Spencer Pratt has reinvented himself more than once — from reality-TV villain to “Pratt Daddy” crystal peddler to viral wildfire survivor when the Palisades Fire leveled his family home.
Now he is running an insurgent campaign for Los Angeles mayor, starring in artificial-intelligence-generated ads that turn him into Batman one moment and the “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” the next. The pitch leans hard on raw frustration over the government’s wildfire response and a wider belief that elected leaders never pay a price for their failures.
Mr. Pratt is shaping up as the ultimate millennial candidate, and the reality star is giving Mayor Karen Bass and the rest of the political establishment a reality check heading into the June 2 jungle primary.
“His candidacy has been able to crystallize two things. Most importantly, there’s dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in L.A., and also, by extension, California,” said Christina Bellantoni, director of USC Annenberg’s Media Center. “We know there is a problem with homelessness. We know that despite throwing millions and millions of dollars at it, this problem has not improved. Those things are without question, and then there is that underlying sense of lack of affordability — is your kid going to have a better life than you do?”
The loss of Mr. Pratt’s home in the fires sharpens that message. It points directly to Ms. Bass’ biggest vulnerability. “In some ways, he’s the perfect candidate for all of that — even though he could very well be a terrible mayor if he won,” Ms. Bellantoni said.
Mr. Pratt would not be the first reality television personality to parlay fame in front of the camera into political office. President Trump enhanced his brand as the hard-charging boss on NBC’s “The Apprentice” before his first presidential run in 2016. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy appeared on MTV’s “The Real World: Boston” in 1997 before serving in the House of Representatives and later in Mr. Trump’s Cabinet.
This week, Heavenly Kimes, known for Bravo’s “Married to Medicine,” fell short after placing a distant second in Georgia’s 13th Congressional District Democratic primary. Luke Gulbranson, best known for his time on Bravo’s “Summer House,” is running as a Democrat in Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District in the August primary.
California itself is no stranger to the Hollywood crossover. Ronald Reagan parlayed his career as a Hollywood actor and television host into the governorship in 1967 and eventually the presidency. Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of Hollywood’s biggest action stars, was elected governor in the 2003 recall election and served two terms. Both were Republicans who managed to win statewide office in a heavily Democratic state — a feat Mr. Pratt would need to replicate on a smaller but no less daunting scale in Los Angeles.
Yet Mr. Pratt’s political journey may be more akin to that of Jesse Ventura, who, before being elected governor of Minnesota in 1998 as a Reform Party candidate, was best known as a flamboyant, trash-talking professional wrestler and color commentator known as Jesse “The Body.”
The 42-year-old Mr. Pratt, meanwhile, is best known as the bad boy of millennial reality staple “The Hills,” where he met and married co-star Heidi Montag. He announced his candidacy in January at a “They Let Us Burn” rally on the first anniversary of the Southern California fires, which killed 31 people and destroyed more than 18,000 homes, businesses and other structures.
Ms. Bass’ handling of that disaster has become the cornerstone of the Pratt campaign, along with his vow to usher in an era of “change” and “common sense.”
The message is resonating. Polls show he is duking it out for second place with Nithya Raman, a liberal Los Angeles City Council member. If no candidate crosses the 50% threshold needed to win outright in the primary, the top two vote-getters advance to a Nov. 3 runoff. Mr. Pratt is seeking to become the first Republican mayor of Los Angeles since Richard Riordan left office in 2001.
He said his support is bipartisan, but the “socialists and communists” oppose him.
Mr. Trump has taken notice.
“I’d like to see him do well. He’s a character. I heard he’s a big MAGA person. He’s doing well,” Mr. Trump told reporters.
Still, the consensus is that Ms. Bass and her allies would rather face Mr. Pratt in a November runoff than Ms. Raman, calculating that the incumbent’s structural advantages — labor union backing, high Democratic turnout in a mayoral election year, and the city’s ingrained liberal tilt — would be more decisive against a Republican challenger than against a fellow liberal.
Matt Klink, a Los Angeles-based Republican strategist, said Mr. Pratt has opened a narrow path to victory partly because he has managed to do something the political establishment has struggled to do: speak plainly about the city’s problems.
“When they talk about solutions to some pretty big problems — homelessness, the response to the fires — they lock into bureaucrat speak. Most people in the city don’t care about that. He talks about it the way you and I would talk about it, sitting in a bar having a conversation,” Mr. Klink said.
Central to the buzz around Mr. Pratt’s political rise has been a flood of AI-generated campaign videos that have racked up tens of millions of views on social media. The most viral, created by Los Angeles-based filmmaker Charlie Curran, casts Mr. Pratt as a Batman-like vigilante saving a burning Los Angeles while Ms. Bass appears as the Joker, flanked by Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris, who is depicted taking swigs from a wine bottle. Mr. Pratt has called the clips “fan-made” while reposting several of them on X.
The Batman imagery is no accident. Mr. Pratt has cast himself as a law-and-order candidate, tapping into voter frustration over crime and homelessness that he says city leaders have refused to confront.
Mr. Curran has said the ads are only the beginning. “The dam is broken,” he wrote on social media this month. “Ordinary people have a way to speak truth to power now. Complaining about AI in politics won’t stop it. You actually have to address the grievances, or we’ll keep clowning you. Simple as.”
Indeed, many political insiders believe the flood of AI-generated ads is a preview of what most campaigns will be like in the future.
Mr. Klink said the central unanswered question hanging over Mr. Pratt’s campaign is whether his social media dominance will translate into votes. “Do clicks equate to votes?” he said, particularly among baby boomers. “Those older voters — those are the ones that turn out and vote.”
The candidate has leaned into his reality television roots as a plus rather than a minus.
“People know when I was a reality villain, I was doing it to get paid. It was strategic. I was working with producers,” he recently told CBS News. “I’m being very strategic to win and save L.A., but there’s no strategy when you’re standing in an Airstream on your burned-out town. You can’t fake that.”
Some tabloids and entertainment websites have reported that Mr. Pratt has gone even further in merging his political ambitions with his entertainment career. TMZ and Deadline reported that he has signed a contract with Los Angeles production company Boardwalk Pictures — whose credits include FX’s “Welcome to Wrexham” — to document his campaign and, should he win, his time in office.
Mr. Pratt’s representatives denied the reports. They told TheWrap: “There is no series in production and cameras have not been following the campaign. He does not have any signed contract.”
The campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Times.
Mr. Pratt has drawn comparisons to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who has energized liberal activists and young voters.
Mr. Pratt, who could scarcely differ more from Mr. Mamdani ideologically, embraced the parallel in his own fashion. “I know he promised his voters buses will be free, and I’m promising my voters the Metro, the Metro buses, the Metro trains, they will be free from urine, feces, stabbing, attacks,” he told CBS News, before adding that politics inspired by Mr. Mamdani have failed Los Angeles for years.
Mr. Pratt, who has no prior political experience, said he would fill his administration with the “smartest people in the world” ready to make Los Angeles “the No. 1 city in the world.”
Ms. Bass has dismissed the challenge by pointing to her record in office. “You cannot run the nation’s second-largest city without intimate knowledge, long-standing relationships and collaboration on every level of government,” she said in a recent CNN interview.
Mr. Klink said the buzz surrounding Mr. Pratt’s campaign is real, but the math remains daunting. “He’s an insurgent candidate who is a disruptor of the status quo, and people are there right now, but will they be there when they cast their ballots?” Mr. Klink said. “Karen Bass would be the thoroughbred in this race.”
With Republicans accounting for just 13% of registered voters in Los Angeles, Mr. Klink said, Mr. Pratt “would have to run a perfect campaign, and he would need the mayor to make some major screw-ups.”
