‘Like a Rapper in a Country Bar’: Spencer Pratt Faces an Uphill Climb With L.A. Voters

LOS ANGELES – As ballots were still being counted Tuesday night, former reality TV star Spencer Pratt brushed off the notion that his party affiliation as a Republican would sink his ambitions to become the next mayor of Los Angeles. He insisted his message would transcend party lines — even in a sapphire blue city.

“This idea that I don’t represent Democrats and Republicans and independents — anyone that’s just a Los Angeles citizen that wants basic quality of life, I’ll be able to show that in five months,” Pratt told reporters.

“I’m an Angeleno who said ‘enough is enough’ and I had to step up,” he added.

Pratt is still in contention with progressive Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman for the second spot in the runoff in the mayoral race.

But Pratt’s imprimatur as a favorite of the MAGA movement on social media and a figure whom President Donald Trump praised faces serious hurdles if he advances to the runoff with Democratic Mayor Karen Bass.

“He has a steep hill to overcome and that hill is called math,” said Paul Mitchell, a Sacramento-based political data analyst, noting that Pratt is vying to lead a city where only 15% of the electorate is Republican. “The reality is that voters in Los Angeles, even if they might be upset with the status quo, are not going to take that next step and vote for somebody who is easily described as kind of a MAGA light Republican.”

“It’s like he’s the best rapper in a country bar,” Mitchell said.

While Pratt may try to distance himself from Trump in the general election — and he has repeatedly argued that the race is not about national politics — the president told reporters ahead of the primary that he hoped to see Pratt “do well” and added that he’d heard Pratt is “a big MAGA person.” Trump is so deeply unpopular in Los Angeles that any association with him could taint Pratt’s candidacy, and Bass and her allies appear eager to exploit that opening if he is her opponent in November.

Bass has highlighted Pratt’s vow to cooperate with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement raids — noting her own history pushing back against those operations and arguing that she would be a protector of “all Angelenos.”During a recent event with Bass, Angelica Salas, the president of L.A.-based Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Action Fund, cast Pratt as another version of Trump who would endanger the immigrant community in Los Angeles. “We suffer the consequences when people become confused and enamored with reality TV stars,” Salas said as she stood beside Bass. “We already have a reality TV star in the White House, and look how bad that has been.”

California-based Republican strategist Mike Madrid noted that anti-incumbent sentiment in L.A. is as strong as it has been in decades — providing Pratt with a chance to defeat Bass. But Madrid said the parallels between Pratt’s style and Trump’s have not been helpful to the former star of “The Hills” as he has campaigned with what Madrid described as “performative, over-the-top grotesquery.”

“He’s created a ceiling for himself,” Madrid said. “Spencer Pratt can say he’s not MAGA all he wants, but if MAGA is saying Spencer Pratt is one of us, that speaks louder than anything else he can say.”

Trump drew more attention to his admiration for Pratt, as well as Pratt’s party affiliation, on Thursday when he claimed without evidence that Democrats are trying “to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES” — a reference to Pratt and California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, a Republican endorsed by Trump.

California ballots that are postmarked on or before Election Day are still counted if they arrive up to seven days after the election. Trump has repeatedly invoked the debunked claim that the use of mail-in ballots leads to fraud. And he has gone so far as to argue that Republicans should “nationalize” elections. Pratt’s team did not respond to a request for comment about the president’s assertion.

But Pratt inevitably will be drawn into the heated debate over the length of time it takes to count mail-in ballots in California. The sheer volume of ballots that must be counted in the most populous state in the country means it can take days, if not weeks, to determine the final result in close elections. The remaining ballots to be counted could skew toward more liberal candidates, because many Democratic voters said they returned their ballots later than usual — largely because of the crowded governor’s race.

As of Friday morning, none of the gubernatorial candidates had advanced to the November runoff — Hilton, the former Fox News host, is leading, with Xavier Becerra, a Biden Cabinet official, close behind and billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer in third place.

Trump’s high-water mark in Los Angeles came against Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, when he garnered about 25% percent of the nearly 1.4 million ballots cast, a mark some political observers are watching to see if Pratt can best. In a survey this spring by the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, about 62% of voters described themselves as somewhat or very liberal; about 22% said they were moderate and 16% said they were somewhat or very conservative.

But political strategists note that even if Pratt swept the Republican vote and snagged a significant percentage of the moderate Democrats, he could still fall short of a winning coalition — as real estate executive Rick Caruso, a Republican-turned-Democrat, did in his mayoral loss to Bass four years ago.

“The challenge [for Pratt] in this election is not about who he is, his campaign or his messaging,” said Fernando Guerra, the director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. “It’s who L.A. is. L.A. is not America in 2024, 2016, or even 2020. It’s not a 50-50 split, where you just need to deflate Democrats or cross over a little bit. We’re talking about an 85-15 split.”

With an electorate that tends to be more liberal in a general election than in a primary, Bass would stand to benefit.

California Republican strategist Kevin Spillane noted that Bass’ low approval ratings could also lead her to lean into the “time-tested” campaign strategy often deployed by troubled incumbents: by tearing down their opponent.

“The campaign [Pratt] has conducted — he’s done the best of the three of them,” Spillane said. “But he just has political gravity trying to weigh him down.”