What's Next for Spencer Pratt After the LA Race

On the night of the June 2 primary in Los Angeles, Spencer Pratt was ahead of Nithya Raman for the second runoff slot. He never got there. As California counted mail ballots over the following week, Raman moved past him and kept extending her lead, and by the time the count settled Pratt had finished third and was eliminated.

Pratt, the reality television personality who lost his Pacific Palisades home in the January 2025 fire and launched his campaign on the one-year anniversary of it, finished behind incumbent Karen Bass and Raman. With 93 percent of ballots counted, CBS News Los Angeles reported Bass at 34.3 percent, Raman at 28.5 percent, and Pratt at 25.8 percent. Bass and Raman advance to the runoff on November 3, 2026.

For anyone who works in advocacy or public affairs, the useful part of this race has little to do with who won. It is the specific way a campaign with enormous attention, celebrity money, and real enthusiasm behind it still came up short, and what that says about the difference between an audience and a constituency.

What actually happened on the ballot

Pratt built the loudest campaign in the field. An April ad, filmed outside a mobile home with Pratt pointing toward houses he said belonged to Bass and Raman, drew more than six million views on X. “They let my home burn down,” he said in it. “I know what the consequences of failed leadership are.”

The money followed the attention. Newsweek reported donations from tech founders, music and media executives, and television personalities, including Katharine McPhee, who gave $1,024 and hosted a fundraiser, and David Foster, who maxed out at $1,800. In May, President Trump told reporters he would like to see Pratt do well and had heard he was “a big MAGA person,” remarks ABC7 described as weighing in rather than a formal endorsement. Pratt said he did not need it.

He also led on election night and then lost ground steadily as Los Angeles County counted mail ballots. PBS NewsHour reported that Raman moved past him into second place that Sunday, and that by the following Monday’s update she had extended her lead to nearly 22,000 votes. Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day had seven days to arrive and be counted, which is why the top two were not settled for almost a week.

That pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched California elections. Election-night returns skew toward voters who show up in person or return ballots early. The later count skews toward the higher-propensity, more organized vote. A campaign built for attention performs well in the first bucket. A campaign built for turnout operations performs well in the second.

The money problem underneath the attention

The ad reached millions of people. The campaign account did not reflect it. LAist, reviewing city filings, put Pratt’s total at roughly $538,000, against $3.7 million for Karen Bass and $1.1 million for Nithya Raman.

What he did raise skewed national rather than local. The donor list Newsweek reviewed is heavy on names with no particular tie to the Los Angeles electorate, including Sergey Brin, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and Meghan McCain, and Los Angeles City Ethics Commission filings show a distinct block of out-of-state donors giving at the $1,000 level and above. The New York Times, reviewing the same filings, reported that roughly 17 percent of his donations came from people who actually lived in Los Angeles.

The pattern is the same whichever number you use. Pratt built a national audience quickly and efficiently. What he needed was a Los Angeles electorate, and those are different populations that happen to overlap.

Advocacy programs run into the same mismatch constantly. A campaign goes viral and the organization gets 40,000 new email addresses, most of which belong to people outside the districts that actually matter to the legislative goal. The list looks impressive in a board deck and delivers very little when a committee vote is scheduled, because the people on it are not constituents of anyone on that committee.

In legislative advocacy, geography is close to the only field on a supporter record that determines whether an action counts at all. Our guide to district-level targeting and constituent verification covers how to get that right, including the edge cases that quietly break match rates.

Attention is cheap now, and that changes what is scarce

Pratt demonstrated something real. With the right instincts, a single person can now generate the kind of earned media that used to require a seven-figure budget. That capability is genuinely available to advocacy organizations, and most of them underuse it.

What his campaign also demonstrated is that the scarce resource moved. Getting noticed is no longer the bottleneck. Converting attention into a verified, geographically useful, repeatedly activatable supporter record is the bottleneck. We have written about this gap before in the context of slacktivism, where the visible signal of support and the actual capacity to act have drifted apart.

The practical version for a public affairs team:

A viral moment with no capture mechanism produces nothing durable.
A capture mechanism that does not collect and verify district information produces a list you cannot target.
A targeted list that is never asked to act a second time decays within a year.

Each of those failures is cheap to fix in advance and expensive to fix after the moment has passed. The mechanics are covered in our piece on advocate acquisition for public affairs campaigns.

So what is next for Spencer Pratt?

In a combative video posted on June 12, after he had been eliminated, Pratt said he was not leaving town and would stay active in local politics. He has not announced a campaign for another office.

The more interesting question is what happens to the coalition. He drew hundreds of thousands of votes as a first-time candidate with no prior electoral experience, which is a substantial base to have built from a standing start. Whether it becomes a durable political asset depends on whether anyone maintains a relationship with those voters between now and the next cycle, and on whether the donor base can be rebalanced toward people who live in the jurisdiction.

Those are infrastructure questions rather than charisma questions. Campaigns that treat a loss as the end of the list almost always have to rebuild from scratch. The ones that keep contacting supporters through the off-cycle start the next race with an advantage that money cannot buy quickly.

The takeaway for advocacy teams

You will not run a campaign like Pratt’s, and you should not try to. The transferable lesson is narrower.

Attention and support are different things, and only one of them shows up when you need a legislator to hear from their own district. A program that can generate 200,000 impressions and a program that can generate 2,000 verified constituent messages are not the same program, and the second one is harder to build and more valuable to own.

Attention is only worth what you can do with it afterward. See how CiviClick turns supporter interest into district-level action.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Spencer Pratt win the Los Angeles mayoral primary?

No. He finished third and was eliminated. Karen Bass and Nithya Raman advanced to the runoff scheduled for November 3, 2026.

Why did Spencer Pratt lose after leading on election night?

Los Angeles County counts mail ballots over the days following the election, and those later-counted ballots broke against him. PBS NewsHour reported that Raman passed him that Sunday and had extended her lead to nearly 22,000 votes by the following Monday’s update.

What is Spencer Pratt doing now?

In a video posted on June 12, 2026, he said he was not leaving Los Angeles and would stay active in local politics. He has not announced a campaign for another office.

Why does donor geography matter in a campaign?

Only people who can vote in a jurisdiction can help win an election there. Pratt raised roughly $538,000 against $3.7 million for Karen Bass, and the money he did raise skewed national rather than local. The New York Times reported that roughly 17 percent of his donations came from Los Angeles residents. The same principle applies in legislative advocacy, where only constituents of a given member carry real weight with that office.

What can advocacy organizations learn from celebrity-driven campaigns?

That earned media is now achievable without a large budget, and that it is not a substitute for a targeted supporter base. The organizations that benefit from viral moments are the ones with capture and follow-up infrastructure already in place. Our overview of grassroots advocacy covers how that base gets built.