I never watched The Hills, and if you’d asked me a month ago to explain who Spencer Pratt is or why he’s well known, I’m fairly certain I would have come up empty. Mention his MTV show and that may have rung a bell, but you also could have convinced me that “Spencer Pratt” is a billionaire booster who helped fund AJ Dybantsa’s freshman season at BYU.
In any event, millions of Americans now know Pratt as an insurgent, Republican-coded candidate for mayor in Los Angeles, where Democrats have held office for the past 25 years. The next big step in Pratt’s political adventure comes Tuesday, in the L.A. nomination primary, where he has to finish in the top two to advance to a runoff, most likely with incumbent mayor Karen Bass.
As I’ve gotten acquainted with what I initially thought might be some kind of viral stunt, I’ve been fascinated by Pratt’s campaign. He’s entirely serious and he’s been surprisingly successful, and all of it is drawing national attention. Hence today’s post, which is not really about tech per se, but an ongoing cultural shift that has been partly enabled by social media and certainly mediated by it. In brief: I think the cultural, political and moral power that Democrats have enjoyed for my entire adult life is now waning, and whether he wins an election or not, Pratt’s success should be instructive to liberals interested in reversing that trend. But first, some background.
Often Funny, But Not a Joke
Pratt and his family of four lost their home in last year’s Pacific Palisades fires, which is why he’s running for office at all. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 4-to-1, his campaign has used social media to amplify messaging that targets Bass, the Democratic incumbent, and Nithya Raman, a progressive challenger from the City Council, as careerist creatures of a system that has demonstrably failed to protect the Palisades or address crime, homelessness and quality of life concerns across the city.
Bass still has the highest prediction market odds to win November’s election—69% on Kalshi—but Pratt’s 27% odds are up from 8% in late February. For now, he’s in a dead polling heat with City Council progressive Nithya Raman to advance in Tuesday’s primary. What happens next will be nothing if not an entertaining test of whether Twitter is, or is not, real life. While his competition has spent nearly $2 million on ads, as of last week Pratt had not bought a single minute of ad time on linear television and radio. Instead, he’s been appearing on podcasts, tweeting his own viral ads along with first-person policy proposals, hiring contractors to clip and share viral moments, and sharing AI videos made by supporters.
A reality TV star promising disruption and running for political office, despite no apparent credentials for the job, has of course generated plenty of anxiety and attention. Critics of Pratt’s campaign have called his vision for L.A. dark, branded his supporters as angry, and derided Pratt as a narcissist and MAGA darling. Into that sea of takes, I’ll drop my own adjective for Pratt the politician: competent.
Shockingly so. Pratt’s messaging is disciplined, his media strategies are nimble and shrewd, his commercials are poignant, the AI ads he’s amplified are alternately hilarious and perceptive, and he’s been able to parry away attacks with high energy, good humor, and sincerity.
A few weeks ago there was controversy over whether Pratt actually lived in the trailer on his burned out Palisades lot that was featured in an early ad. Within days, that spawned a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air parody that was both entertaining and a reminder to L.A. that he’s running for mayor because the city’s incompetence allowed 6,800 homes to burn down in the Palisades. Elsewhere, his Mother’s Day message was powerful and heartbreaking. When Chelsea Handler went viral warning L.A. about a “straight white male” with no qualifications, Pratt responded with Shane Gillis reminding the world she went to dinner at Jeffrey Epstein’s house after his 2008 conviction. On Memorial Day, he posted a tribute to L.A.’s National Cemetery and an 8-minute snapshot of L.A.’s baffling spending.
Last week, President Trump offered a soft endorsement and gave Pratt’s opponents the sort of news that could tip an election in a city where the president remains tremendously unpopular. Asked about the support, Pratt first texted, “Everybody wants me to succeed. Everybody. Because L.A. is the most important city in the country.” Pressed to comment on Trump’s support, specifically, Pratt said: “The only support I need is from moms that want to feel safe in Los Angeles. I’m laser-focused on that.”
Nothing Pratt’s done is all that groundbreaking, to be clear. But he moves quickly, comfortably and sensibly. Responding to Trump, he threads a needle—not publicly rejecting support from the president, while also reducing surface area for his opponents to attack and focusing on messages that every voter agrees with.
In general, we’re watching a volume shooter without many misses. When the contenders gathered for a debate in April, Pratt was widely considered the winner (while a local CBS affiliate fact-checked Mayor Bass and found that she was, in fact, lying on stage). His 9-minute proposal to adopt a better intervention approach to drug addiction and homelessness was not angry or dark, but morally urgent and frankly pretty compelling. Other videos have highlighted a better plan to get ICE out of L.A., the astounding salaries of civic employees, or the city’s incredibly expensive affordable housing plans. All those messages resonate with citizens who pay some of the highest taxes in America and wonder where, exactly, that money goes. (As a Washington D.C. resident, I identify).
None of this is an endorsement of Pratt’s ability to actually run L.A. successfully, or even to win in November, when split liberal factions in the primary are likely to merge in opposition to an unqualified outsider who voted for Trump in 2024. Rather, as the whole country marvels at L.A. local politics in this moment, one point that shouldn’t be overlooked about a former reality star and failed crystals entrepreneur now running for mayor is just how effective a politician he’s proven to be. Regardless of your views, everyone should be clear: Pratt is really good at this.
So what about his opponents?
Waste, Fraud & Popular Rebuke
Pratt’s political talent is a big and still-underappreciated story here, but the story of his rise is obviously indivisible from that of the Democratic establishment’s decline. Watching this election unfold over the past several weeks, for all Pratt’s success, I’ve been equally struck by the thought that everything that makes Pratt politically viable used to be specialties of the Democratic Party. Boundless energy, good humor, good-looking and telegenic, occasionally stupid but generally likable, embracing technology, targeting opponents as corrupt and out of touch—that is where Dems lived! And that is becoming less true by the day.
Next to the 42 year-old Pratt in L.A., there is the 72 year-old Bass, an incumbent mayor endorsed by Kamala Harris who barely made a dent in the crime and homelessness crisis during her first term, infamously boarded a plane to Ghana during the early stages of the worst wildfires in L.A. history, and worked after the fact to obscure the city’s failures. There’s also the 44 year-old Raman, a DSA-backed progressive and head of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee. As a fun sample of what DSA affiliation looks like in practice, Raman was recently defending herself on Hasan Piker’s livestream, dissembling and expressing regret for accepting a donation from “Democrats for Israel L.A.,” and clarifying that she does believe that Israel is an apartheid state. (To her credit, Raman did point out the mayor of Los Angeles has no influence over Israel).
Zooming out, those candidates are not especially charismatic, and given that each woman has held power and overseen the proliferation of local problems they now promise to fix, they cannot credibly sell hope. That is how Pratt happens. Likewise, if you’d like to know why Pratt’s drawn support nationally, it’s because the dysfunction he’s identified is common in cities all over the U.S., all of which are governed by Democratic machines whose returns have been diminishing for years (often literally—people and businesses are leaving, and the tax bases are shrinking).
Reckoning with any of this honestly implies an inversion of the political stereotypes many of us have come to know. I was in high school during the Iraq War, and for my entire adult life Republicans have been branded as the party of the rich and craven elite while Democrats have been known as the party of competence, empathy and charm. What’s changed lately is the charm is eroding, and claims of superior competence are frequently at odds with reality.
Apart from Bass’ appalling behavior during and after the L.A. fires, as well as crime, homelessness, and a thicket of state and local regulations that have made it impossible to start rebuilding the Palisades even 16 months later, there are more basic errors advanced by California’s establishment. Consider L.A.’s 2022 “mansion tax” that brought in a third of the revenue that was projected, drove up the cost of construction for apartment buildings, alienated prospective builders (compounding the city’s housing shortage), and yielded about 1,400 units of “affordable” housing that will cost $779,955 per unit. It would be one thing if that tax and its entirely foreseeable consequences were an isolated mistake, but it’s not. Unchecked by opposition, this is what California Democrats do. (See also: effectively banning oil refining and driving up costs for millions of residents, or spending billions on homelessness NGOs without any infrastructure to measure success, as the problem steadily gets worse).
Beyond L.A., there’s an ongoing governor’s race in California. The current favorite is Xavier Becerra, a former HHS secretary widely regarded as the most incompetent member of Biden’s cabinet, who was nevertheless considered un-fireable because of his race. (Washington Post in 2022: “Removing Becerra would likely draw the ire of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and other grass-roots groups that pressed Biden to appoint more Latinos to his Cabinet.”). The battle to succeed Gavin Newsom has also featured the now-disgraced Eric Swalwell, deeply unpleasant Katie Porter, and Tom Steyer, a billionaire who’s embracing the far left and this week threatened to arrest ICE agents in California. If not quite a deep bench, California has at least succeeded in constructing the world’s worst group chat.
At the national level, Kamala Harris burned through $1.5 billion in 15 weeks, lost every swing state, and “lost ground in almost every demographic group, with especially severe losses among young adults and non-white voters, particularly Hispanics and Black men.” She’s currently leading polls for the 2028 nomination. The DNC, for its part, delayed a 2024 election autopsy for months, and what was released last week managed to explain the entire election cycle without touching on Joe Biden’s selfish and borderline indefensible decision to seek re-election. Finally, contra the Pratt campaign embracing AI creators and amplifying new AI ads every few days for the past month, the DNC has barred staffers from using ChatGPT and Claude, though it allows Google’s Gemini to be used for coding (unsurprising note: Gemini is the worst frontier model for coding).
Pratt and Our Political Future
Now let’s get back to Pratt. Beneath all the viral fare, he’s basically running on Bill Clinton’s platform, offering L.A. an energetic, socially liberal presence who promises fiscal responsibility and crackdowns on crime. Next to an establishment Democrat who has failed spectacularly and a DSA-backed challenger who has never accomplished anything, the Republican reality star has a decent shot at presenting as the normal one.
Whether Pratt can execute on his ideas about crime, homelessness and smarter spending is a separate and fair question—experience with government is, in fact, helpful when attempting to staff an administration and govern the second largest city in America—but the ideas themselves shouldn’t be controversial. To many voters in L.A., they clearly aren’t.
It has to be noted, too, that media has changed. Many voters now get most of their news from social media, and Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022. It’s not an exaggeration to say the gains Pratt has made in the past few months would have been impossible on 2020’s version of social media. Elon’s move has injected more diversity into the social media marketplace of ideas, and the algorithmic playing field of at least one platform is now tilted in the opposite direction. And that’s where it becomes a story that’s bigger than L.A.
Without a near-monopoly on mainstream media messaging, there’s going to be less margin for Democratic establishment error going forward. Running good candidates, who can record compelling first-person videos or hold their own on a podcast, is going to be important. Attempting to obscure incompetence that’s easily broadcast all over social media certainly didn’t work for Biden or Harris.
Meanwhile, with their support among young men plummeting and redistricting trending in a variety of unhelpful directions, the sort of structural disadvantages Pratt is facing in L.A. are disadvantages Democrats may face just about everywhere else. It seems entirely possible that the same way Republicans spent about three decades shackled by religious conservatism and neocon foreign policy instincts that everyone hated, modern Democrats are headed for a similarly fallow period thanks to ideological commitments that yield dysfunctional outcomes, as well as memories of DEI excess, anti-police stances and draconian COVID policies that were the left’s version of the Iraq War and may have destroyed the political credibility of an entire generation. That’s not offered as an endorsement of the shift, but it’s an observation that seems to be missing from something like the DNC’s 2024 autopsy, or certainly most of the commentary on L.A.’s election.
For all the columns on Pratt determined to miss the point (“His entire life has been fueled by an unfathomable level of self-confidence, despite a data set that suggests he may not be good at anything.”), his campaign has been very good at reckoning with not only the realities of his city but also the political leanings of its voting population. Pratt is hammering on widely held frustrations, sidestepping issues that might divide his support, using tech to his advantage, and attempting to meet a million voters in the middle. Rather than ridicule him, Democrats all over America may want to start imitating him.
Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. We’ll publish once a week, on Fridays. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.