Seven months after the Palisades fire destroyed his home, Spencer Pratt launched his campaign for mayor of Los Angeles from the wreckage. The image was powerful: a reality TV star turned wildfire victim standing in the ashes, demanding accountability from city leaders who had failed to protect one of L.A.'s most celebrated neighborhoods.
The clip went viral. The campaign went national. Pratt became a hero to the online Right: he was the “look-around candidate” who needed no consultant jargon to explain what had gone wrong in Los Angeles. The burned homes, homeless encampments, broken sidewalks, disorder, rising costs, and obvious failures of city government were arguments enough.
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Then Los Angeles voted.
Pratt finished a close third in the mayoral primary, with just over a quarter of the vote, behind incumbent Karen Bass and councilmember Nithya Raman, a Zohran Mamdani-style socialist. He outperformed the Republican candidates running statewide in Los Angeles and roughly matched Donald Trump’s 2024 showing in the city. That was a real achievement for a first-time candidate running against better-known and better-organized opponents.
It also revealed the ceiling of his campaign. A Trump-like performance can make a primary interesting in Los Angeles. It cannot make someone mayor.
Pratt’s campaign showed that local populism has appeal. Many Angelenos do not need to be persuaded that their city is badly governed. They pay high taxes, tolerate high levels of crime and disorder, and struggle to identify what they receive in return. The Palisades fire and the mismanagement that intensified its destructive effects deepened those frustrations.
The reality-star-turned-candidate overperformed in the Palisades, where the fire was a lived catastrophe. He gained ground in fire-adjacent and hill-adjacent precincts across the Westside and San Fernando Valley. He also ran better than Trump in many higher-income, higher-education, majority-white, and heavily Jewish precincts.
Those gains show that Pratt tapped into real anger among voters who feel abandoned by Los Angeles’s governing class. But they also explain why he fell short. His strongest constituencies were too narrow, too geographically limited, and in some cases not even part of the electorate he needed.
Los Angeles County contains 88 cities, along with unincorporated areas. Many places that people associate with the cultural idea of Los Angeles—Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Calabasas, Rancho Palos Verdes—don’t vote for mayor of Los Angeles. Pratt became popular in or near places like these. That helped him become a national symbol of Angelenos revolting against their city’s dysfunction. It did less to help him build a majority inside the city proper.
The demographic picture was more damaging. National Republicans have made gains among lower-income and nonwhite voters, offsetting losses among affluent and highly educated voters. Pratt’s coalition moved in the opposite direction. He gained among voters most like him: wealthier, whiter, more Republican-friendly, and more directly threatened by wildfire. He lost ground among the voters a non-leftist candidate would need to win to break through in Los Angeles.
In heavily Hispanic precincts, Pratt ran behind Trump’s modest 2024 performance. Higher-income neighborhoods helped somewhat, but even in the highest-earning Hispanic areas, Pratt still failed to improve meaningfully on Trump. That should caution conservatives against assuming that “Hispanic working class” means the same thing everywhere. Los Angeles Latinos are not South Texas Latinos, South Florida Latinos, or other suburban Sun Belt Latinos. They live in one of the nation’s most Democratic urban environments, shaped by different institutions, political cues, and local concerns.
Black precincts were even less responsive. Pratt failed to break double digits, and higher-income black areas showed little sign of movement toward him. Asian precincts were more complicated, with class appearing to matter more, especially in wealthier and fire-sensitive neighborhoods. But even there, Pratt generally performed around Trump’s level rather than dramatically exceeding it.
In the end, his map looked familiar: a Republican coalition with a few local enhancements. The outrage and virality he tapped into mattered, but not enough to overcome the basic partisan structure of the city.
Arguably, the missing ingredient was permission.
Successful non-far-left candidates in deep-blue cities typically have to give Democratic voters a reason to defect from the hardest-core liberal candidate without feeling that they have changed sides in the national culture war. Republican-turned-Democrat Rick Caruso understood this, even though he lost to Bass in the city’s 2022 mayoral contest. He switched parties, hired a Democratic campaign team, and ran as a civic fixer. Another former Republican, Nathan Hochman, who won the 2024 district attorney’s race in Los Angeles County, became an independent and distanced himself from the national GOP during an election year with Trump on the ballot.
Pratt took a different path. Los Angeles municipal elections are formally nonpartisan, but his campaign became unmistakably coded as an enterprise in line with national conservative politics. He remained a registered Republican, utilized GOP consultants, and leaned into his online celebrity to become a viral cause for people who did not live in Los Angeles and could not vote for him. All that helped him dominate X, but it did not help him persuade voters who would never ordinarily vote Republican.
This is the lesson of Pratt’s campaign. He proved that a blunt, local critique of progressive governance can resonate in a city like Los Angeles. He also proved that the online Right’s theory of politics is insufficient for winning power there. Virality can amplify a grievance; it cannot substitute for a winning coalition in the bluest parts of the country.