From 'The Hills' villain to LA mayoral contender: Spencer Pratt's viral video-fueled campaign

On the reality television show 'The Hills', Spencer Pratt played something of a villain, blamed for spreading a salacious rumor and driving a wedge between his girlfriend and her best friend.

Pratt is casting himself as a hero in his latest venture, a bid to be mayor of Los Angeles, in which he's promising to rid the nation's second most populous city of disorder and dysfunction.

Originally greeted with bemusement, Pratt is now upending the race with early voting underway ahead of the June 2 election. The Republican is riding a wave of buzz fueled by viral videos taking aim at incumbent mayor Karen Bass, gov. Gavin Newsom, and others.

Pratt's goal is to turn the chatter into a ticket to a November runoff against Bass, a Democrat who is struggling to recover from a widely panned response to devastating wildfires last year.

He would face long odds in a city that last elected a Republican mayor in 1997. But during last week's debate, Pratt was one of only three candidates onstage, alongside Bass and progressive City Council member Nithya Raman.

"As crazy as this will sound, I'm the adult in the room," Pratt said.

A populist campaign against liberal governance

Pratt and his supporters are making a populist appeal to voters, emphasizing day-to-day concerns about life in Los Angeles and leaning on visceral imagery of drug use and homeless encampments from the grittier corners of the city of nearly 4 million.

He blames the city's Democratic leaders and pledges to "stop these corrupt politicians from destroying our city." He advocates a hard line against homelessness, pledging to eliminate encampments and pursue criminal investigations of nonprofit organizations that serve people living on the streets.

"These people do not want a bed," he said in last week's debate. "They want fentanyl or meth."

Pratt announced his campaign in January at an event marking the one-year anniversary of the deadly Palisades Fire, which destroyed his home and thousands of others.

In an ad released late last month, Pratt stands in cozy neighborhoods where Bass and Raman live. He contrasts them with an Airstream trailer parked on a flattened lot, where he says he's living after his house was destroyed.

"They let my home burn down," Pratt says in the ad. "I know what the consequences of failed leadership are."

Over the past week, a series of viral videos created with artificial intelligence have portrayed Pratt as the city's savior from hapless Democrats and violent socialists.

In one, Pratt is portrayed as Batman saving a dystopian Los Angeles from Bass, portrayed as a villainous Joker.

Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and onetime Republican presidential candidate, called it "maybe the best political ad of the year" in a post on X.

That video and others were shared on social media by filmmaker Charles Curran, and Pratt has reposted them from his own accounts. Curran did not respond to an email and direct messages on X.

"He's playing on the most powerful emotion, which is anger, and LA voters are angry right now," said Matt Klink, a Republican strategist based in Los Angeles.

A background in reality TV

Pratt, 43, is well-versed in the art of generating buzz and entertainment.

He first rose to prominence in 2007 as Heidi Montag's boyfriend on 'The Hills', a hit reality series built around the lives of young women as they navigated young adulthood in Southern California. He was portrayed as driving a wedge between Montag and her roommate, Lauren Conrad, leading to the disintegration of their friendship.

He went on to marry Montag, and they have two children together. They have appeared on a variety of other scripted and reality television series since 'The Hills' ended in 2010, and each has more than 1 million followers in their social media accounts.

Pratt points to a 2013 political science degree from the University of Southern California as evidence of his readiness to lead a massive city.

His campaign did not respond to interview requests.

Bass seeks a second term

Bass, the first Black woman to lead Los Angeles, is a wounded incumbent continuing to deal with fallout from the wildfires and general frustration with City Hall.

She was in Ghana on a diplomatic mission when the fires began tearing through her city, prompting a fierce backlash, and her administration was accused of watering down an after-action report by the fire department, which she denies.

Still, Bass has much of the Democratic establishment firmly behind her, including most of the city's powerful labor movement. A group of unions is funding an advertising campaign attacking Pratt in terms that seem calibrated to increase his appeal to Republicans and help lift him ahead of Bass's progressive challengers, a potential bet that he might be easier to defeat in November.

The rising attention on Pratt shakes up a race that, until recently, was shaping up to pit Bass against a rival to her left rather than her right.

"I feel like he's exploiting the grief of people in the Palisades, and I think that's reprehensible. That's the main thing. And I think he is about his own celebrity. He's famous now again," Bass told Fox News last week.

Pratt has run a fun and imaginative campaign that has effectively parlayed his celebrity into attention, the lifeblood of politics, just as Donald Trump and Arnold Schwarzenegger did before him, said Michael Trujillo, a Los Angeles-based Democratic strategist. He said that has put him in a strong position to get through the first round of voting and face Bass one-on-one in the runoff.

But eventually, Pratt will have to face a stark reality as a Republican: Los Angeles is an overwhelmingly Democratic city. "Not to diminish the creativity and imagination that they're putting into their campaign, but they're going to run into a big math problem," Trujillo said.