Spencer Pratt has spent months waging a guerilla campaign against incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, riding the buzz generated by AI-generated videos, viral moments and some big-name supporters as he seeks to capitalize on dissatisfaction with the way the city is being run.
He may now have five more months to make his case.
Bass secured a spot on the November ballot and Pratt was running in second place as of early Wednesday morning, ahead of progressive city councilwoman Nithya Raman and 11 lesser-known candidates as more ballots were being counted. No candidate appears likely to exceed the 50% threshold to win outright, which means the top two will meet head-to-head in the November election.
In the overwhelmingly Democratic city, Pratt, a former reality television star and registered Republican, would be the clear underdog against Bass, a former state lawmaker and congresswoman with support from the city’s labor unions.
Still, roughly three in five voters in Los Angeles sought to oust their mayor on Tuesday in the primary, in which candidates don’t have party labels.
“This idea that I don’t represent Democrats and Republicans and independents — anyone that’s just a Los Angeles citizen that wants basic quality of life — I’ll be able to show that in five months,” Pratt told reporters outside his private election night party.
“I’m an Angeleno who said, ‘Enough is enough,’ and I had to step up,” he said. “I’m going to show everybody that I’m their mayor.”
The election night party held by Bass was a show of force, featuring union heads, local Democratic officials and business leaders — a coalition that underscored the political reality now facing Pratt in a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about a four-to-one margin.
She claimed progress on addressing homelessness, pointing to 42,000 affordable housing units now underway that Bass vowed would be finished by the end of her second term, as well as efforts to improve public safety by fixing sidewalks and installing 60,000 streetlights.
“We can have the city that we know we all deserve,” she said. “We’re going to build a city where parents and kids do not have to navigate tents because in the nation’s second-largest city, there should never be anybody that is sleeping on our streets. We are a city that can deal with this, and we have been doing it, and we are going to continue.”
What Bass did not focus on was last year’s destructive Pacific Palisades fire — which broke out while Bass was in Ghana as part of a US delegation for the inauguration of the country’s president and severely dented her popularity.
It was also fodder for Pratt, whose home burned down in the fire. He made what he described as Bass’ mismanagement of the city’s response a focus of his campaign. And disputes in recent weeks over whether Pratt was living in a 33-foot Airstream he had parked on his Pacific Palisades lot, or spending most of his nights in a luxury hotel, only turned the election’s focus back to the fire, a political vulnerability for Bass.
Pratt has also lambasted Bass and the city’s Democratic establishment for failing to sufficiently address homelessness, drug use and crime. He has pledged a much more aggressive approach to those issues — though details on how he would solve the intractable problems of the nation’s second largest city have been scant.
Former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said on CNN Tuesday night that the results reflect frustration with “how slow things are moving” in addressing the city’s long-term challenges.
“I don’t think this is about partisanship. I think people want results,” he said. “Here in California, we’ve had a lot of well-intentioned laws for a long time that slow down things like building housing, recovering from a fire, being able to get public transportation or get high-speed rail done.”
In recent weeks, Pratt, the one-time villain of MTV’s “The Hills,” gained national attention, and praise from Republicans and those in President Donald Trump’s orbit. A filmmaker who supports Pratt created an artificial intelligence video that portrays Pratt as Batman and Bass as the Joker, and features Los Angeles residents pelting the state’s best-known Democratic figures with tomatoes.
“Maybe the best political ad of the year,” former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said on X.
“How could you not vote for this guy?” asked Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
But their praise underscored the Catch-22 for Pratt.
He is a registered Republican who says he joined the GOP because of its support for gun rights. However, he has also rejected partisan labels in the nominally nonpartisan mayor’s race and said the president he would compare himself to most directly is former President Barack Obama.
Pratt, a first-time candidate for office, did not have a typical election night event on Tuesday. He held a private gathering at a Mexican restaurant, but reporters were not allowed in and black curtains obstructed the view of those outside. Billy Bush, the radio and television host who appeared on a lewd “Access Hollywood” recording with Trump that surfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign, was on hand for Pratt’s party.
Meanwhile, Bass also faced a spirited challenge from the left in Raman. The prospect of a Bass versus Raman race came with echoes of last year’s New York City mayoral race, in which progressive Zohran Mamdani defeated an icon of the state’s Democratic establishment, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, first in the Democratic primary, and then again in the general election, when Cuomo ran as a third-party candidate.
Raman portrayed herself as an alternative to continuing the city’s status quo or embracing what she described as “Make America Great Again” caricatures of Los Angeles.
In an early May debate, Bass and Pratt attacked Raman repeatedly — which Raman noted, telling the crowd that “each of them thinks that running against each other is what’s going to help them win.”
Pratt shot back that he’d rather run against Raman.
“You think it’s easier to run against the incumbent mayor with all the unions, or a random city council member who’s been a failure for six years?” he asked.
At her campaign’s election night event, Raman did not concede, noting that California will be counting ballots for another week as those postmarked by Tuesday arrive.
“Tonight may not give us a final answer on this race,” Raman said. “Many thousands of votes will be counted in the days ahead, and we may not get an answer we like.”
