Adam Miller & Rae Chen Huang

The Candidates You Like Can Still Help Elect the Candidate You Fear.

The Candidates You Like Can Still Help Elect the Candidate You Fear

Los Angeles has a crowded mayor’s race, and crowded races create uncomfortable math.

Karen Bass, Spencer Pratt, and Nithya Raman are getting most of the attention. A UCLA Luskin poll in April had Bass at 25 percent, Pratt at 11 percent, Raman at 9 percent, and 40 percent of voters still undecided. A later poll reported by FOX 11 showed Bass at 30 percent and Pratt climbing to 22 percent. That matters because the June 2 primary sends the top two candidates to a November runoff unless someone clears 50 percent.

That leaves candidates like Rae Chen Huang and Adam Miller in a strange place.

They may speak to voters who feel ignored, and they may even be the candidate closest to someone’s heart, but politics does not reward emotional purity. It rewards the candidate with the most number of vote.

Rae Chen Huang is running as a pastor, community organizer, and housing advocate. Her campaign speaks to voters who want a more activist, justice-centered Los Angeles, especially around housing, affordability, and care for vulnerable communities. As a long-time Angeleno these are personal issues for us, and Huang represents a lane that is real in L.A. politics: renters, organizers, progressive faith communities, and voters who believe we’ve been moving too slowly and too cautiously.

Her weakness is not sincerity. It is scale.

A mayoral campaign needs money, name recognition, field operation, and a clear path to finishing in the top two. Without that, a candidate becomes less of a contender and more of a statement. There is value in statements. There is also a cost, and quite possibly a huge one.

Adam Miller is a different kind of candidate. He’s a tech entrepreneur and nonprofit leader who is trying to run in the “I’m a leader who knows business” lane. He has put major money behind his campaign, including a large self-loan, and has positioned himself around housing, safety, opportunity, and administrative competence. LAist reported that Miller had raised $2.7 million, though (again) much of that came from his own money.

Miller’s problem isn’t that he’s an unserious candidate.

His problem is emotional connection. Angelenos have seen versions of this pitch before: successful outsider, big plans, private-sector confidence, promises to make government (finally) work. Sometimes that message lands. Sometimes it feels like a boardroom meeting looking over spreadsheets.

Again, that doesn’t make Miller unserious. It makes his path narrow.

And that brings us to the spoiler problem.

A voter may look at Huang and say, “That is the candidate who reflects my values.”

Another may look at Miller and say, “That is the candidate who seems the most competent.”

But if neither candidate is likely to make the runoff, that vote may help decide which two candidates do.

This is not about shaming voters. I truly believe that people have every right to vote with their conscience.

But we also have to be honest about consequences.

The Ross Perot is a useful comparison. Perot won nearly 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992, while Bill Clinton won with 43 percent and George H. W. Bush took 37.4 percent. Many people (myself included) still argue Perot helped Clinton by pulling votes from Bush. While political analysis is more complicated than that, the larger lesson still holds.

When a race has several candidates fishing in the same ideological waters, a fractured vote can change the result.

In this L.A. race, that danger could cut in reverse. If progressive, liberal, reform-minded, or anti-Pratt voters scatter across Bass, Raman, Huang, Miller, and others, the result may not be a more representative election. It may be a cleaner path for Spencer Pratt.

Pratt is not a joke candidate anymore. He has turned personal grievance, celebrity recognition, and social media instinct into real traction. (Sound familiar? Yeah, well read our post on Spencer Pratt here.) Recent coverage shows him polling near or inside runoff range, with Trump’s support adding both attention and baggage in a heavily Democratic city.

So this is the question voters need to sit with… Do you vote for the person who best matches your values?

…Or do you vote for the person most likely to stop the outcome you fear?

I wish there was a cleaner answer. Vote your values. Vote with your heart. Vote for the best candidate.

This is why strategic voting feels so ugly. It asks people to compromise before the election has even happened.

But we Angelenos are not choosing a podcast guest. We’re choosing the mayor of our city.

A vote for Rae Chen Huang may send a message.

A vote for Adam Miller may register dissatisfaction with the status quo.

But if those votes help weaken the candidate most likely to beat Spencer Pratt, then voters need to ask whether the message was worth the result.

In a normal election, we should absolutely vote with your heart.

In a volatile election, we may need to vote with our heads.

FYI, this blorg was written by an actual human creature. Not AI, no AI, never AI.
We like to use good, old-fashioned brains.