There's No Debate Anymore. There's Only Theater.

The first step is to vote MAGA Republicans out in overwhelming, undeniable, can’t-be-spun, can’t-be-gerrymandered-away numbers.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

I want to tell you about the week I finally accepted something I had been refusing to say out loud. It was not a single moment. It was a collision of moments, arriving one after another like the universe was trying to make sure I got the point.

It started with the California primaries. I live in this state. I teach in this state. And I had been genuinely looking forward to the general election debates that a competitive California cycle could produce—a substantive fight over the governor’s race between two people with real competing visions for how to address the housing crisis, water infrastructure, wildfire response, and the long-term economic pressures reshaping this state. I wanted to watch a Los Angeles mayoral debate where two serious candidates argued about what this city actually needs from its next mayor—about homelessness policy grounded in evidence, about how you rebuild trust with a Fire Department after a disaster that exposed the city’s institutional failures in real time, about what a functional Los Angeles looks like in 2030. That is the debate I wanted. Those are the stakes I wanted argued.

Instead, I was looking at who was emerging from the primary field and realizing that Karen Bass—a former congresswoman, a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, a sitting mayor who inherited a city on fire and stayed on the job—was on the verge of sharing debate stage with Spencer Pratt. Yes, that Spencer Pratt. The dork from The Hills. The one whose entire theory of governance is equal parts crystal energy and ambient grievance. This nightmare was averted by Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman overtaking Pratt in the vote count.

Now I wasn’t opposed to watching Karen Bass dismantle a reality television personality on a debate stage—that would be its own form of civic entertainment—but I actually want to see a serious general election debate about what Los Angeles needs from its next mayor. I want the fight over homelessness policy, wildfire recovery, and what a functional city looks like in 2030. That is the debate this moment deserves. Spencer Pratt debating Karen Bass would have been the debate this moment gets instead, which is a sentence that tells you everything you need to know about where we are. And in the governor’s race, the serious candidates would eventually have to contend with Steve Hilton, a man whose policy depth rivals a Substack comment section on a bad day. The substantive general election debates I wanted were not cancelled. They were contaminated upstream, before they could happen, by a primary process that has no mechanism for filtering out people who are running for office the same way they would launch a podcast—because the attention is the point and the governance is incidental. I stared at this and felt something shift. Not surprise. Something worse than surprise. Recognition.

Then the next day I watched a clip of Laura Ingraham interviewing Niger Innis of CORE—the Congress of Racial Equality—on Fox News. Ingraham had Innis on to deliver the good news: Black Americans are thriving under Donald Trump’s second non-consecutive term, and the data proves it. Innis obliged enthusiastically, citing statistics from what he called “The Joint Center for Economic and Policy Research.” Ingraham smiled the smile of a woman who had finally located the one witness she needed for a trial she had already decided the outcome of. There was only one problem. The organization is called The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Political first. Economic second. Not Research at the end. He got the name of the institution he was weaponizing wrong. On national television. While attempting to lecture the country about economic data. It is generally helpful to know the name of the organization before citing it as proof that you are right. Ingraham, meanwhile, appeared completely unbothered by this development, grinning like a woman who had just found the receipt, even though the receipt was misspelled and written in crayon.