The race for Mayor of LA has picked up steam over the last few weeks as Republican candidate Spencer Pratt has made the race interesting with his campaign videos and
mockery of current Mayor Karen Bass.
In one video, Bass and Gov. Newsom are painted as villains with Bass’ face painted
as the Joker and Pratt seemingly dawning a Batman costume in the viral AI-generated
video. The video is supposed to represent how the community feels about the handling of the Palisades fires and how Bass and Newsom are elites who benefit from the fire while victims, like Pratt and his family.
A spokesperson for the Pratt campaign told Newsweek via email, “We didn’t make it.
We’ve only produced one ad, and it went viral. Spencer is so popular that people all over the world are making tribute videos on their own. I think the other candidates are just upset that they’re not popular enough to have fan videos
like that.”
Critics suggest that by framing himself as a wildfire survivor battling entrenched elites, Pratt has tapped into voter frustration. Critics also suggest the ad borrows heavily from Donald Trump’s playbook of incendiary language and fear-based imagery.
Pratt’s background is centered around reality television, best known for his role on MTV’s “The Hills,” and is regarded in pop culture as being a blueprint for the reality TV villain trope. Pratt’s political rise is rooted in personal tragedy: losing his home in the 2025 Pacific Palisades fire, which killed 12 and caused billions in damage.
He has used this experience to criticize Bass’s leadership during the disaster, framing his campaign as a mission to expose systemic failures. While registered as a Republican, Pratt is running as an independent in a heavily Democratic city, positioning himself as a nonpartisan reformer focused on public safety, homelessness, and government
accountability.
While Pratt took the social media route, at- tacking Bass, Bass took the direct approach in her response. ‘Well, honestly, before this, I had never heard of Spencer Pratt,’ Bass said. ‘The thing I am concerned about is I feel like he’s exploiting the grief of people in the Palisades. And I think that’s reprehensible. He is about his own celebrity.’
She delivered the comments defending her leadership during the catastrophic 2025 wildfires, but they immediately triggered outrage, particularly because Pratt himself is among those who lost everything in the blaze.
Bass suggested Pratt lacked a basic understanding of governance, saying he “could benefit by a basic civics course,” arguing she had not seen “a proposal for a solution or a remedy” from him.
Bass also recently received a major boost to her reelection campaign with former Vice President Kamala Harris endorsing her. “Mayor Karen Bass is the leader Los Angeles needs right now. She has done what so many said couldn’t be done — the first-ever two-year decline in homelessness, reducing crime to levels this city hasn’t seen since the 1960s,
and refusing to back down when the federal government came after our neighbors,” she
said in a statement.
As we are a few months away from the November election, according to polls, 60 percent of voters are undecided between the candidates, which also includes Nithya Raman. Raman became the first South Asian woman elected to the LA City Council in 2020, defeating an incumbent candidate.