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Reality TV’s Spencer Pratt has surged into second place in Los Angeles’ June 2 mayoral primary, propelled by viral AI-generated campaign ads against Karen Bass.
Spencer Pratt, the former The Hills cast member who launched a Republican mayoral campaign in January, has moved into second place in Los Angeles polling ahead of the June 2 primary, trailing only incumbent mayor Karen Bass.
The unlikely traction owes more to viral video than ground game. A wave of AI-generated campaign ads, depicting Pratt as Batman fighting a Joker-faced Bass and a Luke Skywalker version of Pratt battling an Emperor Palpatine-coded Gavin Newsom, have piled up tens of millions of views across X and TikTok.
Pratt’s campaign has denied producing the videos. They are the work of AI filmmaker Charlie Curran, founder of Menace Studio in Los Angeles, and have been re-shared by Pratt rather than commissioned by him.
The Los Angeles Times’ deep look at the AI ad blitz and Curran’s role in producing it casts the videos as a glimpse of where political messaging is heading nationally. The most-watched of them, depicting the Hollywood sign on fire while Bass and Newsom dine with elites, has cleared 5 million views on X alone.
Bass has not been amused. The mayor described the ads as very scary and absolutely 150 percent fiction, telling CNN that Pratt’s social media is taking on a violent turn. Her campaign issued a statement accusing him of doing a Trump impression that won’t land in Los Angeles.
The third-place candidate, progressive city councilor Nithya Raman, has framed her own campaign as the anti-AI option. Her spokesperson told Fox LA that Raman’s ads are made by working film and television professionals, drawing a contrast with Pratt’s reposting of generative-AI content.
Pratt’s path into politics began with a fire. He and wife Heidi Montag lost their Pacific Palisades home in the January 2025 wildfires. The fires killed 19 in Altadena and 12 in the Palisades, and Politico’s reporting puts the rebuild count at just ten of the more than 4,000 Palisades homes destroyed.
The post-fire pivot brought attention. Pratt urged his social followers to stream Montag’s 2010 album Superficial, which surged on the charts with Bad Bunny among its high-profile listeners. By January 2026, Pratt had translated the goodwill into a mayoral campaign built around the city’s wildfire response and recovery.
NBC News’s reporting on Pratt’s polling rise and the Republican Party’s view of the race notes that Trump told reporters he would like to see Pratt do well, calling the candidate a character. Joe Rogan has endorsed; Elon Musk and several Fox News hosts have boosted.
The campaign has not run without complications. TMZ reported earlier this month that Pratt and Montag have been living at the Hotel Bel-Air rather than the Airstream trailer prominently featured in his videos. Pratt responded with a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air parody, rapping over the original theme and calling himself the Prince of Bel-Air.
His memoir, The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain, dropped earlier this year and leans into the same persona. The book details his Palisades upbringing in a neighborhood where school pickups looked like red-carpet events.
Whether the viral attention converts to ballots is the open question. Most of the views on Pratt’s content come from outside Los Angeles. Republican Party of L.A. chair Roxanne Hoge has told NBC that the in-person enthusiasm is unusual for a GOP candidate in the city.
The primary’s top two finishers advance to a November runoff. Analysts expect Pratt and Bass to be those two; the polling continues to tighten.
L.A. votes June 2.
