I must admit that I had not been closely following the Los Angeles mayoral race beyond a general awareness that there was discontent with incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass, and so I was not surprised to hear that after a tough reelection campaign she’s now facing a runoff. I was caught off guard, however, by the fact that her main competitor — who, as results are still coming in on Thursday morning, is within five percentage points of her total — is Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star with no political experience or really much of a political vision at all beyond assorted mostly right-wing conspiracy theories and grievances.
Pratt got interested in local politics after the Palisades Fire destroyed his home and neighborhood, which is fair enough. And it’s clear that he has become a receptacle of the city’s frustration with Bass’ handling of the 2025 fires, along with widespread annoyance at the city’s level of homelessness. I imagine there are worthwhile criticisms of Bass’ handling of both homelessness and the natural disaster — though the fires were at least in part the product of a far broader failure to contend with climate change. But I haven’t really seen Pratt offering any specific alternatives. His message seems to be “You’re mad, right? Well, I’m mad! And I’m going to make things better because I’m an outsider, not beholden to all these politicians.”
This is now a relatively common political strategy, and political inexperience is the default style for challengers, while political experience has slid to being more of a liability. The “outsider candidate” moniker has also broadened into calls for “a new generation of leadership,” as we saw here in Harlem last week when Mayor Zohran Mamdani made a surprise endorsement of Darializa Avila Chevalier, a pro-Palestinian progressive activist challenging incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary for the 13th District. Espaillat, the head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, had supported former Gov. Andrew Cuomo over Mamdani in last year’s mayoral primary before supporting him in November. It’s a risky move for Mamdani and he wouldn’t do it unless he actually thought Avila had a good shot at winning as an insurgent outsider candidate.
The thinking behind this is that people are increasingly fed up with the government. They feel it’s stultified and elitist, maintaining a status quo that is leaving people behind and populated by people who are either in cahoots with special interests or just too oblivious and disconnected from realities on the ground to really care. I could write a book or five dissecting all of this, but suffice it to say here there is an obvious measure of truth to some of these ideas. Yet the idea of the outside-of-politics candidate has its own significant risks that sometimes get lost in the shuffle, including the actual functional value of experience.
Not all of the roadblocks of political inexperience are insurmountable, especially if a newbie knows how to delegate effectively. Mamdani obviously was not a political neophyte — he was a state assembly member when he ran for mayor and had spent his career prior to that post in political campaigns and organizing — but jumping from the assembly to executive leadership of the nation’s largest city was certainly an ambitious leap. He’s mitigated some of the risk by populating his administration by mixing the long-trusted ideological allies he needs to maintain his vision with city government veterans who understand the political and practical mechanics of City Hall.
At the end of the day, government is just a system, like a set of irrigation pumps or a film development process (the latter being more my speed). Yes, it is made more complicated by the vagaries of the collective public opinion, the thousands of competing interests, the money, the dire consequences of failure, but any government can be reduced to a series of inputs that produce outputs, at scales that range from a small town to the globe. As with any system, there’s a certain intuitive awareness of how to produce the outcomes you want that transcends intellectual or academic understanding; you have to have gotten your hands dirty, had some failures and fuckups and disappointments before you can operate it in ways that are more difficult to explain or to generalize.
By the same token, though, officials can get so caught up in The Way Things Are Done that it’s easy to dismiss countervailing evidence or alternatives. The cliches or truisms of government grow out of reality, to be sure – but reality is subject to change, and never more so than in this era. If you had told pretty much any serious political analyst or commentator five years ago that U.S. political public opinion would turn pretty decisively against Israel and that 40 Democratic senators would vote to block U.S. arms sales to that nation while it was engaged in active military hostilities, they probably would have laughed in your face.
It seems like close to half of everything President Donald Trump and his top aides do these days are things that political observers would have said couldn’t or wouldn’t be done, from directing Justice Department prosecutions of political foes to deploying troops for domestic law enforcement to personally and openly profiting off deals both inside and outside government. None of the “but they can’t do that” has stopped it from happening, because political laws are not like the laws of physics; they are not absolute.
Trump is the main example and the main warning of the perils of inexperience, though you’ll hear different reasons depending on who you ask. A big part of what stopped Trump’s first term from being this destructive was the fact that he and his team simply did not expect to win, and did not have a pool of trusted people who could navigate the complexities of the federal government to put in charge. The appointees in Trump 1 who did have experience in high-level roles already largely could not or would not carry out Trump’s agenda – they were notably reluctant to carry out his desires to burn the departments where they had built their careers to the ground. So he was stuck kind of spinning his wheels and having his policies routinely blocked in court because he couldn’t get his people to implement them with basic legal bulletproofing.
Of course, for me and probably most of my readers, that relative failure was welcome, though it arguably set the stage for Trump’s 2024 reelection as a lot of tuned-out people did not see the near-misses and had thought of him as a relatively normal president. For his own cadre of ultra-right zealots, though, this was a notable failure to be avoided the second time around, which is precisely why they developed Project 2025 and worked to have a bench of would-be staffers, detailed policies and orders ready to go the moment he took office again.
While a growing share of Americans appear to be considering this administration to be an acute emergency, a disaster of perhaps irreversible proportions, it has been more “effective” in the sense most of its horrors were things that his political movement had wanted to achieve in the first place – with the exception of the Iran war, a blunder so at odds with his promises that even his base seems unenthusiastic about it. So yes, I think having an awareness of the workings of government and experience in it (or at least, in the case of Trump, among the people around him, as the man himself has never seemed to care about the mechanics of governing) does make legislators and executives more successful, for good and ill. If you elect someone just to be mad at politicians in the same way that you are, don’t be shocked if that’s all they can manage.
