The Supreme Court and California’s Election Deniers Are on the Same Page About (at Least) One Thing

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Jun 09, 2026

Republicans Ramp Up Election Denial in California Just Before Suspiciously Related SCOTUS Decision Drops

Two things are happening at the same time: 1) President Donald Trump and his stooges are becoming increasingly shrill about the “election fraud” that they insist explains a very liberal city advancing two Democrats to the general election and 2) the Supreme Court is going to release a decision that’ll likely curtail voting by mail nationwide any day now.

Coincidence?

While election denial is depressingly old hat for Republicans by this point, the fixation with the Los Angeles mayoral race is odd. Yes, Republicans ran an attention-attracting candidate in reality television star Spencer Pratt, and yes, California takes forever to count its ballots. Conservative media covered Pratt in the runup to the jungle primary as if he stood a real chance of defeating the Democratic candidates. But Los Angeles County has three times more registered Democrats than Republicans — it’s a poster child for a big, lib city. It’s like feigning disbelief about Curtis Sliwa losing to Zohran Mamdani — if Sliwa was a proud Trump sycophant.

Republicans are training their denialism on a race their party hasn’t won for over 30 years.

This very plausibly could boil down to the fact that some gullible but influential people online thought Pratt could win, and cynical Republican electeds are weaponizing their naïvete to further the election denying agenda, softening the ground for a future attempt to steal a more important race. California could be crucial for determining control of the House.

But it also sets them up very nicely to be “vindicated” by the Supreme Court in the coming weeks.

We’re awaiting the Court’s ruling in Watson v. RNC, an odd bedfellows case where national Republicans are trying to outlaw Mississippi’s (and 30 other states’) grace periods, during which ballots mailed by Election Day but received afterwards can still be counted.

Here’s Justice Brett Kavanaugh at the March oral arguments picking quotes from a 2020 article by New York University Professor Richard Pildes: “If the apparent winner the morning after the election ends up losing due to late-arriving ballots, charges of a rigged election could explode.” “…The longer after Election Day any significant changes in vote totals take place, the greater the risk that the losing side will cry that the election has been stolen.”

Funnily enough, he quoted the same lines in his 2020 concurrence with the Court’s ruling not to reinstate a court-ordered extension of the deadline for receiving mailed ballots in Wisconsin at the height of the pandemic.

“If you have an election and the election is going to turn on late arriving ballots in a way that means what everybody kind of thought was the result on Election Day ends up being the opposite a week later, 21 days later, the losers are not going to accept that result,” Paul Clement, attorney for the RNC, said during the Watson oral arguments. “Full stop. They won’t. And that is bad for our system.”

Compare that to Trump’s Truth Social: “Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had. 3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections!”

Lacking any proof of fraud in voting by mail — because they are making it up — Republicans from Kavanaugh to Trump argue that the mere “perception” of fraud justifies making it harder to vote. Losing Republicans are the only ones perceiving this fraud, creating a pretext to allow fewer voters (who they assume to be Democrats, or at least more Democrats than Republicans) to cast a ballot.

Elected Republicans/influencers and those on the Court are in a perfectly symbiotic relationship here. The Court will almost certainly rule in their favor at some point in the next two months, perhaps even pointing to the hysteria Republicans have whipped up in recent days as evidence of the need to cut off voting earlier. Republicans, in turn, will point to the Court’s ruling as “proof” that their denialism was correct.

It’s hard to imagine that the LA mayorship is the real race they’re gunning for in perfecting this system.

A Dull Maine Senate Primary Becomes Interesting

We’ll be watching Tuesday night for the first big indicator of how badly, or not, Democrat Graham Platner has been wounded by the recent dribble of scandals. Platner will almost certainly win the ranked-choice primary, but by how much? If his numbers come in precipitously low — Democrat Sara Gideon got 71 percent of the vote in 2020 Senate primary — calls to replace him will grow louder.

Bari Weiss Fails Upwards to New Heights

The Trump toadying editor-in-chief of CBS News is reportedly in line to also take over CNN’s editorial operations, should Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. go through, per Axios. She is failing in her tenure at CBS — ratings are dismal for both the morning and evening shows, and she’s gutted 60 Minutes, a unicorn in profitable broadcast journalism — if you consider her job to be running the network. But since her job is actually to grease the skids for the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal, withering CBS and CNN in the process, she’s succeeding beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.