Pratt Was More Meme Than Candidate in L.A. Mayoral Race

Spencer Pratt soaking up the hype.
Photo: Bauer-Griffin/Getty Images

In retrospect, there was no real world in which Spencer Pratt was going to be elected mayor of Los Angeles. Polls consistently showed him finishing second or third in last week’s nonpartisan top-two primary. If he had finished second and made the general election, polls suggested he would have been crushed by whichever Democrat he was matched against (incumbent Karen Bass or progressive challenger Nithya Raman). And that makes sense: Pratt, the reality-TV villain, was a Republican running a MAGA-style campaign in a profoundly Democratic city, where his most prominent supporter, Donald Trump, is widely loathed.

Yes, Pratt was able to dramatize a lot of general unhappiness with the city’s many problems under the Bass administration, in part because his own home was consumed by the Palisades fire that erupted while the incumbent mayor was at a highly optional diplomatic event overseas (breaking one of her own campaign promises). But the broad brush his viral campaign ads applied to L.A.’s problems was never confined to Bass or local Democrats. Instead, they focused on various Democratic targets in Sacramento and Washington. The most famous Pratt ad shows him as an AI action figure battling not just Bass but an aggressively evil Gavin Newsom and a vodka-swilling Kamala Harris. These are politicians who won over 70 percent of the vote in the city of Los Angeles in the 2022 gubernatorial and 2024 presidential elections, respectively. Pratt was pretty clearly appealing to a conservative audience far outside the jurisdiction he was running to represent. As journalist Benjy Sarlin put it on X:

I don’t pretend to have had some prediction on LA results. But I did notice many of my favorite smart conservatives outside LA raving over Pratt AI videos that were entirely political porn for national conservatives.

And thus, a wildly unrealistic sense of Pratt’s electoral strength spread in the chattering classes, as reflected in this op-ed that appeared in the Hill in mid-May:

There is a recent and instructive precedent for an outsider campaign combining savvy social media use and a populist message centered on arguing “my opponent is out of touch.”

In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani leveraged social media and a populist message to upset former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, despite having just 7 percent odds on the Polymarket gambling website six months before the election. In comparison, Pratt’s odds are at 28 percent, considerably higher.  

On primary night, when the initial (almost always Republican-leaning) results showed Pratt as a solid second in the mayoral race, all sorts of premature celebrations broke out. Pratt had become a meme as much as a candidate, as reflected in this reaction to the early returns by RealClearPolitics’ Susan Crabtree:

What set Pratt apart from other political outsiders was his willingness to weaponize artificial intelligence as a campaign tool — and his instinct for where voter anger was running hottest …

 In a city where voters had grown tired of polished talking points and incremental promises, Pratt’s unfiltered approach found a receptive audience. His social media following swelled, his rallies grew louder, and what had once seemed like a publicity stunt began to look like a legitimate political movement.

Or maybe not. Pratt did well where you would expect: in the wealthier, whiter, and more conservative parts of the city, areas where Republican turned Democrat Rick Caruso performed even better in his unsuccessful 2022 race against Bass. As votes from the rest of L.A. began to come in, it became increasingly clear that Pratt would, at best, wind up with about the same percentage of the vote that Trump won in 2024. His early showing on the evening of the primary was the classic “red mirage” — much like Trump’s national “victory” on Election Night in 2020 — based on partisan voting and reporting trends favoring Republicans early and Democrats later (a phenomenon made even more predictable than usual this year because Democrats in California were withholding mail ballots until the last minute as the convoluted gubernatorial contest took shape).

Thanks to all the advance hype, however, Pratt’s excited national constituency could only see his steady demise as the votes rolled in as a conspiracy, an interpretation that, of course, his chief supporter in the White House was eager to feed. Trump wrote on Truth Social:

There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY??? President DJT

Trump’s claims ignore the inconvenient fact that Republican Steve Hilton is almost certainly going to make the gubernatorial general election, but the president is never inclined to let logic get in the way of his election-denial fables.

The Associated Press called the mayoral primary for Bass and Raman on Monday afternoon, June 8. With an estimated 92 percent of the ballots counted, Pratt trailed Raman by 2.7 percent of the vote, almost precisely where the final Berkeley IGS–L.A. Times poll had him. In the end, the only real surprise is that so many people bought into Pratt’s hype and thought he had a serious chance to win. Mayor Pratt was ultimately as close to reality as The Hills.