Tne LA Mayor's Race Gets Interesting

🔥 WOW - Another INSANE Campaign Ad released by Former Reality TV Star Spencer Pratt as he runs for Mayor of Los Angeles CA.

Whoever Mr. Pratt hired for media is ON POINT!

I live 3,000 miles away but California and New Jersey have some of the SAME PROBLEMS!

I am HYPED. Lets… pic.twitter.com/GxhdDP2HEB

— Jay Costa (@JayCostaUSA) May 2, 2026

Legacy media has begun to pay attention to the California primaries coming up on June 2. The governor's race has already been picked pretty clean: there's a possibility that two Republican candidates will come out on top in the "jungle primary" and face off against each other in November, freezing the Democrats out completely. Still, this isn't inevitable, and lots can happen. But now the Los Angeles mayor's primary has also headed in an unexpected direction: Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star, is running a brilliant media campaign. (An artifact of the progressive era, Los Angeles City races are non-partisan.)

The ad embedded above begins in Spanish, "Spencer, saca la bassura!" Literally, this is "Spencer, take out the trash!", except that AI tells me, "In some regions, like Mexico, 'basura' can also be used as slang to call someone "scum" or a "friend/pal" in a very informal, teasing way, though the phrase 'saca la basura' is almost always literal." What I've discovered just by followinig Spanish Facebook posts is that border Spanish is something like Cockney, and it's full of slang with very local meanings. Almost certainly here, "basura" is being used in personal reference to the current mayor, Karen Bass.

(Also, based on my own crude Spanglish, the ad misspells "basura" as "bassura", but what do I know? Even if I'd studied textbook Spanish, I'd get only so far in LA.) In any case, the cartoon carries an image of Spencer Pratt pushing a dumpster full of garbage with Mayor Bass ensconced in it. There are other pointed references: "From Hollywood to City Hall, feels like the trash moved in". And this is aimed at a Hispanic audience; just because people speak Spanish doesn't mean they like illegals.

From what I can gather behind a paywall, The Los Angeles Times complains that the ad is Miami Latin, not Los Angeles, and it won't work. Nevertheless, it's beginning to attract national attention, and it's certainly entertaining.

Here's a take from Just the News:

Ex-reality show star Spencer Pratt might seem an unlikely candidate for the high-profile gig. His TV fame is mostly behind him, and he brings no political experience to the office.

Those Trumpian creds might attract MAGA loyalists, but the question is whether Pratt can peel off just enough votes from the celebrity circuit for a long-shot victory.

To be sure, many liberal-minded voters have already rallied behind incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass, despite all-round low marks for her handling of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, or her progressive challenger, City Council member Nithya Raman.

Bass leads in essentially every poll. And Raman is promising to reverse the dramatic Hollywood job losses happening on the incumbent mayor's watch.

Still, Pratt is in second place in two of three recent polls, including one a few weeks ago sponsored by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, with Bass ahead by 14 points, and an Emerson College poll in early March in which Pratt trailed by just 8 points.

But a piece at The Free Press, linked at Real Clear Politics no less, sounds a more worrisome note to all right-thinking people:

Spencer Pratt, one of the greatest reality-TV villains of the 2000s, and a current candidate in the Los Angeles mayoral race, just delivered what may be one of the most effective, viral political ads in decades.

Here’s a brief synopsis: Bathed in ethereal California light, Pratt, 42, stands outside the mansions of incumbent LA mayor Karen Bass and city councilmember (and mayoral candidate) Nithya Raman. They, he tells viewers, do not have to deal with the consequences of their bad policies. Cue the consequences, flashing across the screen: homeless encampments, buildings on fire, a masked man holding a flare in front of a graffitied wall.

“This is where I live,” Pratt says, as the ad cuts to an Airstream trailer on the scorched lot where his Pacific Palisades property used to be. He’s been living there for most of the time since his house burned down in the 2025 LA wildfires. The response to the fires by Bass’s administration has been widely maligned.

“They let my home burn down,” Pratt says in the ad. “I know what the consequences of failed leadership are. That’s why I’m running for mayor.” The camera pans back to reveal his empty lot surrounded by some trees, the sun in the sky, and the campaign’s slogan: “A New Golden Age for Los Angeles.”

The message is resonant and raw—which is why the video has already accumulated more than 9 million views on X and growing.

This was an ad released prior to the "Spencer, saca la bassura!" Both certainly show he has some savvy media people working for him. This piece goes on to say that may be the problem: Spencer Pratt is a creature of contemporary reality TV culture, all phony and contrived, "fake, rigged, and incredibly dumb".

Americans are a hardy bunch, and eventually, they called bullshit. And when they did, they learned, to their surprise, that the people they turned to as their leaders were, more often than not, literally as bad as reality-show villains, pros who’ve been in the business of calling bullshit for quite some time.

Chief among them, of course, is our Commander-in-Chief, who parlayed his modest success on The Apprentice into the most massive political payout in American history. Donald Trump—the boardroom baddie whose catchphrase, “You’re fired,” was originally designed as a gesture of theatrical heartlessness—eventually looked straight at the camera and told his viewers that he was bucking the rules in real life too: running to help people like them, cast as the American story’s losers, beat the odds and win.

. . . As a reality-TV character, Pratt caught flack for such tricks as staging a bogus divorce to boost his and his wife’s career. These schemes earned him the distinction of a spot in Yahoo’s 2015 readers’ survey of the greatest reality-show villains of all time, along with greats such as Apprentice contestant—and, briefly, Trump administration official—Omarosa Manigault Newman.

. . . Pratt ascended by realizing that it was precisely the antagonistic posture into which he was forced that made him a stand-in for ordinary Americans. Viewers in Akron, Ohio, say, couldn’t begin to imagine themselves having a life as rosy as Conrad’s; but they could absolutely empathize with the dudebro telling them, with a wink and a smile, that it was all fake, a stupid game designed to keep people like them from having any real say or influence. He wasn’t just stirring resentment—he was telling the truth.

. . . In the reality show called “Los Angeles,” [Mayor Karen] Bass was cast as Conrad, the sparky one who had to succeed so that she could prove that all the propaganda viewers were being fed was sound and true.

But Pratt, reality-show veteran that he is, knows much better than to let this bogus story unfurl uninterrupted. As he’s done for 20 years now, he grabbed hold of the camera, turned it around, and told viewers an inconvenient truth. In reality-show America, that makes him just about the most thrilling, promising, and worthwhile candidate on the scene.

What did this guy expect? Zohran Mamdani won last year's New York mayor election against boring candidates promising nothing but same old-same old. Without Pratt, the LA mayor's election will have the incumbent, Karen Bass, tied to the Pacific Palisades fire, DEI, and homelessness, against Nithya Raman, something of a Mamdani clone and a Democratic Socialist. Pratt at least appears to be proposing solutions to the city's major problems that both Bass and Raman have facilitated, but perhaps more important, he has media advisors who are competent at raising his profile and presenting him as something new.