Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star with no political experience, is running an outsider campaign to replace the incumbent Karen Bass as Los Angeles’s next mayor. Mr. Pratt is a registered Republican and native Angeleno who lived in Pacific Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood in Los Angeles, before his home burned down in last year’s Palisades fire.
He has used his role as a fire victim to fuel a campaign that portrays Ms. Bass, and California Democrats more generally, as clueless elites who have let California go to seed.
Here are five things to know about Mr. Pratt, 42.
1. He rose to fame on MTV’s “The Hills.” This fact needs no explaining to older millennials. In the late 2000s, Mr. Pratt and his co-star girlfriend, Heidi Montag (who is now his wife), were fixtures of cable television and tabloid magazines. On TV, Mr. Pratt excelled at creating drama between Ms. Montag and her friends and often positioned himself as an aggrieved antagonist. His bid for mayor, with his hectoring debate performance and grievance-based campaign ads, is right in line with the character his fans know.
2. Mr. Pratt grew up in Pacific Palisades. His home in the hills of that community sat two miles away from his parents’ home near the ocean; both burned down in the fire. In the year after the blaze, Mr. Pratt lived mostly in his parents’ second home, near Santa Barbara, but made regular pilgrimages to the Palisades to attend news conferences and appear on a podcast (called “The Fame Game”) that he and Ms. Montag have recorded in the ashes of their lot. His blistering critiques of Ms. Bass and of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, attracted attention from right-wing influencers and Republican politicians, helping to set up his bid for office.
3. He has tapped into voters’ deep frustrations with Los Angeles’s homeless problem. Mr. Pratt has turned the tragedy of the Palisades fire into a broader story of corruption and mismanagement. His social media posts frame homelessness as a drug problem and talk about the “evil racket of corrupt politicians and NGOs.” So far his political identity is less about ideology than rage: One moment he is trying to save a trailer park, the next he is railing against building affordable housing in wealthy neighborhoods. The common thread that binds them is a theme that the people in charge have failed, which plays into widespread cynicism about the ability of Los Angeles politicians to solve problems.
4. He is adept at using new technology to gain attention. Mr. Pratt got famous in another era: He made his name on television and brags about the profitable side business he and Ms. Montag had staging photographs for tabloid magazines that appeared on newsstands, in print. But since then he has found new ways to gain attention — using Snapchat to document everyday life and posting TikTok videos of his breakfast burritos and hummingbird nectar recipe. Whether or not he becomes mayor, his campaign is likely to go down as one of the first to harness the power of artificial intelligence. A Batman-esque video that featured A.I. Pratt as the savior of Los Angeles was a viral hit that Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida as well as the son and brother of presidents, called “maybe the best political ad of the year.”
5. He is in a tight race for the November runoff election. California has a “top two” primary system in which the two candidates with the most votes advance to the general election regardless of their political party. Polls show that Ms. Bass, Mr. Pratt and Nithya Raman, a member of the Los Angeles City Council, are locked in a three-way race, with many voters still undecided. Mr. Pratt’s celebrity and social media following have given him an outsize share of attention, but many of his fans, and much of his fund-raising, come from outside Los Angeles.
Conor Dougherty covers housing and development, focusing on the rising costs of homeownership. He is based in Los Angeles.
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