Spencer Pratt is a Warning Shot for L.A. — and Hollywood

Shall we talk about the L.A. mayoral race?

With the primary three weeks away, things have gotten just a bit messy, a little contentious, slightly panicked.

Last week’s debate — where upstart candidate and former reality star Spencer Pratt, a Republican, battled and badgered incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass and progressive Councilmember Nithya Raman over L.A.’s issues with homelessness, the fire response and crime — really set things off. As late as last month, Pratt was polling in the single digits in the prediction markets. Now, Kalshi has him at 32 percent, behind Bass’ 55 percent; on Polymarket, he’s at 31 percent, with Bass again holding at 53 percent.

A UCLA poll in April found 40 percent of L.A. voters were undecided.

It’s all math that adds up to the potential of a runoff between Bass and Pratt in November.

But the panic that has inspired gives you a sense of how insular the L.A. city government is.

So much so, in fact, that here in 2026 — after everything this nation has gone through in the past decade and a half — people seem completely surprised and dumbfounded to learn that in this moment, if traditional politicians won’t speak to their concerns in a convincing way, voters are ready to make some extremely untraditional and unlikely choices just to get someone who at least convincingly pretends to take them seriously.

Why that should be a surprise to anyone right now, I think, is a question more for psychiatrists than political scientists.

By all polls and accounts, the overwhelming issue in this year’s election is homelessness and the homeless encampments that continue to line L.A.’s streets. (It was also the key issue in the last election, to the extent that there were any issues debated in that election.) The homelessness issue is sort of a standard-bearer for a host of other problems — eliciting fear that the city is falling apart at the seams in a hundred different ways, a process that predated Mayor Bass but continues, to all appearances, unabated.

This issue is not what sort of health care delivery system we should put in place. It’s a visceral fear that the city is out of control and that our elected leaders — through complacency, incompetence or driven by other ideological imperatives — are either unable or unwilling to address it.  

And the first step to fixing it is acknowledging there is a problem and taking it as seriously as the voters do.

Unfortunately, political boilerplate gobbledygook in this era has, to voters’ ears, become code for “Laissez le status quo rouler!” 

But when people are telling you, I am worried that my city is falling apart — and you want to put homeless encampments in front of my children’s schools, if you answer their fears with talk of “comprehensive plans” or, as Councilmember Raman did in the debate, quibbles about how a law is structured, you sound either outright insane or so deeply complacent, that you might as well walk around inside of a giant soap bubble.

If you’ve been in government and you can’t start by expressing deep regret about how things have gone lately, you are signaling to voters that their concerns aren’t your priority.

In normal times, a character like Spencer Pratt would struggle to break out of the low single digits in a citywide election. But when the other candidates respond to uproar with complacency, the uproar goes looking for someone who actually acknowledges it.

The problem with people who live in bubbles — be it establishment or ideological — is that they get obsessed with narratives and strategy and think they can decide what people will talk about. 

Joe Biden’s multi-year attempt to tell voters that inflation and immigration weren’t real problems that they had to worry their pretty little heads over should have taught Democrats forever the danger of that strategy.

Currently, Bass and Raman are responding to the Pratt insurgency by canceling the next debate (an event Pratt had already backed out of)… which, if I’ve ever heard of a tactic that seems to be daring the public to feel more discontent, that is it.

For all Spencer Pratt’s shortcomings, it was not his fault that Bass and Raman didn’t have coherent, believable answers on the most salient issues of the day, and refusing to respond to him does not project a sure hand on the wheel, to say the least.

All that said, I find it difficult to believe that here in L.A., this electorate is on the brink of abandoning its steady-as-she-goes habits of forever. Which makes me think that, should he reach the runoff, Pratt has effectively no chance of beating Mayor Bass. (Yes, we’ve said this before and had some surprises, but this is, as I say, Los Angeles.) And so it goes, and if the city’s drift continues, the discontent will continue to simmer for yet another cycle.

Which brings us to our great parallels.

Can you think of another group of people in this neighborhood who speak boilerplate, complacent nonsense in the face of years of rolling multiple disasters tearing apart their sector?

I speak of the leadership of our studios, be they legacy or upstart streamers, who have stood idly by while the industry as we know it and the community around us have been systematically dismantled. 

But before we get to them — and I will — a little bit about how L.A. found itself lost among losers.