Washed-Up Clown Spencer Pratt Will Not Be The Mayor of Los Angeles

Spencer Pratt will not be the mayor of Los Angeles. There should be no need to utter this sentence, much like “You do not have to swallow a rhino whole, tonight” or “Human shit will not rain down from the sky.” Well, of course not. Should I have been worried about that? 

According to more than a few self-styled Serious Thinkers—perhaps still haunted by the shock they experienced on the night of Nov. 8, 2016—who insisted on treating Pratt’s mayoral primary run as a legitimate rebuke of status quo politics: Yes. The Free Press worked harder than anyone has ever worked before to imbue Pratt's candidacy with a sense of “woke Democrats just might lose because of woke” verve.  

And yet, Pratt failed to advance in L.A.’s officially nonpartisan primary, losing to incumbent mayor Karen Bass and councilmember Nithya Raman, who will face off in the November general. Pratt fell to third place after the slow and steady count of mail-in ballots boosted Raman, an outcome that leaves his brigade of losers clinging to myths of fraud to explain why a registered Republican praised by Donald Trump couldn't win an election in Los Angeles.

If you aren’t familiar with Pratt already, then sincerely, truly, from the bottom of my heart, good for you. He first came into popular consciousness as a villain on the hit 2000s MTV reality show The Hills, about a group of 20-somethings torturing each other and interning at Teen Vogue. Over the course of its four-year run, Pratt was a unanimously loathed heel who allegedly leaked a sex tape of his costar to Perez Hilton, emotionally pummeled his little sister to tears and called her a “crazy bitch” for crying, and fucked around on his eventual (and, shockingly, current) wife Heidi Montag. The first time the public cast its votes for Pratt was in 2011, when he was elected America’s least appealing celebrity. He beat out O.J. Simpson for the honor. 

The journey from 2011’s most-hated star to third place in L.A.’s mayoral election was a long, storied one. Spencer and Heidi blew through the $10 million they earned from the show insanely quickly. The $2 million they spent on Montag’s debut pop album, Superficial—which sold 672 copies its first week—sums up how so much cash could be wasted so fast. Pratt seems to have also sincerely believed that the world was going to end in 2012 in a Mayan apocalypse. So why not burn millions on crystals, Birkins, and ammo?

The world, of course, did not end, though perhaps it should have. Pratt had to go on living in a decaying husk of his former celebrity, the half-life of his fame shrinking with each passing year. That wasn’t for a lack of trying. Pratt spent the 2010s making scattershot appearances on the occasional TV show and wading his way into right-wing media. A 2022 Esquire profile, published two weeks after MTV canceled its Hills reboot, opened with Pratt yelling, “I want a hit show so fucking bad.” He’d spent the last five years filming himself, attempting to spark the flame of a successful reality series that could spawn endlessly into spin-offs and feed him and his family for life. At the end of 2025, he spoke to the Hollywood Reporter about an unscripted show focused on his family that was stuck in development, dead everywhere but Hulu. 

Then, in 2025, God sent Spencer Pratt a grotesque boon. His home burned down in one of the deadliest, most destructive wildfires in California history. Pratt choked back tears on Good Morning America while describing watching his sons' room being engulfed by flames through a home security camera. His TikTok videos documenting the rebuilding of his life climbed to higher and higher view counts. He reached out to the world for help: If you want to support us, he said, stream the re-release of Montag’s pop album Superficial. It proceeded to climb to No. 1 on the iTunes charts. 

Through the tears, Pratt had an axe to grind. He blamed the Palisades wildfire that destroyed his home on government negligence and incompetence. That incumbent Mayor Karen Bass was out of town during the fires certainly helped make the point. And on the one-year anniversary of the fire, he launched his campaign to unseat her. The disaster provided an irresistible launch narrative, but the major focus of Pratt’s campaign has been homeless people, whom he regularly refers to as "zombies." Though governing failures could explain how he lost his own home, anyone made homeless by something besides a fire apparently only has their own choices to blame. 

The entirety of Pratt’s platform can essentially be summed up by his promise to round up homeless people faster than Democrats and sequester them in a single facility on an unknown plot of federal land that would surely be gifted to him by Donald Trump upon asking. His hateful grift is powered by more than just bluster; he has a sincere and genuine belief in the things he says. Pratt appeared on Alex Jones’s show as far back as 2009, where he recited his favorite Jones documentaries and referred to climate change as a hoax. 

The credulousness with which Pratt’s candidacy was received by Serious Thinkers is thanks, in part, to some key ingredients: a few surface-level commonalities with Trump, including a penchant for viral memes and AI shitposts; an elite, vocal cadre of Angelenos united by their genuine hatred of poor people; and the unspectacular—rhetorically and politically—Dem alternatives. At the end of the day, though, none of these things were enough to extend Pratt’s viral mayoral moment. 

So, goodbye to a candidacy that has brought us headlines like “Spencer Pratt Batman-Inspired AI Campaign Ad Trolling Gavin Newsom Goes Viral.” No more fan-made AI videos of Mayor Bass as the Joker, laughing at desperate Angelenos while a courtly Gavin Newsom laments, “If you were a transgender migrant, I could get you a free pussy,” and Kamala Harris takes pulls from a handle of vodka.

On to the next, as it were. Last month, reports surfaced that Pratt signed a deal to make an unscripted family series following his campaign. Who knows where that deal goes when there’s no more campaign, or in what additional ways Pratt may parlay his failed candidacy into more spotlight. But he will, no doubt, keep trying. In the best-selling memoir Pratt released earlier this year, he recalls his almost congenital obsession with attention. As a child, apparently, he wondered if he ceased to exist when people stopped looking at him.