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On the reality television show \u201cThe Hills,\u201d Spencer Pratt played something of a villain, blamed for spreading a salacious rumor and driving a wedge between his girlfriend and her best friend.<\/p>\n
Pratt is casting himself as a hero in his latest venture, a bid to be mayor of Los Angeles, in which he\u2019s promising to rid the nation\u2019s second most populous city of\u00a0disorder and dysfunction.<\/p>\n
Originally greeted with bemusement, Pratt is now upending the race with early voting underway ahead of the June 2 election. The Republican is riding a wave of buzz fueled by viral videos taking aim at incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, Gov. Gavin Newsom and others.<\/p>\n
Pratt\u2019s goal is to turn the chatter into a ticket to a November runoff against Bass, a Democrat who is\u00a0struggling to recover\u00a0from a widely panned response to\u00a0devastating wildfires last year.<\/p>\n
He would face long odds in a city that last elected a Republican mayor\u00a0in 1997.\u00a0But during last week\u2019s debate, Pratt was one of only three candidates onstage, alongside Bass and progressive City Council member Nithya Raman.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs crazy as this will sound, I\u2019m the adult in the room,\u201d Pratt said.<\/p>\n
A populist campaign against liberal governance<\/p>\n
Pratt and his supporters are making a populist appeal to voters, emphasizing day-to-day concerns about life in Los Angeles and leaning on visceral imagery of drug use and homeless encampments from the grittier corners of the city of nearly 4 million.<\/p>\n
He blames the city\u2019s Democratic leaders and pledges to \u201cstop these corrupt politicians from destroying our city.\u201d He advocates a hard line against homelessness, pledging to eliminate encampments and pursue criminal investigations of nonprofit organizations that serve people living on the streets.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese people do not want a bed,\u201d he said in last week\u2019s debate. \u201cThey want fentanyl or meth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pratt\u00a0announced his campaign\u00a0in January at an event marking the one-year anniversary of the deadly Palisades Fire, which destroyed his home and thousands of others.<\/p>\n
In an ad released late last month, Pratt stands in cozy neighborhoods where Bass and Raman live. He contrasts them with an Airstream trailer parked on a flattened lot, where he says he\u2019s living after his house was destroyed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey let my home burn down,\u201d Pratt says in the ad. \u201cI know what the consequences of failed leadership are.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the past week, a series of viral videos created with artificial intelligence have portrayed Pratt as the city\u2019s savior from hapless Democrats and violent socialists.<\/p>\n
In one, Pratt is portrayed as Batman saving a dystopian Los Angeles from Bass, portrayed as a villainous Joker.<\/p>\n
Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and onetime Republican presidential candidate, called it \u201cmaybe the best political ad of the year\u201d in a post on X.<\/p>\n
That video and others were shared on social media by filmmaker Charles Curran, and Pratt has reposted them from his own accounts. Curran did not respond to an email and direct messages on X.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s playing on the most powerful emotion, which is anger, and LA voters are angry right now,\u201d said Matt Klink, a Republican strategist based in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
A background in reality TV<\/p>\n
Pratt, 43, is well-versed in the art of generating buzz and entertainment.<\/p>\n
He first rose to prominence in 2007 as Heidi Montag\u2019s boyfriend on \u201cThe Hills,\u201d a hit reality series built around the lives of young women as they navigated young adulthood in Southern California. He was portrayed as driving a wedge between Montag and her roommate, Lauren Conrad, leading to the disintegration of their friendship.<\/p>\n
He went on to marry Montag, and they have two children together. They have appeared on a variety of other scripted and reality television series since \u201cThe Hills\u201d ended in 2010, and each has more than 1 million followers in their social media accounts.<\/p>\n
Pratt points to a 2013 political science degree from the University of Southern California as evidence of his readiness to lead a massive city.<\/p>\n
His campaign did not respond to interview requests.<\/p>\n
Bass seeks a second term<\/p>\n
Bass, the first Black woman to lead Los Angeles, is a wounded incumbent continuing to deal with fallout from the wildfires and general frustration with City Hall.<\/p>\n
She was in Ghana on a diplomatic mission when the fires began tearing through her city, prompting a fierce backlash, and her administration was accused of watering down an after-action report by the fire department, which she denies.<\/p>\n
Still, Bass has much of the Democratic establishment firmly behind her, including most of the city\u2019s powerful labor movement. A group of unions is funding an advertising campaign attacking Pratt in terms that seem calibrated to increase his appeal to Republicans and help lift him ahead of Bass\u2019s progressive challengers, a potential bet that he might be easier to defeat in November.<\/p>\n
The rising attention on Pratt shakes up a race that, until recently, was shaping up to pit Bass against a rival to her left rather than her right.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like he\u2019s exploiting the grief of people in the Palisades, and I think that\u2019s reprehensible. That\u2019s the main thing. And I think he is about his own celebrity. He\u2019s famous now again,\u201d Bass told Fox News last week.<\/p>\n
Pratt has run a fun and imaginative campaign that has effectively parlayed his celebrity into attention, the lifeblood of politics, just as Donald Trump and Arnold Schwarzenegger did before him, said Michael Trujillo, a Los Angeles-based Democratic strategist. He said that has put him in a strong position to get through the first round of voting and face Bass one-on-one in the runoff.<\/p>\n
But eventually, Pratt will have to face a stark reality as a Republican \u2014 Los Angeles is an overwhelmingly Democratic city.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot to diminish the creativity and imagination that they\u2019re putting into their campaign, but they\u2019re going to run into a big math problem,\u201d Trujillo said.<\/p>\n
#Los #Angeles #Zohran #form #exreality #star #Spencer #Pratt<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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