As the results slowly rolled in from the Los Angeles mayoral primary, things grew increasingly dicey for incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. It also looked likely she would face off against former reality TV villain Spencer Pratt, although that outcome was not yet mathematically certain.
American political handicappers warn that it is dangerous for an incumbent to fall much below 50% in a primary. It signals weakness and a general lack of enthusiasm and support. Because of a quirk of LA election law, a 50%-plus-one finish would also have put the mayor back in office outright, with no general election necessary.
With an estimated 66% of the vote counted from the 2 June primary, Bass was sitting far below that 50% threshold. She had 35% of votes cast to Pratt’s 29%. LA City Council member Nithya Raman was in third with 23%. Other candidates were all in single digits.
What a Pratt Versus Bass Election Would Mean
The top two primary finishers will fight it out again in the November elections. The congressional midterm elections and California’s gubernatorial election will be raging at the same time, which will make for an extremely expensive contest to lead America’s second most populous city.
If the final matchup is between Bass and Pratt, the primary has also given us a glimpse of the innovative ads and other videos we can expect. Videos by Pratt and his supporters have involved an unusually large helping of memes and mockery, turbocharged by new AI manipulations.
One video had Pratt as the superhero Prattman, taking on City Hall. Another was a parody of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song, with Pratt moving into the upper-class neighborhood in a trailer.
Pratt originally rose to fame as the season 2 villain of the reality television show The Hills. He is a political neophyte trying to topple an incumbent whose political roots run deep. Bass served for more than a decade in Congress and as speaker of the California State Assembly. She was elected mayor of LA in 2022 with just under 55% of the vote.
Pratt challenged Bass because his house burned down in the Pacific Palisades fire. He holds her personally responsible for her absence during the crisis, for the city’s lackluster efforts to fight the blaze and for not doing enough to cut the red tape that has kept most of the homes from being rebuilt.
The seasonal warm Santa Ana winds fanned the fire that brought down over 13,000 homes in early January 2025. A year later, an AP report found that fewer than a dozen houses had been fully rebuilt.
While the Palisades were burning, Bass was in Africa for the inauguration of Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama. Pratt and others have contended that Los Angeles firefighters were under-resourced and not well led. The gist of it is that they were sent in too late, some of the water systems they were relying on to fight the blaze failed and a lot of houses burned as a result.
The Homelessness Issue Will Not Go Away
Pratt is also making a huge issue out of the city’s homelessness problem, with LA hosting the largest homeless population in the nation. The city has about 3.8 million residents. It can be hard to track people without addresses, yet one 2025 government headcount found 43,699 homeless in the city. They were part of 72,308 homeless counted in the greater LA metro area.
Bass had insisted that LA’s homelessness problem was getting better because of the city’s efforts. “My commitment to confront this crisis head-on is stronger and more urgent than ever”, she insisted last July. Some numbers back her story of gradual improvement. But the sheer scale of the problem was hard to make go away with improving trend lines.
Pratt also argued that LA had incentivized the homeless to camp there. Many would leave if the incentives changed, particularly with harsher treatment of drug addicts. “These people, when I unplug them and say, ‘We’re not taking our taxpayer money anymore’, they’re all going to Seattle, where the mayor will welcome them”, he said in an interview with ABC News.
The relatively new, avowedly socialist mayor of the city much further up America’s West Coast appeared amused by the charge. During an interview in front of a live audience, Mayor Katie Wilson said: “I’m not going to respond to him but I will respond to you all.” She pointed to housing costs as the chief culprit driving homelessness, but added: “That does not mean that drugs are not a factor. They absolutely are a factor.”
Mayor Wilson admitted that government cannot make a persistent problem go away simply by assigning housing to homeless people with serious substance abuse problems.
Late counting could still bank hard against Pratt. If not, Mayor Bass will find him to be her own persistent problem until Election Day.