Why Is a Reality TV Star the Most Qualified Mayoral Candidate in Los Angeles?
The lesson L.A. should learn: credentials are the disease, not the cure.
Spencer Pratt is running for mayor of Los Angeles. I hope he wins.
I am pulling for Spencer even though he has zero political experience, zero governing experience, and zero relevant credentials beyond justifiable indignation. I hope he wins because Los Angeles doesn’t need credentials. It needs someone from outside a failed system with the courage and independence to blow up a crumbling, broken, and failed bureaucracy.
I don’t live in California. But I care about the outcome of next month’s mayoral election in L.A. because I know full well that what happens in our largest cities impacts the rest of the nation. Zohran Mamdani’s election last year as mayor of New York City heartened radical leftists across the country. Mamdani’s policies are already driving business out of America’s biggest city – but that hasn’t stopped his socialist imitators from running for office. (Several of his admirers are on the L.A. ballot.) If Spencer Pratt can win in Los Angeles, the consequences will reverberate.
Degrees and Debris
Los Angeles is America’s second-largest city, with a $13 billion annual budget and over 50,000 full-time (mostly unionized) employees. And yet, when devastating wildfires swept through the city’s chic Palisades neighborhood in January 2025, that bloated civic budget offered no protection. Instead, fire hydrants ran dry, and a critical reservoir sat empty. Individual first responders were heroic, but they did not have what they needed to prevail in the fight. Several lives were lost, and thousands of multimillion-dollar homes burned to the ground.
Spencer Pratt was one of those Palisades homeowners who lost everything. Like so many in L.A., Pratt had built his career in the entertainment industry. When he was done starring on The Hills, he went to USC and earned a degree in political science. Still, he had no plans to run for office. Not, that is, until the fires came.
As he came to grips with what he had lost – and why – Pratt realized that his neighbors had voted for tax increase after tax increase, regulation after regulation, always assuming that they were paying for good government. They never got it. They got ashes instead. And what Pratt saw was that the scale of the devastation was directly tied to L.A.’s ongoing decline. The utterly inadequate response to the firestorm was not the only proof of that decline. For decades, the city has spent billions to address homelessness – while the number of “unhoused” Angelenos continued to swell. The taxpayers subsidized countless agencies and programs that promised to solve the problem. The streets only got dirtier and more dangerous.
Karen Bass Cannot Be Reformed
To be fair, socialist policies didn’t literally start the Palisades fire. The untreated mental illness and addiction that lead to homelessness happen everywhere. The problem in Los Angeles is that a swollen, sclerotic bureaucracy is more committed to left-wing ideology than good governance. And no one embodies that misplaced commitment more than L.A.’s incumbent mayor, Karen Bass. A former Congressional Black Caucus chair, Bass was so radical that she traveled to Cuba to support Fidel Castro when she was barely out of her teens. When she gave up her House seat to run for mayor, she was endorsed by every progressive organization in California. They were confident that Bass would prove a dutiful, dependable ally.
Karen Bass can’t fix the homeless problem because the homeless nonprofits fund her campaigns. She can’t reform the fire department because the unions elect her. She can’t streamline permitting for new housing because the environmental groups would destroy her politically. She’s not just in the Progressive Political Vise—she has her hands on the lever.
In The Political Vise, I explain how progressive institutions create control through elite pressure from above and organized mobilization from below. In Los Angeles, as in many large cities, the Vise captures you on your way up. You need union money to run, and you need left-wing nonprofit support for ground game. By the time you’re viable enough to govern, you’re far too captured by the system to reform anything.
Credentials Are the Disease
In 2022, Rick Caruso spent $100 million of his own money trying to beat Bass. He lost to her by seven points. Caruso was a developer, so environmental groups opposed him. He was a billionaire, so progressive activists targeted him. He tried to position himself as the reasonable businessman who could fix things. A competent, courteous self-made man, Caruso thought money, detailed plans, and impeccable business credentials could overcome the progressive stranglehold on the City of Angels. He was wrong.
Spencer Pratt, as I noted above, has no governing experience. He’s completely unqualified by traditional standards – and it is that very quality that makes him ideal for this job. He can dismiss the homeless nonprofits getting millions in city contracts to NOT solve homelessness. He can gut the permitting bureaucracy that prevents housing construction. He can override the environmental regulations that made water management impossible during the fires. And he can direct the police to start enforcing the law and make the streets safe again.
Every other candidate in the mayoral race is invested in the broken system. After four years in office, Bass says she needs more time to make the system work better. Two other candidates (running even further to Bass’ left!) want to invest even more in failed policies – and to defund the police even further. Like Bass, these hopefuls are in the progressive Vise, feeling the squeeze from the elites and the unions and the non-profits. Only Spencer Pratt – a (justifiably) angry reality TV star – isn’t captive to that corrupt and corrosive agenda. His is the only plan that has a real shot to work.
Every Failing Blue City Is Watching
If Pratt wins, he becomes the anti-Mamdani. New York City swung to the hard left by electing a charismatic, radical socialist—but Mamdani is still a creature of the Democratic Socialists of America, a professional politician playing at revolution. If Los Angeles voters are fed up enough to elect an uncredentialed disruptor, then other failing cities (including my own long-suffering Chicago) would have a new model to consider.
The progressive establishment insists that only those captured by the system can govern. Spencer Pratt has a chance to prove otherwise. I’m pulling for him. You should be too.