Viral AI-generated videos, an ad shot on a flattened lot, and a steady stream of attacks on Democratic governance have propelled reality television star Spencer Pratt to the brink of a runoff in the Los Angeles mayor’s race, a city that has not had a Republican mayor in nearly three decades. The onetime “villain” of MTV’s “The Hills” is now the most disruptive force in a contest testing whether celebrity and populist anger can break Democratic dominance in deep-blue Los Angeles.
Pratt is mounting a sharply populist campaign. He blames the city’s Democratic leaders for disorder and pledges to eliminate homeless encampments and pursue criminal investigations of nonprofits that serve people living on the streets. “These people do not want a bed,” he said in a recent debate. “They want fentanyl or meth.”
His bid is intimately tied to the deadly Palisades Fire, which destroyed his home and thousands of others. In a campaign ad released late last month, Pratt stands in front of an Airstream trailer on the flattened lot where his house once stood, contrasting it with the cozy neighborhoods of Bass and City Councilmember Nithya Raman. “They let my home burn down,” he says. “I know what the consequences of failed leadership are.” But TMZ reported Wednesday that Pratt has been living at the upscale Hotel Bel-Air and has never stayed in the trailer; his campaign attributed the arrangement to unspecified security concerns.
The celebrity candidate’s reach has been amplified by a series of AI-generated videos that went viral in recent weeks. One video, shared by filmmaker Charles Curran and reposted by Pratt, depicts Pratt as Batman saving a dystopian Los Angeles from Bass, who is portrayed as the Joker. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a onetime Republican presidential candidate, called it “maybe the best political ad of the year” in a post on X. Curran did not respond to requests for comment.
Bass, the first Black woman to lead the nation’s second-largest city, is a wounded incumbent. She was in Ghana on a diplomatic mission when the wildfires erupted, prompting a fierce backlash. Her administration has also been accused of watering down an after-action report by the fire department, which she denies. A coalition of labor unions is now funding ads attacking Pratt — a move that some analysts interpret as an attempt to lift him ahead of Bass’s more progressive challengers, on the theory that he would be easier to defeat in a runoff. Bass told Fox News last week: “I feel like he’s exploiting the grief of people in the Palisades, and I think that’s reprehensible. … He’s famous now again.”
Republican strategist Matt Klink said Pratt is tapping the dominant mood. “He’s playing on the most powerful emotion, which is anger, and LA voters are angry right now,” Klink said. Michael Trujillo, a Los Angeles-based Democratic strategist, described Pratt’s campaign as “fun and imaginative” and compared his celebrity pivot to the trajectories of Donald Trump and Arnold Schwarzenegger. But Trujillo cautioned that Pratt’s path to victory is narrow. “Not to diminish the creativity and imagination that they’re putting into their campaign,” he said, “but they’re going to run into a big math problem.”
Pratt, 42, first rose to fame in 2007 as Heidi Montag’s boyfriend on “The Hills,” where he was cast as driving a wedge between Montag and her roommate Lauren Conrad. He later married Montag; the couple have two children and have appeared on multiple reality series since. Pratt points to a 2013 political science degree from the University of Southern California as evidence of his readiness to lead a city of nearly 4 million residents. His campaign did not respond to interview requests.
With early voting underway and the June 2 primary fast approaching, Pratt’s celebrity-fueled insurgency is reshaping a race that had initially appeared destined to pit Bass against a challenger to her left. Whether the viral stardom that made him a reality TV fixture can also make him mayor remains an open question in one of the nation’s most reliably Democratic cities.