The Entire Internet Threatens to Vote for Spencer Pratt
And just like that, suddenly California is intensely interested in election security.
Thank you again for your collective patience, kindness, and compassion while I was in California for my dear father-in-law’s funeral. Your messages and prayers meant the world to me and my family, and your enthusiasm for the occasional recycled post was a delightful surprise.
Today feels like an appropriate day to return. As we honor those who gave everything in service to this country, I hope your Memorial Day is filled with gratitude, chemtrail-free skies, and the people you love the very most.
A year ago, if you knew who Spencer Pratt was, chances are you spent the late 2000s watching The Hills while sipping a vodka Red Bull and possibly rocking an Ed Hardy hat. Today, the former reality-TV chaos agent somehow has folks from both sides of the political aisle vowing to fly, drive, skate, paddleboard, or crawl into Los Angeles to cast a mayoral vote on his behalf—legality be damned.
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Pratt has built a surprisingly enthusiastic fan club among fed-up Angelenos who are increasingly tired of homelessness, crime, government dysfunction, and paying $4,000 a month to live somewhere that smells like a port-a-potty behind a music festival taco truck. He talks passionately about restoring public safety, cleaning up the city, reducing government waste, reversing business flight, and bringing civility back to a place where CVS stores now lock up the Old Spice like it’s enriched uranium. His platform is less “burn it all down” and more “could we maybe stop stepping over fentanyl needles and human feces on the way to Whole Foods?”
And somehow, to much of the country’s shock, that message is landing.
In fact, Pratt outraised incumbent mayor Karen Bass by a modest ten to one margin during the latest fundraising period, pulling in roughly $2.7 million compared to Bass’s $283,000. Which is either a political earthquake or the single largest concentration of disaffected Erewhon shoppers ever assembled.
It’s also why the media has become increasingly desperate to frame Pratt as the “MAGA Star” being “steered by Republicans.” To be fair, Pratt is a registered Republican—information he volunteered, without being asked, on day two of his campaign. He also has repeatedly said there will be no R or D next to his name on the ballot and that the only party he represents is the “angry Angelenos” party. But modern political journalism increasingly operates under a simple rule: if you criticize progressive governance, congratulations, you’re MAGA now.
Which has created a hilarious media conundrum. Journalists desperately want Pratt to fit neatly into the “Trump-style reality TV narcissist” template, but he keeps making annoyingly sensible points about quality-of-life issues normal people actually care about. And it’s tough to portray someone as a dangerous populist demagogue when his central campaign thesis is that public spaces should be safe and elected officials should generally be held accountable for their actions.
Pratt is also, it must be said, extremely good at reading the room. His online presence is slick, funny, and disarmingly self-aware. It’s working. So much so that this weekend, social media exploded with posts from out-of-towners announcing plans to storm California to vote for Pratt because “what they gonna do… ID me?”
To be clear, voting illegally in any election is a crime. But that wasn’t really the joke. The joke was watching people who spent years insisting that any safeguard was discriminatory abruptly become extremely interested in explaining all the safeguards.
“You still have to register!” “They verify eligibility!” “There are systems in place!” “Voter fraud is a felony punishable by prison!”
Apparently there are rules after all.
California’s election structure makes the panic even funnier. Unlike many states, Los Angeles doesn’t hold separate primaries where each party selects its nominee. All candidates run together in the same primary regardless of party affiliation, and if one manages to clear 50% plus one vote in June, the race is simply over. No November showdown. No dramatic finale. Otherwise, the top two finishers advance to the general election regardless of party. Spencer Pratt doesn’t need to “win the Republican primary” because there literally isn’t one.
Which is also why the media is so invested in framing this as a Republican insurgency. If Pratt is MAGA, only MAGA shows up for him. If he’s an unaffiliated, exasperated Angeleno with a platform that makes sense, suddenly Democrats, independents, the politically homeless, and anyone else tired of dodging drugged-out zombies at preschool drop-off might not care what box he checked on his voter registration card.
All of which has accidentally forced half the country to rediscover how elections actually work. Because for years, Americans expressing concerns about election integrity have been treated like barefoot men screaming at pigeons in a Walmart parking lot. Voter ID? Racist. Signature verification? Dangerous. Cleaning voter rolls? Unfair! Authoritarian! Discriminatory! We’ve been repeatedly assured that voter fraud is extraordinarily rare and bordering on impossible—so everyone should calm down and stop asking questions.
Thanks to Pratt somehow becoming a serious contender, suddenly everyone on Earth cares about the Los Angeles mayoral race, a contest most Americans normally ignore with the passion of a Terms of Service agreement. Los Angeles has become a symbol—which is a polite way of saying it has morphed into a cautionary tale that both sides are using for completely different purposes. Conservatives view LA as the physical manifestation of every blue-city failure they’ve been screaming about for a decade. Progressives see any criticism of Los Angeles as right-wing propaganda—which is a bold claim to make about a city whose residents are just trying not to get their catalytic converters stolen between Pilates classes.
Pratt may not be a politician, but he’s undeniably a catalyst. While his competition tries to gaslight the population into believing Los Angeles is thriving, Pratt is tapping into the increasingly radical position that people do, in fact, have eyeballs. We’re talking about a city that managed to let thousands of homes burn down during a drought nobody addressed, while its mayor was on vacation in Ghana amid a homelessness crisis so visible it’s become a tourist attraction and a crime wave polite enough to hit every zip code.
Pratt sees what we all see—and he actually has the cojones to say it out loud. California is a circus. Los Angeles is the clown smoking behind the tent. And Spencer Pratt is just a guy whose house was reduced to an insurance claim, whose city failed him, and who responded the way Americans used to respond when something was broken: by deciding to fix it himself.
“Business as usual is a death sentence for Los Angeles,” Pratt has said. He’s not wrong.
Whether he wins or loses, he got America to care about Los Angeles. And frankly, that’s more than any mayor of that city has ever managed.
"...paying $4,000 a month to live somewhere that smells like a port-a-potty behind a music festival taco truck."
Your wit, sarcasm, sense of humor and timely topics are on a level with Jeff Childers.
“I’m not MAGA or anything” …
Since when is making America great again a dirty word?
Rinos used this against American First candidates in local races and actually won?!
Those who love our country are literally fighting for its survival.
Please vote like your country depends on it!