I vote by mail in every election these days, as is my right as a mostly lazy natural-born American citizen. Fill in a few bubbles with black ink, chuck the thing into the nearest dropbox, and consider myself a functioning member of society for a brief moment. Now that my son is old enough to ask me coherent questions about my daily life, he was highly interested in what the hell I was doing as I marked the form. “I’m voting,” I said tersely, lest I divert my attention fully from the bubble-filling. “Don’t vote for Spencer Pratt, daddy,” he responded. “I hear he’s a jerk.” The word seems to be spreading.
Every local TV station and streaming app is turgid and bloated with political ads these days. My son might be old enough to ask me who I’m voting for, but he’s not old enough to understand why. That doesn’t stop campaigns from serving him countless commercials pleading with him to consider (or reconsider) a certain candidate. He’s now nominally aware of allegations of sexual misconduct against LA city controller Kenneth Mejia (which Mejia has denied) and the Orange County congressman Ken Calvert’s run-in with a sex worker. What a joy it is to be a parent in 2026.
But what really stuck with him is Spencer Pratt, the former star of Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, and candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. Something about Pratt sparks a boogeyman-like response in my son. Perhaps it’s Pratt’s scrunched-up face, ever in a vapid grin, looking like he’s trying to sell you a car with a missing engine block. It could be the increasingly scary rhetoric in the commercials that link Pratt to Donald Trump’s disastrous policies. Maybe it’s his horrendous fashion sense. No one should be wearing a Hugo Boss suit with Vans.
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Looking like Burt Ward from the original Batman TV show is not a reason to shun a political candidate, I tell my son. Looks are not all that matters, even if I literally just made fun of how Spencer Pratt dresses. Do as I say, not as I say in my column.
I say listen, instead, to the family of Spencer Pratt. “A vote for him is a vote for stupidity,” his sister Stephanie Pratt said back in February of this year. Of course, she retracted all of that in a statement to Vanity Fair this week. I suppose Spencer Pratt is kind of like the movie The Big Lebowski, misunderstood in its time. It took decades for people to appreciate that movie. It only took Stephanie Pratt a couple of months and a few strong polls to come around on her brother.
Numerous big money donors are rolling in to support Pratt’s campaign, which generally revolves around his personal anger at his house burning down in the 2025 Palisades fire. Also, the hot-button issue of stepping on poop on the street. “Vote pratt if you’re tired of human poop on the streets,” as the candidate put it, is a campaign rallying cry both hyper-specific to one person’s experience (Pratt shared a post on X about witnessing a homeless person defecating near a BMW) and intensely relatable. I, too, have seen a person poop in public. I did not care for it.
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And that, unfortunately, is the core of Pratt’s appeal here in Los Angeles. People, especially rich ones, are sick of the city not working the way they want it to. The wildfires that devastated neighborhoods on both sides of town galvanized frustrated citizens in both ideological camps, creating an intellectual dissonance that could cause our local government to become even more paralyzed. People want unhoused Angelenos off the street, but they don’t want them housed in their neighborhoods. Pratt has blamed homelessness on drug use, not the high cost of living in a place like LA. His brilliant idea is to bus people without homes to Seattle. Sounds like a small-scale version of a familiar policy.
So much of this is wrapped up in Pratt’s hilariously pandering slogan of making LA “camera-ready” again. It plays perfectly into the inherent vanity of many people who live here, who are more concerned with the amount of graffiti on the 6th Street Bridge than whether a middle-class family can afford to live in that neighborhood. Pratt’s taken a page directly out of the Trump handbook: emphasizing grievances, vague promises, and a sense of unearned exceptionalism that flatters the egos of voters.
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As long as you remain mad, you can ignore the candidate’s lack of experience or inability to articulate actual policy outside of “I will fix it.” AI slop videos cast this unremarkable man as a superhero that looks nothing like the actual Spencer Pratt. Unfortunately, Batman is not real, but if he was, he wouldn’t wear sneakers with a Hugo Boss suit. Everyone knows Batman wears Armani.
But vapid, cheaply made fantasy propaganda is the grist of modern politics. Specifics just confuse people. Whatever Pratt plans to do, you have to hunt to suss it out. Nowhere on Pratt’s website is there even a nod to income inequality or the cost-of-living crisis. You have to go to Pratt’s Substack to learn about his policy proposals for bringing motion picture production back to LA, which requires you wade through a screed about the upcoming Baywatch reboot.
The unspoken piece of this is the 2028 Summer Olympics, a moment where literal TV cameras will be filming the city night and day. Like an actor going on a harsh diet before shooting a Marvel movie, LA is in the throes of a crisis of self-esteem that all of us here can relate to. Our problems – inefficient transportation, high rents, a massive bureaucracy that doesn’t respond to the needs of the people – have been festering for decades now. It’s just that the rest of the world is about to find out about all those unsightly blemishes. As if he’s some dark huckster self-help guru, Spencer Pratt has descended on LA to gas us up and tell us we can be beautiful again if we just quit carbs and inject this needle in our metaphorical faces. The reality that the mayor’s power in Los Angeles is limited is immaterial to the big-money donors and angry citizenry. They just want the facelift, even if they can’t afford it.
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If Spencer Pratt, who makes 2016 Donald Trump seem a highly experienced politician, is elected mayor this year, he will have the same tools Karen Bass, Eric Garcetti, Antonio Villaraigosa, and everyone before him had to try to change things. He’ll have to coerce and cajole city councilpeople, bureaucrats he can’t fire, and special interests who don’t want to give up their piece of the pie. If he can’t even convince my eight-year-old, I’m not sure what hope he has.
And on top of all that, he never even apologized to LC.
Unforgivable.
