If the latest polls are to be believed, Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt — formerly known as reality-TV villain Spencer Pratt — has a real chance of advancing to a Nov. 3 runoff against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass.
But in a city where 55% of registered voters are Democrats (like Bass) and less than 15% are Republicans (like her most colorful challenger), Pratt must first survive what could be seen, locally, as a “poison pill”: the sudden support of Donald J. Trump.
And he’ll have to do it while continuing to campaign… just like Trump.
“I’d like to see him do well,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. “He’s a character. I heard he’s a big MAGA person.”
The similarities between Trump, 79, and Pratt, 42, are hard to ignore. Both became 21st-century celebrities by playing themselves on television: Trump on NBC’s The Apprentice, Pratt on MTV’s The Hills. And both spent years monetizing their reality-TV success.
For Trump, that strategy translated into a steady stream of licensing and endorsement deals worth $427.4 million, according to a 2020 New York Times investigation. For Pratt, it meant selling crystals and filing for a fake divorce from his wife Heidi Montag, whom he started dating on The Hills.
“The public saw chaos, betrayal and divorce papers,” Pratt recalls in his new memoir, entitled The Guy You Loved to Hate. “But behind the scenes? Heidi and I were still thick as thieves, scheming side by side, laughing at how easy it was to keep the world guessing and the checks coming in.”
Pratt followed Trump’s lead into politics earlier this year, announcing his campaign on Jan. 7 with a speech in the Pacific Palisades that dismissed “business as usual” as “a death sentence for Los Angeles.”
“I’m done waiting for someone to take real action,” Pratt said.
Pratt’s launch date was intentional. Exactly one year earlier, the devastating Palisades fire had ripped through Pratt’s wealthy coastal enclave, destroying both his house and parents’; Pratt and Montag sued the city and blamed Bass, who was on a diplomatic trip to Ghana when the fire ignited. Now, he said, he wanted to take her job.
“All of this was preventable,” Pratt claimed. (The Los Angeles Times has reported that the city’s fire department could have nipped the blaze in the bud if not for “a series of communication failures and questionable decisions.”) “I have realized that the city I love is being managed into the ground by people who don’t have the courage to actually lead.”
Since then, Pratt has followed Trump’s playbook to a T:
He has stoked quality-of-life outrage on social media, slamming today’s LA as a third-world hellhole rife with “darkened streetlights, stripped of copper wire,” “homeless encampments lining city sidewalks” and “drug use in MacArthur Park,” as the LA Times recently put it.
He has spread his message by sharing rude, racy AI videos that cast Bass as various pop-culture villains: the Joker, Darth Vader, Marvel’s Thanos.
And just like Trump, he has attracted a lot of media attention as a result.
So far, Pratt’s gamble seems to be paying off — to a degree. California has a “jungle primary” system, with candidates of all parties competing against each other to win 50% of the vote in an initial round of balloting, followed by a general-election runoff between the top two finishers — again, regardless of party label — if no one manages to clear that threshold.
A longtime state lawmaker and former member of Congress, Bass is likely to place first in LA’s June 2 primary. But her current job-approval rating is so low — just 24% — that she has little chance of avoiding a runoff. In theory, Pratt could advance alongside her. The three local polls conducted since the start of May all show him in — or effectively tied for — second place, trailing by anywhere from 3 to 12 percentage points.
But a third candidate — the progressive city councilmember Nithya Raman, who has drawn comparisons to NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani — is just a point or two behind Pratt, on average, suggesting the sprint for second could come down to a photo finish.
Local political observers say the inexperienced Pratt beat expectations at the final mayoral debate on May 7; Raman seemed vexed. But they also say Trump’s “endorsement” has given Raman a closing argument that could be potent in a liberal metropolis where the president, who launched last year’s mass Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, is more unpopular than ever, especially with Latino voters.
“It’s no surprise Donald Trump supports his LA Apprentice and ‘Big MAGA person’ Spencer Pratt,” Raman wrote on X Wednesday. A “vote for my campaign stops Spencer Pratt from making it to the general election.”
Meanwhile, Bass’s allies appear to be boosting Pratt in hopes of easing her path to a second term — and Pratt is doing his part by downplaying his connections to Trump and the GOP in general. “[This] has nothing to do with national politics or who is in the White House,” he told Billy Bush on Wednesday. “I keep telling people it’s a nonpartisan race.”
The question now is whether Pratt can cobble together just enough votes to keep his latest reality show on the air until Nov. 3. “Once I see an opportunity, I’m like a shark in the water, a dog with a bone,” he writes in his memoir. “I see what I want. I take it.”
