Spencer Pratt, the star of a long-running reality show, is closing in on a renewal in the Los Angeles mayoral race, but this season’s finale may yet contain some surprises.
With 53% of the vote counted late Tuesday night, The Hills star-turned-political gadfly sat in second place with just over 29% of the vote in his bid to run California’s largest city, ahead of his third-place rival, progressive City Council member Nithya Raman, by 7.5%. Pratt has garnered 121,000 votes to Raman’s 90,000 — but a whopping 370,000 votes remain to be counted.
Raman also appeared to be closing the gap, in keeping with a trend of Republican votes tending to come earlier in the counting; she had been down ten points earlier in the evening. Whoever prevails will advance to November’s two-person runoff.
Incumbent mayor Karen Bass currently sits comfortably in front of both her rivals with 152,000 votes (36.4%), all but assuring her a place in the runoff but falling short of the 50% needed for automatic re-election. Bass would be the first L.A. mayoral incumbent to need a runoff since 2005, when incumbent James Hahn finished second in the primary and was forced into a runoff against challenger Antonio Villaraigosa, who defeated him. Both Villaraigosa and his successor Eric Garcetti would win a second term with 50% in the primary.
If the totals were to hold and Pratt were to advance against Bass, it would set up a made-for-vintage-MTV showdown. The battle between the two would be one of the fiercest and most colorful elections the city has seen in decades. Pratt has repeatedly gone after Bass in the primary campaign, reposting AI videos of her portrayed as The Joker and deriding her response to the wildfires and the city’s housing crisis. After previously ignoring hm, Bass has recently gone after Pratt too, calling him a “TV reality star villain.” Pratt has received the seal of approval of another reality star-turned-politician, Donald Trump, though rebuffed the endorsement.
A Pratt win over Raman would mean a rebuff for progressives in the city, though it would also stir up some Monday-morning quarterbacking about the decision of Rae Huang, a Democratic Socialist of America candidate, to stay in the race and siphon votes from her. Of course, Raman’s late entry into the race itself may have taken votes from Bass, who might have hit the 50% threshold and avoided a runoff with Pratt if she had stayed out. (Think Nader-Gore-Bush in 2000.)
A Raman comeback, on the other hand, would amount to a jarring defeat for Pratt, who surged in recent weeks on the back of the viral videos and a general discontentment with the challenges of a city run by Bass. It would end one of the most surprising and novel campaigns in an era of surprising and novel campaigns, halting an outsider run that conservative-coded entertainers have made their stock-in-trade dating back to Jesse Ventura in the 1990’s, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 2000’s and Donald Trump in the 2010’s.
Despite Pratt’s entertainment bona fides, it was Bass who sought to position herself as the candidate of Hollywood in her speech to supporters Tuesday night. She called L.A. “the creative capital of the world’ and decried an “industry that was leaving but we are bringing it back.”
Pratt, for his part, has kept Hollywood or at least the media at bay — he appeared to ban reporters from covering his election-night party at Don Antonio’s in the Sawtelle neighborhood of Los Angeles, according to two people on the ground, in contravention of longstanding election-night practice but in keeping with his anti-elites theme. He did speak to reporters outside the restaurant, generally striking a restrained tone but offering a few more trash-talky challenges to his presumptive runoff opponent. “She knows it’s on. I hope she’s ready,” he said of Bass.
In the California governor’s race, another critic of Democratic incumbents has turned out a strong showing. Former Fox News host Steve Hilton — like Pratt, a TV figure who has never run for elected office before — had climbed handily into the lead. With 55% of the ballots counted, he had a sturdy lead of 27.6% of the vote, compared to 25.5% of Democrat and poll frontrunner Xavier Becerra, and a full eight points ahead of progressive Democrat Tom Steyer. But the margins — 1.3 million for Hilton, 1.2 million for Becerra and 900,000 for Steyer — were hardly conclusive with nearly four million votes left to be counted.
Should results hold, it would set up a general election between the moderate Democrat and former California AG Becerra, an establishment candidate, and the British Hilton, the political upstart who also has Trump’s endorsement.
Hilton has run a race lambasting incumbent Democrats, particularly Governor Gavin Newsom, and campaigned on a traditional conservative platform of lower taxes and fewer regulations. “Change is coming,” he chanted with supporters at his election-night event. He has also said he would raise the film tax credit ceiling to as high as 60%. In the speech to supporters, Hilton nodded to his England-born status. “I know some of you who are watching thinking ‘who is this guy with a funny accent thinking he can be governor,’” then segued to a reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger and a conversation he had with him about becoming governor.
Steyer had staked out a far more activist government position, arguing for more climate regulations, more worker protections and novel proposals such as the “token tax,” which would charge people for AI usage and put the money in a pot for displaced workers. Some polls had put the billionaire entrepreneur in second place in the days leading up to the race.
But the candidate — who had spent more than $200 million of his own money on the campaign, the most of any candidate this primary season nationwide — seems to be sputtering with voters in the early going, another rebuff of progressives in California.
Becerra continued to ride a late-season wave that has seen him go from single digits at the polls all the way to the top of the heap in his bid to becomes the state’s first Latino governor. He has avoided bold policy prescriptions, including on Hollywood, perhaps waiting to see whether his November rival would be to his right or his left. Speaking to supporters Tuesday night, the former HHS secretary played the Cinderella role, saying he had been “outspent by a ton” (a reference to Steyer) and how he was “even called along the way to drop out” (a reference to the California Democratic party chair’s pleas for lower-polling Democrats to step aside earlier in the race).
“Well guess what,” he said. “The underdog stayed in the fight.”
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