Is Spencer Pratt the Hero LA Needs?
Reality TV stars have been fixtures of Los Angeles for decades, but now there’s a chance one could run the city. Spencer Pratt — who appeared in The Hills, among other series — may not succeed in his mayoral bid, but his candidacy has produced a social media campaign that is taking apart the progressive rot long embedded in LA’s politics.
Even East Coast-based outlets, such as the Free Press, are titillated by the prospect of a Pratt mayoralty. Some conservatives think he can win the race by uniting MAGA supporters, Democrats and Independents who recognise the city’s decline. While it is a non-affiliated race, Pratt is a registered Republican, and some commentators see his prospective victory as a sign of an imminent conservative earthquake in California. That is, if Republicans win the Governor’s Mansion as well.
Pratt has plenty of material to work with. He portrays himself as a Batman-like figure fighting a city establishment that has presided over the proliferation of homeless encampments, mediocre schools and cracked streets. He has a good grip on the deeper problems within state infrastructure that contributed to these problems. Unsurprisingly, he singles out a rapidly declining entertainment industry, in which employment is down 30% since 2022.
On a personal level, Pratt also connects with voters on some key issues in the city. He used to live in the Pacific Palisades, an idyllic parcel overlooking the ocean. But his house, and most of his neighborhood, burned down in the 2025 LA wildfires, which look increasingly like a masterclass in incompetence at the city and state level. He compares his current abode — a trailer on the site of his former house — with the luxury of Getty House where Mayor Karen Bass resides, or with the vastly expensive home occupied by socialist Councilwoman Nithya Raman.
This strategy may prove effective, given how obvious the city’s decline is. This year’s record-low Quality of Life Index, a metric compiled by UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, marked a huge drop from a decade ago. LA suffers from the highest level of poverty among the biggest American cities. In some parts of town, the lights don’t even work because thieves have pulled out copper wires. And all this can be yours if you can afford to live in a city with some of America’s highest housing costs.
Will these problems aid Pratt’s candidacy? Parallels can be seen with Richard Riordan, the last Republican mayor of LA, who ran in the aftermath of the devastating 1992 riots in the city. Riordan, however, could count on a Republican base — then roughly one-quarter of city voters — which on election day constituted one-third of the electorate. Today, that percentage is down to about 15%.
Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com, follow him on Substack and Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo credit: screenshot from Spencer Pratt mayoral campaign’s social media.
