A Letter To Los Angeles About Spencer Pratt

What I wrote to my friends.

A scene from our video shoot.

Last weekend, I emailed the letter below to a wide swath of friends in Los Angeles. I wanted to explain my unlikely support for Spencer Pratt for mayor and invite them to examine their skepticism (or disbelief) about this candidate and consider what is really needed to bring our city to a better place.

The response was about what I expected. A few people wrote back right away to tell me how much they appreciated what I had to say. A few offered some respectful pushback. Most didn’t reply, which is fine and normal. People are busy, and the email was long.

Now that my friends have had their time alone with my letter, I thought I’d post it here. Remember, it was written last week, so polling numbers are out of date, and of course, the May 6 debate hadn’t happened yet.

Over on X, I’m afraid I’ve appointed myself the chief representative of Liberal Elites for Pratt. I can’t post videos here, but you can access a few of my short dispatches here and here if you have the misfortune to be on that unholy platform.

May 2, 2026

Dear Los Angeles Friends,

I think you know I’m not the kind of person to send emails about political candidates, or politics at all. But I’m doing something I never imagined; urging those of you who vote in the city of L.A. to consider a mayoral candidate that arguably sounds like the biggest joke in recent political history — and that is a high bar. That would be Spencer Pratt, a former reality show star who is running for mayor.

Pratt is my guest on this week’s podcast. More importantly, though, this letter is for you, my friends and neighbors in L.A., who probably can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. I can’t either. But after a great deal of initial skepticism, I now want this guy to win.

Am I saying that the producer-crafted “villain” from The Hills who later blew his fortune on Birkin bags and moldavite crystals is the best person to be the mayor of the second largest city in America? Uh, no. Am I saying that given the options currently before us, I believe Spencer Pratt is L.A.’s best hope for reversing course on a path towards a crisis that, in my view, grows more heartbreaking by the day? Yes, to my astonishment, I am saying this.

If our media and attention economy was even halfway functional, I would vote for Adam Miller, a more conventional candidate. But, as it is, that economy is broken and Miller, currently polling at around 3%, is not a contender for the primary on June 2.

So here we are. Pratt is currently polling in second place, narrowly ahead of Nithya Raman, the city council representative for District 4. I still think he’s a longshot candidate, partly because of the liability of being a registered Republican with some MAGA-adjacent endorsers.

But Pratt’s actual platform has nothing to do with the national Republican agenda. He’s running on L.A. issues: why the reservoirs were empty when the Palisades Fire started, why billions spent on homelessness has left our streets more dangerous and degraded than ever, why horrific animal abuse on the streets is ignored, why a federal audit found that $2.4 billion in homeless services funding simply couldn’t be accounted for.

I surely don’t need to tell you that it is commonplace to drive around the city and see trash-strewn rows of tents, piles of hoarded metal and associated junk, dogs chained to abandoned shopping carts, and half-naked human beings smoking pipes, shooting up, vomiting, defecating, passed out or in some cases dead on the sidewalk.

Where I now live, I pass the same cast of characters along my running route every day, including a man almost certainly selling drugs out of a filthy, junk-packed garage across from the metro rail station. One Sunday afternoon, I saw a father and his two young kids leaving the garage and heading back to the station. The kids had their bikes with them, as if out on a normal family excursion. The father stared at the ground as they walked, shoulders slumped as if clouded by shame.

A few hundred feet later, I passed a man so strung-out he was throwing violent punches at the brush and shrubbery along the road. With him was a battered-looking dog on a short leash. I had to look away; not just for my own safety but to make it through the rest of the day.

This is a regular occurrence. It’s also a regular occurrence to hear our elected officials deny the existence of what we’re seeing before our eyes. The term “gaslighting” is woefully overused, but I can think of no better word. As a friend put it, living in Los Angeles today feels like being in an abusive relationship with our own leaders.

Again and again, they fail us, ignore us, and put self-interest above civic duty and even basic logic. Raman, who chairs the city council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, represents some of the most devastated blocks in the city and routinely scoffs at constituents concerned about encampments near schools. Yet we continue to elect these officials, either because we’re so distracted by national politics that we forget to pay attention or because voting for a familiar party confers comfort in distinctly uncomfortable times.

But this is not a normal election. These are not normal times anywhere in the world, and that includes Los Angeles. A fire destroyed nearly 7,000 structures because of city mismanagement*. An estimated seven people die on the sidewalks every day. Dogs on Skid Row are being tortured, mutilated, sold for drugs, used for fentanyl testing, and bred again and again to keep the cycle going.

Here’s the thing about the Spencer Pratt case: even if Pratt got into office and did nothing for four years but repeatedly state the obvious, I have to believe it would be an improvement over what we have now. Moreover, I have to believe that whoever came next would have no choice but to govern from a place of shared reality with their constituents.

In my interview with Pratt, you’ll hear us share our stories of losing our homes in the wildfires last year. I did not get a chance to share another story that goes back much farther than that. Fifteen years ago, as some of you might remember, I spent several days in a medically induced coma with multiple organ failure, sepsis, meningoencephalitis, and a platelet count tantamount to a death rattle. (I know some of you will remember, because you were by my side.)

That illness was flea-borne typhus, the same disease that is now surging at epidemic levels throughout the region – mostly because of inhumanely unsanitary conditions in homelessness encampments. L.A. County reported a record 220 cases in 2025, with 90% requiring hospitalization. If it takes a reality show villain to use existing laws to force people off the sidewalks and into treatment–not to mention arrest drug dealers, human traffickers and people committing shocking atrocities against dogs and cats on Skid Row and elsewhere–I’ll gratefully accept the cosmic irony of it all.

To be honest, just saving the animals would be enough. (And by enforcing laws and allowing LAPD and Animal Services to do their jobs, that is something a mayor can do.) If you don’t believe these abuses are really happening, I can assure you they are well-documented and for years have been reported by citizens to city officials, who do nothing. I won’t include links because they’re too upsetting, though the impulse to look away is part of the reason this issue goes largely ignored.

If you have a chance to watch or listen to the podcast episode, I hope you’ll access the Substack version. I also hope you’ll watch it on video, since it’s easier to digest that way. It’s unpaywalled and includes an expanded introduction that talks about why I took the unprecedented step of interviewing a political candidate. I also hope you’ll share this email with fellow Angelenos who vote for L.A. mayor. At the very least, it might strike up an interesting conversation.

Ballots should be hitting your mailboxes now, and the primary is June 2. I have some thoughts about the governor’s race, too, but they’re a lot less interesting.

It should go without saying that if you vote for Karen Bass or Nithya Raman, we’ll still be friends. I have friends who voted for Jill Stein in 2016, and I forgive them – sort of.

Yours,

Meghan

*In my aim for brevity, this sentence came out a little hamfisted. The causes of the Palisades Fire are too complex to go into here—and more is being discovered all the time— but it would have been more accurate to say that “city failures made a catastrophic situation significantly worse than it needed to be.”