While driving around Los Angeles last month, I was shocked to find myself absent-mindedly humming a song from a viral campaign ad from an L.A. mayoral race. In Southern California, most of us seldom, if ever, think of the mayor of L.A., let alone the primary candidates. But this year’s election is different. Spencer Pratt, 42, gained notoriety in the late aughts on the MTV reality series The Hills. In January 2025, his house burned down in the Palisades Fire. And lately, his bid to unseat Mayor Karen Bass has been the talk of the Southland.
Pratt began the race as a long shot: He’s a registered Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, and he has zero experience in government. Yet last week he was one of just three candidates to qualify for a televised debate––a debate that could hardly have gone better for him. While Bass and L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman spent much of their time highlighting each other’s failures to remedy the city’s problems, Pratt had the advantage of being the only option onstage for voters seeking change. And he stuck to his strategy of focusing on local issues, including fire preparedness, crime, homeless encampments, and misspent funds, never even broaching a subject unrelated to Los Angeles.
As the June 2 primary approaches, Pratt is leaning heavily into his image as an Everyman outsider—and online, lots of pro-populist people and groups have eagerly gotten behind him. To have any chance of winning, Pratt must tap into the populist energy that is propelling him. But like a drag racer with nitro, too much of this energy will make him crash and burn.
The pro-Pratt ad that’s been stuck in my head, “Spencer, Saca La Basura!,” is a salsa-inspired earworm by a group called Latinos Por Pratt (which the Los Angeles Times reports seems to consist of one person, a Cuban American lawyer). The song’s title translates as “Spencer, Take Out the Trash!” “Mayor Karen took a trip way off the map while the hills caught fire,” the first verse begins, reminding voters that Bass was traveling in Ghana as her city burned. The seemingly AI-generated music video that accompanies the song goes on to depict pothole-filled streets lined with homeless encampments and trash. A muscled Pratt in a black T-shirt and jeans is portrayed rolling Bass out of town in a garbage bin; salsa dancing with his celebrity wife, Heidi Montag, as supporters with an American and a Mexican flag cheer them on; and using a broom to sweep away litter and tent cities. “Sweep that nonsense fast,” someone sings, “cause this clown show can’t last.”
The symbol of a populist outsider using a broom to sweep away the establishment’s mess has precedent in California: The most recent Republican to win any statewide office here, Arnold Schwarzenegger, campaigned with a broom of his own, promising to clean house in Sacramento and sweep out special interests. His 2003 bid for governor was the rare example of a populist-right campaign that achieved victory without demonizing immigrants or minorities. Instead, the villainous “others” were politicians and bureaucrats.
Schwarzenegger’s strategy energized Californians who wanted to punish incumbent Democrats, but avoided scaring too many of the state’s median voters. If Pratt wants a chance at victory, he’d do well to keep threading the same needle, critiquing the Democratic establishment with enough vigor to generate high turnout among Republicans and independents who’d normally sit out a Los Angeles mayoral primary, while taking care to avoid the sort of bigotry or tribalism that would alienate the majority of voters. Put another way, Pratt needs to avoid seeming like the populist right’s leader, Donald Trump—who is even more unpopular in L.A. than he is in America at large.
So far, Pratt has managed to deploy sharp attacks while eschewing MAGA-style racism, sexism, and xenophobia. An ad that he posted on his X account Friday includes images of the pristine Los Angeles that he says he will bring about and features some of the diversity of the city’s residents. It’s not an ad that seems to be pandering to the white-nationalist wing of the populist right; rather, it sides with the attitudes toward diversity that prevail among Angelenos. In another ad posted last week, Pratt showed that he knows how to attack his opponents without seeming bigoted or unhinged. He stands outside an expensive-looking house and says, “This is where Mayor Bass lives. You notice something? Or here, where Nithya Raman’s $3 million mansion sits. They don’t have to live in the mess they’ve created, where you live.” The visuals cut to homeless encampments, graffiti, and fire. “This is where I live,” he continues, standing in front of an Airstream trailer where he relocated after the destruction of his own $2.5 million house. “They let my home burn down. I know what the consequences of failed leadership are.”
Still, all populist-right political hopefuls and their supporters have perverse incentives to fight the culture war rather than focus on running a campaign. Another viral pro-Pratt ad, not produced by Pratt’s own campaign, best illustrates the perils of populist-right energy. It begins with Mayor Bass depicted as the version of the Joker portrayed by Heath Ledger in the film The Dark Night: a psychopath bent on deliberately sowing anarchy and violence to unsettle and destroy a city. AI is apparently now superhuman in its ability to mix visual metaphors, because as the ad continues, Bass is not only the Joker; she is also a judge presiding over a scene meant to evoke a decadent court of nobles at Versailles. She is flanked by California Governor Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris––and they are served by masked thugs in black paramilitary outfits that say DSA. The masked thugs deposit a tearful middle-aged woman in front of Bass, Newsom, and Harris. The woman begs for help with homeless drug addicts. Everyone laughs. Newsom replies, “Look, if you were a transgender migrant I could get you a free pussy.”
Prior to 2015, that ad would have struck almost everyone as unthinkably crass and disturbing. Today, it didn’t merely go viral on social media; it was reposted by Pratt himself on X and celebrated as a notably excellent ad by many Republicans, including public figures such as Ted Cruz and Matt Gaetz. “Maybe the best political ad of the year,” Jeb Bush said. The L.A.-based essayist and podcaster Meghan Daum, a liberal who supports Pratt’s candidacy, had a more sensible reaction: “I understand that people around here enjoy these ads,” she wrote on X, “but they will be repellent to the undecided voters Pratt needs to catch, most of whom will think they’re coming directly from the campaign. Get smarter, guys.”
The Bass campaign is casting Pratt as a Trumplike figure; a spokesperson said that he was doing his “best Trump impression” in the ad where he stood outside her and Raman’s houses. Another outside ad, also celebrated by some Pratt fans online, puts new lyrics to “California Dreamin’,” with Trump playing the flute in front of California landmarks. Associating Pratt and the movement to elect him with Trump, among the most hated political figures in Los Angeles, can only damage his campaign, and Pratt himself seems to get this. “I don’t do national politics,” he told a recent interviewer. “I don’t do tribal politics. I don’t talk about other states. I’m localized.”
Democrats, for their part, are giving Pratt a clear opening. Bass herself acknowledges that the city of Los Angeles is badly governed. In last week’s debate, the moderators asked about billions of local and state dollars for homelessness that were allegedly misspent. Bass responded, “I don’t think it’s shocking that you do find corruption in big programs like this, and I think it is extremely important to hold them completely accountable.” Raman said, “There is no accountability in the city”––that “even as we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year,” there is no staff making sure that every dollar “is being spent appropriately,” because “the city has not invested in oversight.”
When a moderator in last week’s debate asked Pratt why he should be trusted to preside over a multibillion-dollar budget, given his inexperience, his answer was that advisers would help him with the accounting. “My job is to be, as crazy as this will sound––I’m the adult in the room here as Spencer Pratt,” he said in a moment of savvy self-awareness. “That’s what it’s come to.” Adult leadership isn’t especially exciting to influencers on the populist right who revel in waging culture wars. But whichever candidate can provide it will deliver what the city’s voters crave.
The post Spencer Pratt and the Temptations of Populism appeared first on The Atlantic.
