When Spencer Pratt, formerly of the reality show “The Hills,” announced his bid for mayor of Los Angeles in January, I was not surprised. A celebrity with no political or traditional corporate experience wants to run the second-largest city in the United States?
We have a reality TV president. The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, and his wife were on MTV’s “The Real World.” The couple just spent months filming a YouTube show with their family called “The Great American Road Trip,” ostensibly to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary.
A former star of Bravo’s “Summer House,” a reality show about a summer share in the Hamptons, who is a model and a maple syrup entrepreneur, is running for Congress in northern Minnesota. And a 2021 contestant on HBO’s “FBoy Island,” a dating show on which women try to discern whether men are nice guys or commitmentphobes, who worked in finance and loves Zyn is running for Senate in Virginia.
Whether you like it or not (and I do not), reality stars are apparently becoming a staple of our deeply unserious 21st-century politics. Although television and movie stars have been elected to office for decades (Ronald Reagan, Al Franken and Arnold Schwarzenegger come to mind), they were actors, not playing themselves. Reality TV fame allows Pratt and his peers to get attention for their outsider candidacies, and it gives them much more leeway for bad behavior than the average person enjoys. The public is already used to their antics; that’s what made them famous.
As an avid watcher of “The Hills” in the mid-aughts, I think Pratt is a particularly ill-suited entrant in the Los Angeles mayoral primary, which is a nonpartisan election. He was the dark prince of “The Hills,” spreading vile rumors about castmates. Pratt and his wife and “Hills” co-star, Heidi Montag, blew through $10 million and at one point had to move into a house his parents owned. In a memoir published this year, he explained that he spent $500,000 on Birkin bags for Montag and over $1 million on crystals. So he’s not a person I would trust on the fiscal management — to name just one responsibility — of a major American city struggling to balance its budget.
I watched last week’s Los Angeles mayoral debate with full knowledge of Pratt’s history. I have to admit that he dominated that performance. I’m not alone in that impression: As of Tuesday afternoon, 90 percent of participants in an online poll on NBC Los Angeles’s website said he won the debate.
Pratt, a registered Republican, has said that he is running for office because he and his parents lost their homes in the horrific Palisades fire in January 2025 and the incumbent, Mayor Karen Bass, a registered Democrat, did not have compelling explanations for her mishandling of the disaster. (She was out of the country when the fire started.) After the fire, her standing with Angelenos fell and never recovered. “I blame this person for burning my house and my parents’ house and my town and all my neighbors’ down. I am not working with Mayor Bass,” Pratt said.
During the debate, the moderator asked about the homelessness crisis, “Do you support the ordinance that restricts encampments in front of schools or day care centers?” and requested that the candidates answer with a straightforward “yes or no.” The City Council member Nithya Raman, a registered Democrat and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, responded with “I, you know, I, I, support keeping our streets safe. I did vote against the structure of this particular ordinance, and it is because at its best — —” before being interrupted by the moderator.
The main reason Pratt was effective in the debate — and, it seems, more broadly in his campaign of late — is that he is channeling the anger that some Los Angeles residents feel about the state of their city. “I talk to thousands of moms a week. They do not feel safe in the street, no matter what these crime statistics are telling anybody,” he said. He ranted about fentanyl, supermeth and people being stabbed on the street. If you believe that crime is out of hand, hearing someone express that vehemently and authentically is far more compelling than Raman’s careful answers about establishing a Bureau of Homelessness Oversight.
I came away from the debate wishing that the Bravo impresario Andy Cohen ran a training institute for wayward Democrats, where the “Real Housewives” all-star NeNe Leakes could school candidates in the art of snappy comebacks and exquisite facial expressions.
I called Richard Longoria — who is in the political science department at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, and is the author of “Celebrities in American Elections” — to ask what he made of Pratt’s increasingly legitimate candidacy. Longoria’s research has shown that celebrities have outperformed normies because of name recognition and thus may be able to raise more money from fans and high-profile cronies. As of late April, Pratt was leading the pack on fund-raising.
Longoria explained that there is some precedent for Pratt’s candidacy in California, home of the entertainment industry: “Sonny Bono and Clint Eastwood both became mayors because of building permit disputes. And Spencer Pratt is out there talking about he can’t rebuild his home after the fires because of the permitting process.” If you frame Pratt as a local businessman — the business is celebrity — rather than as a reality TV provocateur, it does make more sense.
Reality TV stardom is, of course, a legitimate form of prominence, said Nelini Stamp, director of mass audience engagement for the Working Families Party. But Pratt’s candidacy and his message probably wouldn’t be taking off in this moment if the people of Los Angeles didn’t feel they were in some kind of crisis, Stamp explained. “There’s a collective grief that is still happening” because of the fires, she said, and because Pratt lost everything, he’s able to express the pain in a way that resonates with some voters. “I am angry and aggrieved and emotional, which is why I’m voting for Pratt, because he is also enraged and heartbroken and, as a result, the only humane option,” Adeline Dimond, who grew up in Los Angeles, put it in Pirate Wires.
The other candidates need to figure out how to reflect these feelings if they want to win.
Stamp also said something powerful: Being on reality TV trained Pratt well for the world of politics, where you’re the hero one moment and the villain the next. He is comfortable being the villain — saying something aggressive and not caring about the reaction or fighting dirty in public.
The thing is, Pratt has only ever really fought for himself. The people of Los Angeles, who have the opportunity to vote in the mayoral primary on June 2, would be foolish to think that he’d necessarily fight for them.
If they think he’d be a great mayor, I have a pile of crystals to sell them.
End Notes
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I have been binge-listening to the current season of the podcast “Infamous,” on which my friend Vanessa Grigoriadis is a host. There’s a four-episode arc about scams perpetrated by “Real Housewives” cast members, focusing mostly on Jennifer Shah, who served time in prison for fraud because of her involvement in a telemarketing scheme.
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I watched “The Third Man” over the weekend. If you haven’t seen this classic bit of cinema from 1949, it hasn’t aged a day. It takes place in postwar Vienna and shows the deadly cynicism of black-market profiteers in a broken city. It has particular resonance for me because my grandparents grew up in Leopoldstadt, just blocks from the Prater amusement park’s giant Ferris wheel, which plays a pivotal role in the film.
I had to laugh at Elvis Mitchell’s assessment of “The Third Man” in The Times in 2004, which contained this sentence: “Calling this one of the finest movies ever made may be one of the most obvious statements ever made, akin to saying the sky is blue, a presidential campaign is bound to turn dirty or Donald Trump has a comb-over.” Everything feels circular, just like that infernal Ferris wheel.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
The post Unfortunately, We Have to Take Spencer Pratt Seriously as a Politician appeared first on New York Times.
