BASS FISHING

Can a reality TV bad boy burn down the career of LA's mayor?

May 20, 2026

John McDermott has spent 11 years in Los Angeles covering celebrity and culture for Esquire, GQ and Rolling Stone. In 2022, he was one of the first journalists to profile Spencer Pratt’s second act as a content creator, a piece that traced how The Hills bad boy had reinvented himself for the influencer era. He had no idea he was documenting the origin story of a mayoral candidate.

When the Palisades fires tore through Pratt’s neighborhood in January 2025 and the promised rebuilding never came, Pratt turned his grief and frustration into an insurgent run against LA’s Democratic incumbent mayor, Karen Bass.

The Oracle spoke with McDermott about the May 6 debate that reshuffled the race, why the media keeps getting the AI fan videos wrong, and what 40% undecided voters in a deep-blue city actually means for Pratt’s chances.

This interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.

You profiled Spencer Pratt back in 2022 as a washed-up reality star trying to reinvent himself. Did you have any idea you were documenting the origin story of a political candidate?

Zero idea. I wrote about him because I thought he encapsulated something real about how celebrity works now. What fascinated me about Spencer was that you could trace the history of contemporary media through him. He was at the forefront of reality TV, the birth of this entirely new genre of television, and as TV’s relevance faded, he became an internet influencer.

So what turned him political?

The Palisades fires in January 2025. They burned down his home. And the promised rebuilding — Karen Bass herself promised she would expedite the permitting process and get the Palisades back in record time — never materialized. A year and a half later, there hasn’t been much rebuilt. He’s been a very vocal critic of the fire readiness, or lack thereof, leading up to and during the fires, and the slow rebuilding process. And that culminated with him running for mayor.

Walk me through Bass and the fire. How bad was it for her?

She was not in LA at the time. She was in Ghana, doing a photo op with President Biden, despite myriad warnings that LA was at an incredibly high fire risk. And then afterward, there was an after-action report on the fire response that Bass’s office had edited after it was written to lessen her culpability. The author of the report came out publicly and said: “This is not what I wrote. They changed this after I submitted it.”

Let’s talk about the May 6 debate. Raman, the leftist, got cut nearly in half overnight in the odds. What happened?

The overwhelming consensus is that she was the worst in the debate. She hesitated, didn’t have clear answers. And Pratt — who everyone expected to stumble on policy questions — spoke very fluently and very to the point. Two moments went viral, and both favored Pratt.

Raman also accused Bass and Pratt of working together to keep each other in the race at her expense. Explain that.

The structure of this race is unusual. It’s not a partisan primary — it’s an open election. If somebody gets more than 50%, they win outright. If not, there’s a runoff between the top two candidates. Raman’s accusation is that Bass and Pratt were deliberately friendlier with each other in the debate and ganging up on her, trying to knock her out of the top two so they can face each other in the runoff.

Pratt is at 27% as a registered Republican in one of the most Democratic cities in America. Is there any real structural support for him?

People thought Rick Caruso had a genuine chance in the last election against Bass, and he lost. What Pratt has going for him that Caruso didn’t is a massive undecided voter pool. One poll has 26% undecided, a UCLA poll has 40%. Those undecided voters are not closet Republicans. They are typical Democratic voters who are questioning the status quo. If those people are in play, they could swing to Pratt.

What is actually driving his support, underneath the memes and the charisma?

He is channeling real impatience with the homelessness issue — billions of dollars spent on a soft-handed approach, to little effect.

You’ve written a lot about viral media and celebrity culture. The AI fan videos have gotten a ton of attention — Pratt as Luke Skywalker, Pratt as Batman. What’s actually going on there?

The media has completely botched this story. The LA Times and Vanity Fair both reported Pratt’s campaign is making these videos. That is outright false. He made none of them. They are made by random people on Twitter who are good at AI video production. Many are pretty provocative, borderline violent in some cases. Karen Bass went on CNN and said Pratt is putting out violent videos that could have dangerous consequences. He did not make them. They’re pretty much all coming from one guy — someone called Charles Curran.

It’s wildly misleading coverage. And it matters because it lets Bass frame him as a threat while the actual story is that he has organic, fan-driven momentum she cannot manufacture.

If it ends up as a Bass-Pratt runoff, who wins?

The analogy I keep coming back to is Trump-Hillary. Bass is the old-school Democratic Party machine politician. He’s the anti-that. He is charismatic in a way that Bass and Raman simply are not, and that was on full display in the debate.

The trading on Polymarket is telling. The volume on Pratt is six times greater than anyone else in this race. That national interest is real. He’s already a national figure whether or not he wins. The question is whether he can convert attention into votes in a city that, when it comes down to it, is still a Democratic stronghold. That is the challenge. But with 40% undecided and a broken record of Democratic governance on the issues people actually care about, I wouldn’t write him off.

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Are we seeing any evidence of a rightward shift in the California governor’s race?

The California gubernatorial race is even more wide open than the LA mayoral race. Xavier Becerra has pulled ahead as the leading Democratic Party candidate, but Steve Hilton, a Republican, is polling just behind him. Tom Steyer (D), Chad Bianco (R) and Katie Porter (D) all have an outside chance. The fact there are two viable Republican candidates for governor of California again speaks to how disillusioned California voters are with the Democratic leadership that’s held the office since 2011.

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