Will Spencer Pratt Realign California?

By every reasonable standard of governance, California’s elected politicians have made a mess of the Golden State. Reciting the litany of failures has become so common that it’s hardly worth the trouble. Chaotic, unsafe downtowns. Retail businesses giving up and relocating. Chronic government budget deficits, despite the nation’s highest taxes, set to go higher still. “Needle exchanges” and “safe injection sites,” funded by taxpayers. Kids encounter drug zombies on the way to school. Parents dodge psychopaths in grocery store parking lots.

We’ve heard it all. We’ve seen it all. We’re desensitized. We just avoid certain parts of town the best we can and tell ourselves it can’t be helped. When we choose which candidates to support, we know nothing is going to change. This is life in California.

Even after preventable superfires ripped through several neighborhoods in Los Angeles in early 2025, destroying an estimated 16,000 homes, nothing seemed likely to change. The initial frontrunning candidates for mayor this year merely offered different downward trajectories. With incumbent Karen Bass, the decline would continue along a predictable path: more taxes to fund programs that were not failing for lack of funds but because the programs themselves rested on preposterous assumptions. Get homeless drug addicts “indoors,” and they will begin to recover. Keep giving them clean new needles. Don’t demand sobriety in exchange for benefits. That’s inhumane! Bass’s opponent, democratic socialist Nithya Raman, embraces the same flawed assumptions and supports the same failed programs but promises to expand them all even more rapidly.

California is an experiment in socialism that is slowly descending into bankruptcy, paralysis, and mass poverty, and Los Angeles is at the center of it all. But into this tightly choreographed exercise in manufactured consent posing as voter choice, Spencer Pratt decided to run for mayor of Los Angeles, turning it into a three-way contest that now offers voters a genuine alternative. Whether Pratt wins or loses, he is ushering in a new era in both the tools of campaigning and the messages that resonate.