Photo: HIGHFIVE/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
It’s that sweet turning point of June, isn’t it? The weather’s finally warm enough, the Knicks are on a roll, and Spencer Pratt dropped to third place in the Los Angeles mayoral race on Sunday, overtaken by Nithya Raman, a progressive city councilmember.
Pratt, the former reality-TV villain and registered Republican who announced his campaign at a January rally commemorating the one-year anniversary of the L.A. wildfires, has built most of his platform on the destruction the fires caused. His and Heidi Montag’s home was destroyed, and Pratt said he was running for mayor because he was upset over the city and incumbent mayor Karen Bass’s response to the devastation. Since then, he’s also campaigned on better living conditions for Angelenos and questionable plans to combat homelessness, telling ABC7 Eyewitness News in late May that the city’s 40,000 homeless weren’t, in fact, unhoused, but rather “drug addicts … choosing to be on the streets because they want to do drugs.”
In the same interview, he was asked how he expected to manage the city’s $15 billion budget given his own financial struggles. (In 2018, he and Montag admitted to blowing through their $10 million net worth on a series of luxury purchases that included wine and a $1 million crystal collection.) Not instilling much confidence among his critics, Pratt responded that it was “my money” he mismanaged, not “taxpayer money.”
Nonetheless, he’s gotten multiple celebrity endorsements, including from Joe Rogan, Paris Hilton, and Kristin Cavallari, as well as conservative politicians like Ted Cruz and Trump himself (“I heard he’s a big MAGA person,” the president said). Despite all this Republican backing, Pratt has insisted this race is “nonpartisan” and has “nothing to do with national politics.”
The primary election took place June 2, and the secretary of state will certify results on June 10. Pratt was predicted to advance to the November runoff until Sunday night, when Raman — who has run on reducing homelessness, creating more film-industry jobs, and abolishing ICE in L.A. — edged into second place. A winner hasn’t yet been declared — because California ballots are largely mail-in, they’re notoriously slow to count, with the New York Times reporting that roughly 20 percent still needs to be tallied.
Meanwhile, Pratt has been doing just what you’d want a mayor to do (?) in the face of a setback — post through it. He’s taken to Instagram and X to insinuate, without evidence, that the shift toward Raman is because of fraudulent votes from homeless people. In the words of reality-TV icon Chrishell Stause, who wrote on Threads that “every single person” she’s tussled with on TV voted for Pratt: “This feels very validating.”
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