Spencer Pratt Was a Reality TV Villain. Now He Wants to Be L.A.’s Savior.
Former star of ‘The Hills’ is running a biting, social-media-savvy campaign to be the next mayor of Los Angeles
Reality TV personality Spencer Pratt is running for Los Angeles mayor after his house burned down in the 2025 Palisades fire.
Pratt trails Mayor Karen Bass in recent polling ahead of the June 2 primary election.
Pratt’s campaign uses Trump-style rhetoric and social-media savvy, amplifying viral, AI-generated videos.
LOS ANGELES—Spencer Pratt knows he doesn’t need to be universally liked.
At an annual tennis invitational and white party at a billionaire’s Beverly Hills mansion last weekend, the reality TV villain and mayoral hopeful marveled at his potential path to victory.
“It’s pretty incredible you can become the mayor with only 51% of people liking you. I’m like, ‘I can do that,’” Pratt told the crowd.
Pratt, 42, rose to millennial fame as the dark prince of “The Hills,” playing the love interest of his now-wife, Heidi Montag. He provoked conflict with fellow cast members and was seen by fans as fraying Montag’s relationship with her best friend.
The couple settled into Pacific Palisades with their two sons, and Pratt opened a healing crystals business called Pratt Daddy. He trained hummingbirds to eat nectar out of his hand and posted the videos on Instagram.
Then, in early 2025, their house burned down. As the ash settled on the Palisades fire, Pratt channeled the grief and fury of thousands of displaced people, sharing with his vast following on TikTok, Instagram and X what it felt like to lose his home, his parents’ home and his childhood neighborhood.
He began demanding accountability from city and state officials, and he and Montag are now the lead plaintiffs in a continuing lawsuit blaming government agencies and utility companies for property damage. The city-run utility has said it isn’t responsible for starting the fire or for the losses that followed.
Pratt, who has said he was registered as a Republican and voted for President Trump in 2024, launched his campaign for mayor in January outside the burned shell of a Spanish-style commercial building in Pacific Palisades. He told the crowd that Los Angeles is “being managed into the ground by people who don’t have the courage to actually lead.”
He soon began to hit Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on some of the city’s most intractable problems, including street homelessness and the stagnating entertainment industry. His campaign has captivated residents who are frustrated with the slow pace of fire recovery and with Bass, who was out of the country when the fires started and whose approval ratings plunged afterward.
Pratt stole the show early in a recent debate. He called Bass an “incredible liar” and said homeless people were using “super meth.”
The latest independent polling shows Bass leading four challengers, with Pratt and Nithya Raman, a City Council member, within striking distance of each other for second place. The top two finishers from the June 2 nonpartisan primary will advance to the November election if no candidate wins a majority of votes.
‘The Guy You Loved to Hate’
Pratt earned his political science degree at the University of Southern California but hasn’t held public office. After “The Hills,” he continued to dabble in reality TV with roles on “Celebrity Big Brother” and “Marriage Boot Camp” and earlier this year published a memoir, “The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain.”
Supporters see Pratt as a fresh face who talks openly about the city’s dysfunction. His lack of experience with government might even be an upside, they say, since the system seems so broken.
“The urban blight has become so bad,” said Andy Heyward, chief executive of the animation company Kartoon Studios. Pratt “could be a turning point, a tipping point character,” he said.
Heyward co-hosted a fundraiser with his wife last week at which Pratt was smudged with sage before standing in front of a giant amethyst geode to address about 125 people.
Recent donors to Pratt’s campaign include Lucian Grainge and his son Elliot Grainge, the respective chief executives of Universal and Atlantic music groups, and the entertainment investor and major Democratic Party donor Haim Saban, city records show.
David Solomon, 46, who works in real estate, said he became invested in the mayoral race after break-in attempts at his home in Santa Monica Canyon.
“L.A. is like the most liberal place on the planet,” Solomon said. “Everybody I know that’s a Democrat is voting for Spencer.”
At a Brentwood fundraiser last week, the record producer David Foster and his wife, the singer Katharine McPhee, serenaded Pratt with a cover of the ’80s anthem “The Best.” “You’re simply the best, better than all the rest,” McPhee sang as she name-checked some of his opponents, according to a video shared to Instagram.
Critics said Pratt is untested and has little understanding of major issues including housing, affordability and the job market. He has advocated for removing homeless people from the streets, including with involuntary, temporary psychiatric holds, and said the city should “not perpetuate and indulge their addiction.” Experts said some of his proposals could face legal and logistical challenges. “The ‘homeless’ problem is a drug abuse problem, and you can’t fix drug addiction with housing,” Pratt said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal.
Going viral
Pratt is running a flood-the-zone, attention-grabbing campaign, heavy on podcast appearances—including “The Joe Rogan Experience,” “The Adam Carolla Show” and “All-In”—and lighter on interviews with traditional news outlets. (His campaign declined to make Pratt available for an interview.) He mixes Trumpian rhetoric with social-video savvy reminiscent of other millennial politicians, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Pratt has brought national attention to his campaign by amplifying a torrent of viral, AI-generated content. One Batmanesque video, which his campaign said neither he nor formal surrogates made, showed Bass as the Joker, being pelted in the face with tomatoes.
Bass told CNN that she is worried by the “violent turn” of the videos, including one that showed her and California Gov. Gavin Newsom being drowned.
Bass campaign spokesman Alex Stack said Pratt is running a campaign “based on AI slop and no plans,” while Bass is focused on delivering results.
Raman, the City Council member, said in a statement that Pratt won’t be able to deliver the change he has promised and that “anger alone will not fix Los Angeles.”
In one ad, Pratt showed the city-owned mayoral mansion in leafy Windsor Square before cutting to a silver Airstream trailer on an empty lot. “This is where I live,” he said.
After TMZ reported that Pratt was staying at the Hotel Bel-Air, where the cheapest room starts at $999 a night before taxes, he said his security team, concerned about death threats, wouldn’t let him stay in the Airstream “even if I wanted to.”
Pratt’s handling of criticism reflects his years of practice as a reality TV villain: deflect and redirect without breaking a sweat.
In a recent campaign ad, Pratt rapped to his own version of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” theme song, “This is a story all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down and I had to take a minute to run for mayor,” he said.
Some of Bass’s backers have started running digital ads calling Pratt “too Republican for Los Angeles.”
Less than 15% of Los Angeles city voters are registered Republicans, and the electorate last chose a GOP mayor in 1997. Four years ago, the billionaire developer Rick Caruso, a Democrat who was previously registered as a Republican, spent more than $100 million running against Bass and lost by nearly 10 percentage points.
Pratt said on the “We Need to Talk” podcast that his voter registration and past political preferences wouldn’t affect his campaign. “You can’t box me up with other peoples’ politics,” he said.
On Wednesday, Pratt mingled with voters in South Los Angeles, including Stevie Hodge, a retired mover who stopped by to get some free barbecue.
Hodge walked away conflicted. He liked that Pratt came to the neighborhood but said he didn’t know enough about his policies. Bass has done some work to help the homeless, Hodge said, but he doesn’t want to vote for her again.
“I think I’ll wait and vote in November,” he said.