Spencer Pratt

LA politics burned down his house. Now, he’s burning LA politics.

“I’m not running to be a politician,” said Spencer Pratt, former television personality and now a candidate for Mayor of Los Angeles.

“I’m running because the current mayor (Karen Bass) let my house burn down.”

Spencer & Heidi Pratt amidst debris of former home in LA. Courtesy Pratt for Mayor 2026.

Kaboom! Great line.

It’s no wonder that Pratt is soaring in polls. He’s honest, serious, straightforward, sincere, sympathetic, original, energetic and refreshing; plus, he’s funny and totally incisive. Definitely, this guy resonates with voters. Hence, Pratt is raising funds, gaining endorsements, and remaking California politics, if not America’s.

Will Pratt be the next mayor of America’s second-largest city? Can he salvage LA from its trashy level of decline and urban implosion? Just now, it’s hard to say because strange things definitely happen on election days anymore.

Still, it’s “America 250,” and what better way to celebrate the country’s quarter-millennium than to liberate a formerly great city from the seedy, greedy grip of long-term, left-wing, progressive political dysfunction, corruption, incompetence and cronyism.

Meanwhile, the tale of Pratt’s political journey pertains not just to the Golden State, but offers a teachable moment to the entire nation. Let’s dig in…

Reality TV Meets LA Reality

At first blush, 42-year-old Spencer Pratt is an unlikely candidate to run a city, let alone a really big place like Los Angeles.

Still, he begins with solid bones, so to speak. Born and raised in LA, he’s a home-boy USC grad who went into a local industry, namely the entertainment business. There, Pratt played roles that portrayed him as a bad guy; although, of course, in Hollywood that’s also what actors call “work.”

“Yes, I was a bad guy,” Pratt explained in one interview. “That was my job. I worked with show-creators, producers and scriptwriters to be a bad guy. And I made good shows that people wanted to watch, which led to good ratings.”

(Note – Pratt discusses his career in a recently published book entitled The Man You Love to Hate: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain.)

Meanwhile, ratings are the cash register of the entertainment biz. And Pratt’s strong ratings led to more than a few handsome paydays. During one stretch, Pratt’s income was so good that he and his wife Heidi bought a multimillion-dollar home in tony Pacific Palisades. (Well, back then it was tony. Not anymore, as we’ll discuss below; and see here for a related article I wrote last year.)

For Pratt, his home and former life amidst the LA show biz crowd burned down on January 7, 2025, at the beginning of several weeks of massive wildfires that scorched the region.

Pratt’s house went up in flames, along with much else. In fact, those LA fires burned about 90 square miles, destroyed more than 18,000 homes and structures, killed at least 31 people and forced more than 200,000 to evacuate. Insurance estimates placed losses north of $250 billion.

Pacific Palisades post-fire, January 2025. Courtesy ABC News.

During the conflagration, flames jumped from building to building. But in many neighborhoods water mains were empty and fire hydrants didn’t work. Not that it mattered because several of LA’s key reservoirs were empty, drained and never refilled by officious, know-it-all bureaucrats.

Even adjacent to the Pacific Ocean – absolutely, an aqueous firefighting resource – many areas burned to the ground for lack of equipment simply to pump seawater ashore and squirt it from a hose.

LA burned to the waterline; i.e., the Pacific Ocean! Courtesy U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

On streets across the city, the LA fire department lacked sufficient firefighting trucks. In its fiscal wisdom, the city had retired equipment without replacement; or the fire department lacked funds for normal maintenance after the Bass administration raided the budget to fund so-called “homelessness” programs and other boondoggles.

And while LA burned, Mayor Bass was on a political junket to Africa, in Ghana to be exact, and nowhere to be seen in the early days of flaming disaster.

Burned Again, After the Fires

Immediately after the fires, politicians lined up and promised help. Clear the debris! Rebuild fast! Permits forthcoming! Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, right…

A year later, per Fox News, a mere 12 building permits were issued for reconstruction in Pacific Palisades. And in the past 17 months, just two new houses have been erected amidst the ruins, one of which is a “spec” by a builder who bought land from a seller who just wanted to cash out and get away from the entire mess.

Instead of helping citizens who lost homes rebuild, the Bass administration and her LA city bureaucracy placed roadblock after roadblock: new zoning and land use rules, extensive permits, costly filing fees, architectural reviews, endless checklists. And this is on top of how property owners must battle insurance companies over the amount of fire coverage (long story).

Along the way, several thousand displaced people have simply sold their former real estate to insiders, speculators and developers, more than a few of which are foreign corporations, and some apparently funded from Chinese sources.

Downtown, at City Hall, and up north in the state capital of Sacramento, the prevailing push is to rebuild Pacific Palisades with a large element of so-called “low-income” housing.

In other words, we see here a political land grab from former homeowners. The system ties up burnt-out homeowners in red tape, waits them out, wears them down, and then takes their property to advance the cause of Social Justice and the Nanny-Welfare State. It’s a massive racket between well-connected developers and local, county and state government.

Meanwhile, as things currently stand in California, multi-billions of dollars per year are already dedicated to… ahem… “housing the homeless,” and yet the numbers of people on those LA mean streets never seem to decline. (Long story; scandalously long.)

Campaigning for Competency

Pratt’s frustration with unaccountable, incompetent, uncaring government prompted led him to toss his hat into the political ring. “I saw who was running,” he said, “and it was the same exact people who caused the problems in the first place. So, I stepped up.”

Now, Pratt is staging a fast-growing, populist-style campaign, and in California no less; a state defined – and ossified – by two decades of single-party political dominance, certainly in LA.

“I’m running against incompetency,” Pratt said. “I’m running against complacency. Against the idea that these politicians are entitled to power, and to spend taxpayer money on whatever they want, no matter how bad the result. My campaign platform is common sense.”

Asked about his lack of past political experience, Pratt quickly notes, “The people who run things have all this supposed ‘experience,’ and look where we are.”

He explains that his campaign has been working with a long list of outsiders who will be pleased to step up and play roles in bringing better governance to LA if (when) he wins the election.

Pratt points out that, “California is home to some of the smartest people in the world. Many of them live in or around LA. And none of them seem to be working in the Bass administration.”

Meanwhile, “The LA region is among the wealthiest spots on the face of the earth,” he says. “We ought to be an economic powerhouse, gleaming like Dubai or Singapore. But instead, we have miles of homeless camps. We have drugs everywhere. Feces on the sidewalks. Crime. Bad schools. Broken infrastructure. Boarded up buildings where nobody can start a business.”

In a recent interview with CBS News, Pratt was filmed at his current abode, a trailer parked on the site of his burnt-out home in Pacific Palisades. “My opponent lives in a three-million-dollar home. I live in a trailer, a year after my house burned down. And after my parents’ house burned down. And my friends’ houses. And ten thousand other people’s houses.”

But neither is Pratt a single-issue candidate. For example, in another discussion he explained how LA is unprepared for a mass-casualty event.

“It’s not just last year’s fires,” he said. “Already, much of the underbrush has grown back and the city isn’t clearing fire breaks. And LA is unprepared for even a modest earthquake, and we know what kind of damage that would cause because we’ve seen it before.”

Plus, Pratt has a more than respectable approach to many other basic issues of city governance: how to deal with homeless people, drugs, crime and criminals; how to promote growth and economic development, repair infrastructure, and much more.

Indeed, it’s fair to say that Pratt has as much of a campaign package as anyone else, if not more. But it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t win.

Shock & Awe Social Media

So, what’s Pratt’s pathway to the mayor’s office? Well, here’s where his bad boy, reality TV past comes in handy.

Pratt understands that the way to break through the California media market is with some level of spectacle, but not just gratuitous sound and light. Thus, his ads are creative gems that offer a sharp, honest, reality-based, easily understood political point, delivered with pithy humor.

One of Pratt’s first ads was a homemade effort that required about six hours to devise and has already amassed over 20 million views. Numerous other Pratt ads are similarly impactful: a mix of funny sketches that include devastating political points about how out-of-touch is the current political class. (These ads are easily located with a simple You Tube search.)

Pratt eschews typical political pabulum. He knows that California is a one-party state run via a tight, mostly closed political-media system that maintains the Left in power. In other words, it’s next-to-impossible for an outsider to break through to the public by conventional means; other candidates have tried in the past and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on losing campaigns.

With this in mind, Pratt’s road to success is to mobilize public opinion via social media. His ads must land hard, and then go viral; that is, go over, under, and around the roadblocks of conventional television, radio, print and even established online venues.

Pratt’s anchor-narrative – and it will continue, no doubt – has been the loss of his house to the Palisades Fire: “Karen Bass let my house burn down.” Yes… very emotive.

But now that Pratt has people’s attention, his narrative is expanding. He can’t just be the “burned house” guy. So, he campaigns honestly on issues that quickly relate to other, widespread levels of dissatisfaction: homelessness, crime, drugs, urban decay, etc. That, and massive waste of billions of taxpayer dollars on failed boondoggles. At root, Pratt tears the mask away from standard California zombie-party politicking.

For Pratt, the political idea must be to mobilize and build a voter base via social media. Clearly, he has caught the wave of broad public opinion that’s dissatisfied with progressive, expensive, thoroughly ineffective Left-wing government.

Serendipitously, Pratt’s engaging ads have sparked a cottage industry of creative, independent imitators and spinoffs, many of them constructed from astonishing displays of visual AI. One ad depicts Pratt as Batman fighting crime, and thoroughly mocks the current crop of California political frauds.

So, Spencer Pratt is a blast of fresh air; but can he prevail? Will he be the next mayor? Well, he’s coming on strong right now. And the California primary is June 2^nd. We’ll see, of course, and then we’ll see what happens in the November elections.

But clearly, Pratt is out to change Los Angeles, to recapture governance, kick out the hard Left, and bring some basic honesty and sanity back to the streets.

At an even higher level, LA offers hope to the nation. Because if the City of Angels can come back from the brink of Perdition, it says much about many other American jurisdictions where political dysfunction, corruption, grift, graft and incompetence also run deep.

Spencer Pratt. Bad guy. But you can call him “Mr. Mayor.” Indeed, maybe even America’s Mayor.

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