What Most People Don't Know About Politics: How Big Change Actually Happens
(California is giving us a live demonstration right now)
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Most people watch politics the way they watch sports.
My team. Your team. Win. Lose.
That framing misses much.
Consider a different lens. One that sheds light not just who wins elections. But how large-scale change happens.
In markets. In culture. In politics.
Itâs called category design.
And California is running a live experiment in it right now.
First, the category design lens.
In business, most people obsess over products.
Better features. Better marketing. Better brand.
But the companies that change industries rarely (never) win on product alone. They win by changing what problem people think theyâre solving.
OpenAI didnât say ChatGPT was better search. They said it was different. Something new. Generative AI. Everything about it was different. You donât search. You prompt. You donât get blue links. You get answers. You get to create things. Do stuff. They created a whole new career, âprompt engineerâ. A whole new way to create software, âvibe coding.â
They changed the quality of problems people could solve with technology.
OpenAI did not improve the past.
They created a different future.
(Thatâs category design.)
So did Sara Blakely. Sheâs the category designer of shapeware. And creator of the number one shapeware brand, Spanx.
So did Nolan Bushnell (Atari founder). He did not improve board games. He created a new type of video game and was first to make the category tip.
Thatâs category design. Not competing inside an existing game. Changing the game itself.
The person who names the problem gets to define the solution.
That principle doesnât just apply to business.
Politics is market.
It applies to every market. And politics is a market. A group of people trying to solve a problem. Same dynamics. Same rules.
Now watch California.
Spencer Pratt has gone from reality TV punchline to serious contender in the LA mayorâs race remarkably fast.
Recent Emerson College polling shows Karen Bass at 30%, Pratt at 22%, Nithya Raman at 19%. The undecided vote collapsed from 51% in March to 16% in May.
Thatâs not noise. Thatâs a market moving.
Then came the money. Between April 19 and May 16, Pratt raised $2.72 million versus $283,000 for Bass, according to documents filed with the Los Angeles Ethics Commission. Nearly 10x the incumbent mayor. In fundraising, thatâs not a signal. Thatâs a siren.
Prediction markets still favor Bass. Around 66% on Polymarket, 67% on Kalshi. Category Queens, in legacy categories are hard to dethrone. In business and in politics.
But the probability math is moving.
Prattâs odds of making the runoff: roughly 79%. Odds of winning: roughly 25 to 35%. Possible. Not probable.
But no longer a joke.
Steve Hilton is running a parallel experiment in the California governorâs race. He entered dismissed. Then polling tightened dramatically. The latest poll has Hilton and Xavier Becerra virtually tied at 22% and 21% respectively.
Prediction markets now give Hilton roughly an 84% chance of advancing past the June 2 primary. Heâs not a long shot anymore. Heâs a frontrunner for the runoff.
His odds of winning the governorship in November are a different question. In a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by millions, Hilton faces steep headwinds in a general election.
Prediction markets put his chances of winning the whole thing at roughly 10%.
But hereâs what matters right now. California has a top-two primary. Hilton doesnât need to win in June. He just needs to survive it.
And he almost certainly will.
What are the odds both Pratt and Hilton ultimately win their races? Roughly 4 to 5%. About 1 in 22.
Low. Not zero. And in politics, ânot zeroâ is where new category opportunities live.
What most people are missing.
When Trump improved his California performance from 34.3% in 2020 to 38.3% in 2024, the sports-fan take was: California is going Red.
Thatâs almost certainly the wrong conclusion.
The category design question is different:
What if voters arenât buying Red?
What if they arenât buying Blue either?
What if the category theyâre shopping in has changed?
California may not be turning Red.
California may be turning dissatisfied.
(Aka different.)
Those are not the same thing. And confusing them leads to completely wrong predictions.
Everyone is talking about Prattâs marketing. Almost everyone is missing the category design.
Yes, his ads are legendary.
Yes, heâs doing something remarkable with AI and social media.
But fixating on the execution misses whatâs driving underneath all of it.
Pratt is framing the problem.
Pratt is marketing the problem.
Not abstractly. Not politically. In the exact language of people who live in Los Angeles and are exhausted by what they see every day.
Poop on the streets. He doesnât sanitize it. He doesnât euphemize it. He says it plainly. The way people in LA talk about it around their kitchen tables.
He calls homeless people zombies. Not to dehumanize them. To make a point that the current leadership doesnât actually see them, doesnât have a plan for them, and has failed them.
Heâs naming something people feel but donât have permission to say out loud.
He talks about the fires. The people who died. The families who still canât rebuild. He makes it personal. His family. His community. His neighbors. Not a policy position. A wound that hasnât healed.
And then he does something that is pure category design.
He says: I am not a politician.
Thatâs not a disclaimer. Thatâs a category declaration. He is explicitly rejecting the old category. Saying the old category produced this. Somebody has to do something. So he decided to be that somebody.
From. To. By
From: a city that doesnât work, run by people whoâve been running it into the ground.
To: a city that actually functions, where real peopleâs real problems get solved.
By: someone who isnât from that world. Who isnât protecting that world. Who has nothing to lose by blowing it up.
Thatâs the frame. The marketing is just the amplifier.
Strip away the viral ads, the AI-generated content, the social media mastery. Whatâs left is a candidate talking about what actually matters to people in LA. In the way they actually talk about it. Without apology.
Thatâs not marketing genius.
Thatâs category design working exactly the way itâs supposed to.
Now hereâs what makes this undeniable.
Zohran Mamdani just became mayor of New York City. Different ideology. Different political universe. Further left than Pratt is right. Policies that couldnât be more different.
Same move.
Mamdani didnât run on credentials.
He ran on a problem frame. New York isnât affordable. The people running it have accepted that. He hasnât. He named what working New Yorkers feel every month when they pay rent, every day when they ride the subway, every time they wonder if they can stay in the city they grew up in.
He rejected the old category too. Just like Pratt. Just from a completely different direction.
Thatâs the thing category design reveals that sports-fan political thinking completely misses.
This isnât a left strategy or a right strategy.
Category design is a human strategy.
Frame the problem in a way people recognize from their own lives. Reject the category that produced it. Become the only logical answer.
Pratt and Mamdani would probably disagree about almost everything.
But theyâre running the same category design play.
And itâs working.
So what are Pratt and Hilton actually doing?
Whether by instinct or design. And it almost doesnât matter which. Theyâre not leading with brand marketing.
Brand marketing sounds like this:
âI have more experience.â
âIâve done this before.â
âI have the endorsements.â
Category design sounds like this:
âYouâre solving the wrong problem.â
âThis is the right problemâ
âI will fix the problem.â
Pratt isnât primarily saying âIâd be a better mayor than Karen Bass.â Heâs saying Los Angeles has a homelessness problem. A safety problem. A city-that-doesnât-work problem. A fire-recovery problem.
Hilton isnât primarily saying âIâd be a better governor than Becerra.â Heâs saying California doesnât have a management problem. It has an affordability problem. A trust problem. A spending problem. A crime problem. A tax problem. A future problem.
Whether you agree with those diagnoses is beside the point.
The candidate who frames the problem controls the conversation. The candidate defending their record is always playing on someone elseâs field.
This pattern isnât new.
Or partisan.
Clintonâs entire 1992 campaign was category design. âItâs the economy, stupidâ wasnât a policy. It was a reframe. He didnât say âIâm smarter than Bush.â He renamed the game and made everything else irrelevant.
Obama ran on âHope and Change.â Not a platform. A category. He named a feeling millions of people had but couldnât articulate: the current system is the wrong answer to our actual problems.
Trump did the same in 2016. Reagan in 1980. Mamdani just did it in New York.
Different politics. Different policies. Different worldviews entirely.
Same strategic category move.
Frame.
Name.
Claim.
Hereâs why this lens matters beyond this election.
Brand marketing works best after a category exists. It defends and extends territory already won. But when a category is breaking down, when voters stop believing the old frame solves their actual problem, brand loses to category (almost) every time.
In 1980, when Regan said, âAre you better off than you were four years ago?â He won. By framing the problems of the day around the incumbent Jimmy Carterâs neck.
The real question in California right now isnât âWill Pratt win?â or âWill Hilton win?â
The real question is: Has the problem changed in the mind of the market? (And if so, whoâs changing it)?
If voters believe the old category still works, the old brand wins.
If voters believe the old category is broken, the new category has a shot.
Thatâs what to watch.
Not the horse race.
The category race.
So will Pratt and Hilton both win?
Probably not. The math says 4 to 5%. Maybe 1 in 22.
But hereâs the thing about category shifts. They rarely announce themselves clearly until after theyâve happened.
And when these races conclude, the sports-fan interpretation will almost certainly be wrong in either direction.
If they lose: âSee? California is permanently Blue.â
If they win: âCalifornia flipped Red.â
Both miss it.
The signal may be something subtler and more durable. California voters, like voters in a lot of places, may be shopping for a category of politician that doesnât fully exist yet.
Not left. Not right. Different.
And if category designers know anything, itâs this:
Different is the last moat.
P.S. Follow these races with this lens and something interesting happens. You stop watching to see who wins. You start watching to see whoâs changing what question people are asking.
Thatâs where the real story is.
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This newsletter/data/research was created with the help of multiple AIs including: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, and Perplexity. Let me know if you think something is off. Or really on đ
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The Asset AI Canât Steal
[FREE WEBINAR] The Pirates sit down with the CEO of Mighty Networks to talk about the future of knowledge work
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Hereâs a fun thought experiment.
Open your favorite AI tool right now and ask it to do your job. Write the email. Build the deck. Summarize the report. Draft the proposal. Itâll do a pretty good version of all of it. In some cases, a better one than you would have produced on a Tuesday afternoon when you were tired.
Now ask it to build you 200 people who trust you, buy from you, refer you, and show up for you when it counts.
It canât. It never will.
We had this conversation in the Academy last week. Pirate Christopher explained how a thought leader actually builds trust, and the answer was simple enough to fit on a sticky note: Be a trustworthy person. Say what you mean. Do what you say. And then Pirate Christopher dropped this bar:
âWho you are speaks so loudly, I canât hear what youâre saying.â
Thatâs the part AI cannot touch.
A model can mimic your tone. It can copy your formatting. It cannot show up for someone on a Tuesday for three years running. It cannot keep a promise. It cannot, as Gina Bianchini puts it, create people magic: the thing that happens when humans gather around a shared point of view and discover they were never alone in their thinking.
People magic is the asset AI canât steal. Community is where you store it. Category design is how you build the gravity that pulls people into it in the first place.
And the Four Capitals from Creator Capitalist are what compound inside it.
Intellectual capital gives you something worth gathering around.
Reputation capital is what gets built when you keep showing up the way Pirate Christopher described.
Relationship capital is the deep, durable trust that turns an audience into a community.
Financial capital is what all four make possible, the freedom to fund experiences your knowledge worker self has never let you dream about.
AI can speed up the first one. It cannot manufacture the other three.
Which is exactly what weâre getting into next Wednesday with one of our favorite Creator Capitalists on the planet: Gina Bianchini, CEO of Mighty Networks, the platform whose Hosts generated over $500M in 2025.
Pirate Gina, Pirate Eddie, and Pirate Christopher are running a free live event called âThe Asset AI Canât Stealâ on Wednesday, May 27 at 11 AM PT.
Weâll get into:
Why community is the one piece of your business AI cannot compete with
How to find your superpower and build a category around it
How the Four Capitals from Creator Capitalist compound when youâve got a real community attached to your work
đ Grab your free seat here.
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This different newsletter is written by Christopher Lochhead.
Copyright Category Pirates, LLC.
All rights disturbed.
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