Most people watch politics the same way they watch sports. Your team, my team, win or lose. We wear our colors, red or blue, and cheer accordingly. But that framing misses something profound about how real change actually happens in political landscapes.

There is a different lens worth considering, one borrowed from the world of business strategy called category design. This lens doesn’t just explain who wins elections. It explains how large scale change tips in markets, cultures, and yes, in politics. And right now, California is giving us a live demonstration that is impossible to ignore.

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The Category Design Lens and Why It Matters

In business, most companies obsess over products, better features, better marketing, faster and cheaper solutions. They play a comparison game. But the companies that truly change industries never win on product alone. They win by changing what people think about the problem being solved.

OpenAI didn’t position ChatGPT as better search. They introduced an entirely new category called generative AI with new language, new behaviors, and new possibilities. Sara Blakely didn’t improve existing undergarments. She created shapewear. Category design is not about competing inside the existing game. It is about changing the game itself, because the person who names the problem gets to define the solution.

California as a Category Design Case Study

Spencer Pratt has moved from reality TV punchline to serious mayoral contender in Los Angeles with remarkable speed. Polling from late May 2026 shows Karen Bass at 30%, Pratt at 22%, and Nita Ramon at 19%. Between April and May, Pratt raised nearly 2.72 million dollars compared to 283,000 for the incumbent mayor. That is nearly a ten times difference in fundraising momentum.

What most people are discussing is his advertising and social media strategy, but that fixation misses the deeper engine driving everything. Pratt is framing a different problem entirely. He talks about homelessness, public safety, and fire recovery in the plain language that Los Angeles residents use around their kitchen tables. He declared himself not a politician, which is not a disclaimer. It is a category declaration, explicitly rejecting the old category that produced the current problems.

Steve Hilton is running a parallel strategy in the California governor’s race, polling virtually tied with Xavier Becerra and holding roughly an 84% chance of advancing past the June primary according to prediction markets. Like Pratt, Hilton is not saying he would be a better version of his opponent. He is saying California has an affordability problem, a spending problem, and a trust problem that current leadership has failed to solve.

This Pattern Is Not New and It Is Not Partisan

Bill Clinton’s entire 1992 campaign was category design in action. His defining frame, “It’s the economy, stupid,” was not a policy. It was a problem reframe that made everything else irrelevant. Obama ran on hope and change, positioning himself as a new category of leader rather than a superior version of what came before. Trump’s 2016 campaign did the same thing with Make America Great Again, framing a problem and pointing toward a different future while his opponent ran on brand credentials.

Zoran Mamdani just became mayor of New York City using a nearly identical category strategy to Pratt, despite sitting on the opposite end of the political spectrum. He named what working New Yorkers feel every month when they pay rent and every day when they ride the subway. He rejected the old category of politician and positioned himself as something genuinely different.

The pattern is consistent and clear. Candidates who frame the problem control the conversation. Candidates defending their record are always playing on someone else’s field. Whether California ultimately shifts in these races or not, the real signal worth watching is not whether it turns red or stays blue. The signal is that voters may be shopping for a category of politician that does not fully exist yet, not left, not right, just different. And as any category designer will tell you, different always wins.

To hear more from Christopher Lochhead and how to approach Politics with Category Design, download and listen to this episode. Want to read more Different from Christopher Lochhead? Join his newsletter today!

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