The Democrats (and ex-Democrats) Voting for Spencer Pratt

DAVID K. ISRAEL WOULD SEEM to have little in common with Spencer Pratt, the brash reality TV star turned mayoral candidate. 

Israel, 58, is a novelist and composer whose music has sent dancers leaping across stages around the world. He’s worked with Leonard Bernstein and Twyla Tharp. He often hosts Sunday salons for those in the arts. He’s a registered Democrat. He said he cannot stand Donald Trump.

But both he and Pratt lost their homes (and everything inside them) in the Palisades fire, a catastrophe that forged a bond. It also catapulted Pratt—previously best known for playing the villain on “The Hills” for five seasons—into politics. On the fire’s one-year anniversary, he launched his mayoral campaign, vowing to “expose the system.” Israel, a self-described “fanboy,” said he is “100% behind him,” given the choices on offer. 

“Yes, he has no experience in government — to me, that’s great. That’s what we need,” said the composer, adding that he could write a book filled with his grievances about Mayor Karen Bass. “If we’re all wrong, and he wins, it can’t be worse than what we’re dealing with right now. It just can’t.”

Israel is one of a growing legion of proud Pratt supporters eager to publicly back a man who, he said, “doesn’t spew the usual political B.S.”

But, much like another reality star-turned-politician who confounded pollsters when he won the presidency a decade ago, Pratt appears to be attracting significant support from voters who are not quite willing to trumpet it in public. 

“There're little, secret groups that are forming,” said a Los Feliz screenwriter who is a registered Democrat and is backing Pratt — “but I wouldn’t announce it if I was with a group of seven people eating out for dinner.”

Still, she said, she has managed to identify others in her circle who feel the same way. Another friend recently confided: “‘You know, Spencer Pratt isn’t sounding that crazy,’” she said, adding that she responded: “I know, I know — but we can’t tell the rest.”

The L.A. mayor’s race is in its final sprint before the June 2 primary. The top two vote-getters will advance to the November election. Back in February, the conventional wisdom was that Bass would face her most formidable challenge from the left as her former ally, Councilmember Nithya Raman, sought to unseat her. As a registered Republican in a city where only 15% of voters share that affiliation, Pratt, many commentators thought, didn’t stand a chance. 

But in recent weeks, support for Pratt has surged, and a recent poll showed him slightly ahead of Raman, with Bass still in the lead. 

Key to Pratt’s rising popularity are: the secret (and not so secret) Democrats backing Pratt, often because his promise to clean up the city and forcefully tackle homelessness resonates, even if his rhetoric sometimes verges on offensive. 

“The last time I was downtown, I thought I’d vomit. It was horrible,” said the Los Feliz screenwriter, who, like many voters, spoke to L.A. Material on condition of anonymity or by only their first name to avoid social reprisal. She added that despite all the money the Bass administration has spent on the problem, the city still feels like “it’s just slid into this abyss of Blade Runner.”

Pratt, she said, is “not afraid to make people angry. Everyone else is just trying to be so nice, and it’s just running the city into the ground.”

Asked about the disenchantment that is driving people toward Pratt, a spokesman for Bass defended her record.

“For decades, city leaders let our problems get worse,” Alex Stack, the spokesman, said. “It was Karen Bass who came in and started changing L.A. — reducing homelessness by 18% while it went up in the rest of the country, building more affordable housing, and bringing down crime to 1960s levels.”

The secret Pratt voters were not convinced. 

June, a former registered Democrat who lives near Mid-City, recently switched to the Republican party and has already voted for Pratt by mail. She doesn’t support Trump and said she does not consider Pratt a MAGA figure.

“I’ve seen my city deteriorate before my eyes,” said June, who was born in Korea and lived in Koreatown for many years. 

As a landlord, June said she was subject to enforcement from the city’s building and housing departments, and doesn’t understand why homeless encampments seem to be subject to no laws, taking over entire sidewalks, setting up barbecue grills or tapping into electricity illegally. 

“Homeless people are 100% above the law,” June said. “Normal people have no voice.” 

June said she appreciated Pratt’s direct approach to discussing how the government must enforce the law to ensure public safety: “No one else is talking in an honest way,” she said.

In Mar Vista, a woman who works in the entertainment industry and is a registered Democrat said the city’s homelessness crisis had also driven her into Pratt’s camp. She said she was gobsmacked while watching the recent mayoral debate to hear Bass and Raman tout progress, including a nearly 18% drop in homelessness, in addressing the crisis. 

“Tell that to my eyes — it is not getting better,” she said. “It just feels like they’re gaslighting us about the way that things are.”

She said she frequently sees sanitary wipes and needles from drug use scattered across a  park near her home. Encampments may disappear for a few hours or a day, but then they return, she said.  “Is my dog going to step on a needle? Is a little kid going to come over here? This is our local park — it’s not acceptable.”

Pratt, she said, was the only candidate she thought spoke candidly about the role of drug addiction in street homelessness, which she found refreshing. A “pathological kindness” has “taken over the Democratic Party, like, ‘Oh, we have to be nice to everybody all the time,’” she said. “It feels like we’re in this codependent addictive relationship of denying what the real problem is.”

“Right now, handing out needles feels like enabling,” she said.

By contrast, Pratt appeared to be offering real, tough-love solutions. “You either go in and get mandatory treatment, or you have to leave,” she said. “I look at his Instagram feed every single day, and it gives me hope.”

Still, many of these voters said that despite their support for Pratt’s position on homelessness, they did not agree with all of his positions — or some of his campaign’s more outrageous attacks on Bass.  

“I wish he wouldn’t call her Karen Basura. I don’t like that,” said the screenwriter near Los Feliz, who said she believes the mayor truly loves the city and “really is an Angeleno.”

Many also said they felt that voting for Pratt was, to some extent, a wild gamble, undertaken because they saw it as the only chance to make real change in a city desperate for it. 

“Here’s the reason why he’s worth the risk,” said the mother who lives near Mar Vista. “I believe if we don’t do something radical right now, it’s not going to get better.”

Many voters said they might also have supported Adam Miller, the Democratic tech entrepreneur who has run on a moderate platform of making City Hall more efficient. But with polls showing Miller’s campaign flagging, many said it was more pragmatic to vote for Pratt. 

Among them is Meghan Daum, a nationally known opinion writer who is now in Northeast L.A. after her Altadena residence burned down in the Eaton fire. Daum shocked many who know her byline from her work at the L.A. Times when she came out for Pratt earlier this spring. 

“I’m somebody who would have supported Adam Miller,” she said in an interview. But when it became clear that the front-runners were Bass, Raman and Pratt, she threw her support behind Pratt. Los Angeles is “fed up with leaders who tell constituents that problems happening before their eyes aren’t happening at all,” she wrote in The Atlantic.  

“Even if this guy manages to accomplish nothing in office, the fact that he is talking about these things out loud, and putting to words what everybody can see before their eyes,” Daum said in an interview, “will be better than the status quo.”

Still, she said she abhors many of the artificial intelligence-produced videos that have littered social media to boost Pratt (and mock Bass). 

Israel, the novelist and composer whose home burned in the Palisades fire, said he won’t apologize for his support of Pratt.  

“Some family and close friends were like, Are you fucking kidding me? You’re voting for a reality star?” 

He brushes that off, noting that his detractors say: “You’re voting with your heart, not your head.”

He continued: “And maybe I am. But I’m entitled to, after what I’ve been through.”

Matt Hamilton can be reached at [email protected].