Spencer Pratt Won't Be L.A. Mayor, But He Changed the Conversation

And that was always the point.

A scene from my interview with Pratt on April 24.

It’s been, as people say when they can’t think of what else to say, quite a journey.

Since early this spring, I’ve been publicly supporting reality star Spencer Pratt in his run for L.A. Mayor. Pratt now appears to have come in third in the June 2 primary, taking him out of the running altogether. Overnight, the chatter surrounding him shifted from irrational and sometimes bot-driven exuberance on social media to accusations of a stolen election.

Before I go any further, I will say that I don’t believe there was outright fraud. I’m in favor of reasonable Voter ID laws and I suspect ballot harvesting needs to be seriously reevaluated and probably eliminated. But so far, I see no evidence of a stolen election – only evidence of Los Angeles being Los Angeles.

I have registered my support for Pratt with the same care and nuance I try to bring to everything I do, including squawking about him on X, the care and nuance capital of the internet. In addition to interviewing him for my May 4 podcast, I published an article in The Atlantic on May 15 about his unlikely momentum among Democrat–leaning voters, who, myself included, were willing to take a chance on him despite his general aura of ridiculousness. The response from readers ranged from perplexed to apoplectic. One woman emailed directly to inform me that I was a neo-fascist shill. Many of the 300-plus reader comments chalked me up to be either a MAGA apologist and/or just a standard idiot. There were lots of promises to cancel subscriptions, the ultimate fighting words of educated elites.

A few weeks later, my position didn’t seem quite as outlandish. While I remained one of the few, if not the only, members of the so-called liberal media elite publicly supporting Pratt (I made a few videos under the tongue-in-cheek heading “Liberal Elites For Pratt”), his polling numbers were up and there were murmurings of a growing contingent of “shy voters.” Several educated, Volvo-driving, NPR-listening (yes, still) types I knew had donated money to his campaign and planned to vote for him if they lived in L.A. city limits. A May 2 letter I’d emailed to Los Angeles friends laying out my case for Pratt began to feel slightly less like social suicide with every passing day.

My case, in a nutshell, was this. Spencer Pratt is an inconvenient messenger for an urgent message: that Los Angeles is in the grip of a humanitarian crisis regarding street homelessness. (There are plenty of other problems too, ranging from wildfire response to potholes, but I’ll stick with this one for now.) Pratt is inexperienced, unserious, and, if not actually MAGA at least “MAGA-coded” in a way that makes any attempt to woo a deep blue city not just an uphill battle but a Sisyphean ultra-marathon. Still, he had one major advantage over his competitors; he was willing to open his mouth and state the truth about what his eyes were showing him. Even if he got into office and managed to do nothing but state those truths over and over for four years, I for one believed that would be an improvement over what we have now and what his opponents are offering.

That’s not to say Pratt didn’t have a plan. He had several, some of them fairly substantive, like the plan for addressing street homelessness that he outlined in this 9-minute video. I wish more people had watched that and not the endless AI slopgasms put out by his fans–each declared more of a “banger” than the last. Those videos may have been catnip for angry young men on social media, not to mention a certain breed of Beltway bubble-dwelling political commentator who called them “game changing” and “the future of political campaigns.” But they were almost certainly repellent to actual voters in L.A. At least that’s what I feared, and I said as much repeatedly.

I also said I didn’t like Pratt calling homeless people zombies or calling Mayor Bass “Karen Basura” or calling every Democrat he didn’t like a commie–not just because it was juvenile but because I thought it hurt his chances with the disaffected liberal voters he needed to reach.

Pratt superfans told me I was wrong about that. They said I was behind the times, applying fusty respectability standards to a post-respectability world. Insofar as we don’t yet know exactly what campaign tactics worked in Pratt’s favor and what worked against him, it’s possible I was indeed wrong. I honestly have no idea. But I do know that supporting this candidate these last several months has made me feel like a defense lawyer trying to prove the innocence of someone who might as well have framed himself for murder. I took a certain thrill in the rhetorical challenge.

If Pratt had a five percent chance of getting sick people off the streets and into appropriate treatment, that was better than the zero percent chance I’d give his competitors, who didn’t seem interested in even trying.

Trying to separate Pratt’s common-sense policies from his ludicrous persona was like threading a microscopic needle. The eye of that needle was about as narrow as the path to success I imagined Pratt might be able to carve out if he got elected and somehow did everything right – in other words, a very long shot. But at least there was a path and not the permanent blockade of the entrenched ruling party. As I saw it, if Pratt had a five percent chance of implementing a plan that would get sick people off the streets and into appropriate treatment, that was better than the zero percent chance I’d give his competitors, who didn’t seem interested in even trying.

When making my argument to naysayers, I chose words that were nonthreatening and vaguely TED Talk-y. “I know picking the least qualified candidate is counterintuitive,” I’d say. “I know the logic might feel like a heavy lift. He’s a wild card and the prospect of him actually fixing anything in this broken city is a Hail Mary Pass. But given the options before us and given how dire things have become, this is the only glimmer of hope that I see. Can you see what I see?”

A few could, but many could not. (Homeless encampments? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I drove to Erewhon today and it was fine!) Many people, after hearing me explain Pratt’s actual positions, conceded that they agreed with most if not all of them but could not get past the fact that he was a registered Republican. Many more were not able to separate the Pratt phenomenon from the Trump phenomenon and, in the process, were not able to see me as anything but a friend (now former friend, perhaps) who had at best fallen for a grift (everyone’s favorite word was now grift) and at worst was some kind of newly minted quack trying to slip through a side door into MAGA-land.

Not that they didn’t already know me as a holder of controversial opinions. Most were accustomed to me and my edgy takes. But this, somehow, was a bridge too far.

“I think I’ve really done it this time,” I said to a longtime confidant. “Of all the wrong-thinky opinions I’ve had over the years, this is the wrong-thinkiest of all.”

It was a bid for reassurance. I wanted to be told that everything was fine, that no one was saying anything bad about me and, besides, I was right and eventually everyone would see that. What I got back instead was, “yeah, you might have really done it this time.”

But what have I done exactly? Taken an axe to what remained of my liberal elite bona fides? Supplied countless opportunities for my adversaries to say “grift?”-- a term I’m convinced is only in such heavy rotation because the word itself is fun to say in an ASMR trigger kind of way, the verbal equivalent of popping a zit.

Maybe so. But I sense bigger things on the horizon.

As I said in the last line of my Atlantic article, “even if Pratt never becomes mayor, it’s possible that simply saying the truth out loud will make him a bigger force for change than whoever does.” That feels even truer today than it did a few weeks ago. That’s because despite the charges that he was running for mayor for the grift (it seems like a lot of trouble to go to just for that), the Spencer Pratt mayoral campaign was never about Spencer Pratt. It was about citizens coming together over a shared reality.

He may have lost the election, but he shifted the Overton Window, which is arguably a bigger feat. For the first time in years, there is a critical mass of citizens who are done pretending that what they see before their eyes isn’t really there. The people in charge will have to answer to those citizens. And if they don’t, the election four years from now may look very different from this one.

Meanwhile, the people not in charge–people like me– must start doing our part, whatever that means. Over the last several months, I’ve been devoting more episodes of my podcast to issues around street homelessness, addiction, and mental illness. I plan to do much more. Hell, maybe the entire show will become about that. Stranger things have happened.

Strange things happen all the time. And Spencer Pratt, the villain from The Hills, kicking off a people’s revolt for common sense, might be the strangest of all.

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