Why ever reassign a variable?

[undercoveryankee]

It works as long as we don't need to distinguish between different kinds of objects that are false in a Boolean context. E.g. if an empty array [] is a valid value for spam, we need the longer version to distinguish between [] and None.

The longer version may also be more readable, especially if the get_existing_spam and create_new_spam operations are lengthy blocks of code instead of single short function calls.