Friday, May 8, 2026

Suddenly, Spencer Pratt Is Everywhere

On Monday, I poated about Spencer Pratt's campaign for mayor of Los Angeles, focusing on an ad -- at the time, it wasn't clear that his campaign had in fact not commissioned it, but this is the case. But within days, two more independent, "fan produced" ads have come out: one, embedded above, is based on The Dark Knight Rises; the other, embedded below as part of a Mark Halperin 2WAY segment, is based on the Hitler-in-the-bunker scenes in Downfall.
But then there was an enmtirely separate development: at a Wenesday night debate, Pratt wiped the floor with his two opponents, incumbent Karen Bass and Democratic Socialist Mamdani clone Nithya Raman. (Some commentators get several things wrong about the candidates -- first, Los Angeles City elections are "non-partisan", and candidates don't idenmtify by party, and second, Pratt, although formerly Republican, is registered independent.) On Gutfeld last night, Spencer Pratt stayed composed while the Dems got exposed. Megyn Kelly, Why Spencer Pratt's BRILLIANT Debate Performance Has Megyn Supporting Him For LA Mayor.

The Dark Knight Rises ad was even on Sky News Australia. Mark Halperin's reaction to the Downfall ad is embedded above. The Hill reports,

A new AI-generated ad promoting Spencer Pratt, a Republican [sic] running for mayor of Los Angeles, depicts the city as a Gotham-influenced dystopian hellscape with only Pratt, presented as Batman, able to save it.

The ad, shared Tuesday on social media by Los Angeles-based filmmaker Charles Curran of Menace Studios, shows the Hollywood sign and City Hall burning. It also depicts Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D), as the Joker, flanked by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and former Vice President Kamala Harris.

. . . While Curran is not directly affiliated with Pratt’s campaign, the candidate reposted the ad on social media. As of Thursday morning, 3.9 million users on the social platform X have viewed it, and 10,000 have reposted it.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) gave props to the ad, writing Tuesday on X, “Maybe the best political ad of the year.”

. . . A poll conducted in March by the University of California, Berkeley, and the Los Angeles Times found that a quarter of respondents backed Bass in the race, with 17 percent backing Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, a democratic socialist, and 14 percent backing Pratt. About a quarter of respondents were undecided.

. . . Early voting in the nonpartisan mayoral primary is set for May 23 through June 1, with an official voting day falling on June 2. Unless one candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote in the primary, the top two finishers, regardless of party, will advance to the general election.

There are several takeaways from the Pratt phenomenon that we see here, whether or not they'll impact the outcome of the election. The first is that the campaign is completely disconnected from legacy media. The LA Times has endorsed Karen Bass, who remains at the top of Polymarket's odds as of today at 45%, but those odds have fallen 4% from yesterday. Nithya Raman's odds are now 27%, having fallen 6%, while Pratt's odds are now 25%, nearly tied with Raman, having risen 6%. Clearly it's the debate results and the ads on social media that are driving opinion, not the LA Times.

Second, Pratt seems instinctively to be following Trump's innovative formula: he either diaregards legacy media coverage, ignoring or outright denouncing it, or he turns it against itself, forcing it to report on campaign rallies, controversial remarks, stunts like the campaign garbage truck, and so forth. Not only did Pratt not have to commission three highly effective ads, he didn't have to pay to have them run -- social media users distrubuted them for free.

Third, as Mark Halperin pointed out above, the ads themselves were likely dirt cheap to produce using AI. The Spectator also comments,

It cannot really be said that videos like these lower the tone of public life. Traditional political broadcasts are already awful and people go to great lengths to avoid seeing them. The most famous spot of the 1960s showed a little girl being blown up by a nuclear bomb.

However, it should also be noted that the Johsnon 1964 campaign never paid to air that ad -- it sent it to TV stations to use as news, so it didn't have to. Pratt and his supporters are using precisely the same strategy, except they're bypassing the network news gateway by going through social media. The link goes on,

AI videos are effective in politics for the trivial reason that you can create whatever scenarios you like for rhetorical purposes. In Curran’s clip Kamala Harris is drinking vodka straight from the bottle, and Mayor Bass has her face made up like the Joker – in a pre-AI age the only way to depict this would be to animate it, which would take much too long. “Storytelling” is meant to be the secret to political communications and AI lets one do this in a much more literal sense. Donald Trump’s famous 2024 ad told viewers that “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” but here Gavin Newsom is simply made to say that “if you were a transgender migrant I could get you a free pussy.”

But then it makes a non sequitur:

It is perhaps telling that Trump, the master of all mediums, only uses AI for jokes rather than for actual communiques to the public.

But even the jokes have storytelling punch: consider the one where Trump swings at a golfball that hits Hillary in the head. The longer AI Pratt ads are nothing but a series of equivalent skits.

A bigger question is whether Pratt has a future. The June 2 primary has two possible outcomes: one is that a single candidate polls above 50%, in which case he or she becomes mayor without a runoff. Polling up to now suggests Raman could win this. Otherwise, the top two have a runoff in November. So far, Pratt\ has consistently polled in third place, and as of today, there have been no new polls reflecting the past week's developments. To have any chance, Pratt needs to mnve a few points up to second, and then he needs to continue an effective campaign through summer and fall. This is uncertain.

Keep in mind that the dead people vote, the illegal alien vote, and the usual-suspect vote are still for Bass, while the boutique affluent vote is still for Raman. The indy ads seem correctly leaning toward appealing to the solid-citizen Latin vote.

But even if he's elected mayor, he needs to get his program through the far-left city council, which right now is a deeply uncertain question. Winning the election will be only the first of his tasks. It's best not to get carried away.

posted by test @ May 08, 2026   0 Comments