On the reality television show The Hills, Spencer Pratt played something of a villain, blamed for spreading a salacious rumor and driving a wedge between his girlfriend and her best friend. Pratt is casting himself as a hero in his latest venture, a bid to be mayor of Los Angeles, in which he's promising to rid the nation's second most populous city of disorder and dysfunction. Originally greeted with bemusement, Pratt is now upending the race with early voting underway ahead of the June 2 election, reports the AP. The Republican is riding a wave of buzz fueled by viral videos taking aim at incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, Gov. Gavin Newsom, and others.
Pratt's goal is to turn the chatter into a ticket to a November runoff against Bass, a Democrat who is struggling to recover from a widely panned response to devastating wildfires last year. He would face long odds in a city that last elected a Republican mayor in 1997. But during last week's debate, Pratt was one of only three candidates onstage, alongside Bass and progressive City Council member Nithya Raman. "As crazy as this will sound, I'm the adult in the room," Pratt said. Pratt and his supporters are making a populist appeal, emphasizing day-to-day concerns about life in Los Angeles and leaning on visceral imagery of drug use and homeless encampments in the city of nearly 4 million.
In one ad, Pratt stands in cozy neighborhoods where Bass and Raman live. He contrasts them with an Airstream parked on a flattened lot, where he says he's living after his house was destroyed in the Palisades Fire. "They let my home burn down," Pratt says. "I know what the consequences of failed leadership are." A series of viral videos created with AI have portrayed Pratt as the city's savior from hapless Democrats and violent socialists. In one, Pratt is portrayed as Batman saving a dystopian Los Angeles from Bass, portrayed as a villainous Joker. "He's playing on the most powerful emotion, which is anger, and LA voters are angry right now," said Matt Klink, a GOP strategist based in Los Angeles.
The rising attention on Pratt shakes up a race that, until recently, was shaping up to pit Bass against a rival to her left rather than her right. "I feel like he's exploiting the grief of people in the Palisades, and I think that's reprehensible. ... I think he is about his own celebrity. He's famous now again," Bass told Fox News. Pratt has run an imaginative campaign that has effectively parlayed his celebrity into attention, the lifeblood of politics, just as Donald Trump and Arnold Schwarzenegger did before him, said Michael Trujillo, an LA-based Democratic strategist. He said that's put him in a strong position to get through the first round of voting. But eventually, Pratt will have to face a stark reality—Los Angeles is an overwhelmingly Democratic city. "Not to diminish the creativity and imagination that they're putting into their campaign, but they're going to run into a big math problem," Trujillo said.
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