Spencer Pratt, a candidate in the Los Angeles mayoral race, fields interviews during an election night event Tuesday, June 2, 2026, in Los Angeles. Mother Jones illustration; Jill Connelly/AP
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There’s a specter haunting Los Angeles, and it’s Spencer Pratt. A few days after the former reality TV heel turned Republican candidate lost his second-place spot in the Los Angeles mayoral election to progressive Nithya Raman, he released a statement and video saying that, unfettered from the bonds of actually winning, he has now entered “phase III” of a “war” on corruption and his political opponents.
“You enjoy your worthless meetings at City Hall,” he declared. “You think your election is going to stop me. If you want to stop me, you’re going to have to fucking kill me.”
For a few weeks, Pratt’s war seemed to entail tweeting angrily about Communism, defining it as broadly, flexibly and self-referentially as possible. Communists, he tweeted, were responsible for the demise of Los Angeles’ signature Art Deco building style, for a supposed war on landlords, for the destruction of history and erasure of Little Italy from a map of immigrant neighborhoods produced by the New York mayor’s office, and for making Los Angeles more vulnerable to a coming earthquake. In the midst of all this Red-scaring, Pratt also promised to release unspecified information during the general elections that would damage either incumbent Mayor Karen Bass or Raman, declaring, “We have some recordings of one of your exalted candidates doing and saying something that would make her resign in shame.” Thus far, Pratt has not released any compromising information on either candidate.
In time, though, Pratt has begun returning to the approach that has served him well since launching his nascent political career, which replaced his irrelevance as the lesser-known half of a reality TV couple in The Hills. The approach is simple: talking more and more overtly about voter fraud. Pratt, who soon after his loss posted a tweet implying that homeless people could have been paid to vote for Raman, suggested again on July 8 that fraud could have played a role in his election, while stopping short of definitively saying that it had taken place.
“Whether or not there is widespread fraud occurring, there certainly could be,” he declared in a 9-minute video on July 8, which he posted to both X and Instagram. He also claimed that “dead people” were still on the voter rolls, that organizations supporting Raman had been “hoarding” ballots, and that California laws prevented anyone from taking action to prevent voter fraud. “It’s like a bank heist, but California has no law that you can lock the bank vault, you’re not allowed to have security cameras, and you can’t count the money inside the vault,” he declared. “Robbing the bank is still 100% illegal, but there’s no way to stop it from happening.” Over AI-generated images of a zombie-like figure helping someone fill out a ballot, he also accused “socialist street animals” of going “door-to-door and violat[ing] the ballot harvesting laws.”
As unserious and posting-heavy as this all seemed, Pratt’s July 8 video garnered more than 4 million views on X alone. And by July 9, his self-described war had brought him to the Oval Office, where he released a photo of himself, his child, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and another, as-yet-unidentified man sitting across from President Donald Trump. Neither Pratt nor Trump has disclosed what they discussed in the meeting; both Pratt and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
In what has proved to be a busy month, Pratt also found time to travel with his wife and fellow former reality TV star Heidi Montag to Hawaii, where she shot a music video. Montag and Pratt are pursuing very different public profiles; while he fulminates about fraud, she’s stuck with video promotion and glamorous studio portraits of herself. She hasn’t weighed in on his claims.
Reality TV notables Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt are seen out and about while on vacation on June 14, 2026, in Hawaii.MEGA/GC/Getty
Days before his meeting with Trump, Pratt also announced the creation of something he’s calling “the War Foundation,” which is unrelated to the addiction recovery group of the same name. The organization, he declared in a tweet, will “win the war against political corruption with innovative new media” and “restore common sense and roll back the long march of socialism through our vital institutions.” Using “hard-hitting media, investigative research, educational campaigns, and strategic partnerships,” the organization will achieve those goals, he added.
Put simply, Pratt is joining three overlapping movements at once. He’s dipping a toe into the world of election denial—while still carefully couching any suggestions of fraud in “could be” language. Meanwhile, he’s also joining, with much more force, a group of self-styled right-wing “new media” figures, as well as the fever swamp of the anti-Communist far right—which both dates back to the John Birch Society and is as recent as Trump’s sudden emphasis on “communists,” as the root of all ills, following the frightening-to-him victories of a plethora of progressive and Democratic Socialist candidates. All these groups have enthusiastically embraced Pratt as the newest symbol of a stolen election, and as part of a continued campaign to paint California as a liberal-controlled hellscape, dominated by fraud and mired in poverty. And their solutions to this dystopia are, unsurprisingly, extreme.
He has some strong allies in these fights. “We need to be at every precinct,” former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declared at an event called the “Fraud Fighter Summit” on June 16, which was held by Unauthorized, which describes itself as a “candidate consultancy” for “grassroots Constitutionalists candidates.”
“Whether you’re armed or not depends upon your state laws. ICE has to be there. Or we’re going to have a situation exactly like what happened in Los Angeles, where they sat there and stole the election from Spencer Pratt, who should be on the ballot in November.”
“Whether you’re armed or not depends upon your state laws,” Bannon added. “ICE has to be there. Or we’re going to have a situation exactly like what happened in Los Angeles, where they sat there and stole the election from Spencer Pratt, who should be on the ballot in November.” On July 10, pardoned January 6 defendant and white supremacist Jake Lang held a rally supposedly in support of Pratt near LA’s Union Station. Demonstrators held signs that read “Elect Spencer Pratt,” “Spencer Pratt Can Save L.A. From Communists,” and just for good measure, “Deport Nithya Raman.” The rally quickly grew chaotic and dangerous, with counter-protesters chasing and punching Lang, while his supporters reportedly used pepper spray and stun-guns on counterprotesters.
Both Pratt’s supporters and an army of self-styled journalists have also recently descended on Skid Row, which has been an epicenter for the city’s unsheltered for the last 100 years. Skid Row is often host to some of the most abject human misery imaginable, and the far-right content creators have gone there to showcase just how hellish they consider California to be under liberal rule. It’s also where a 64-year-old woman named Brenda Lee Armstrong recently admitted in a plea agreement that she paid unhoused people to register to vote, a case brought by a Trump-appointed US attorney after he saw a video exposing her conduct by conservative sting video-maker James O’Keefe.
In Pratt’s case, “investigators” apparently working with him and calling themselves “the Pratt Pack” went to Skid Row to interview people who seemed to be unhoused. The New York Post happily highlighted the many ballots sent to the Skid Row area that they claimed to have found, adding, “but few there actually voted in the Los Angeles mayoral race.” (This does not prove Pratt’s implication that homeless people were paid to vote for Raman; in fact, it does the opposite.)
All of this, says Kayla Gogarty, is part of a “feedback loop.” Gogarty is a research director at Media Matters who recently wrote and oversaw the organization’s report about right-wing media’s response to the Los Angeles mayoral primary. The loop, Gogarty says, begins with content creators “providing content that is then amplified by right-wing media.” At that point, she notes, the Trump administration will “take certain actions or advocate for certain policies,” which are then covered by right-wing media. The content is “largely around fraud,” Gogarty says, especially with the midterms approaching. “In March, we saw them descend on Skid Row when Trump was making a push on the SAVE America Act,” she says. Now, with the midterms approaching, “they started reupping some of these claims.”
Bannon is the “most extreme” we’ve heard, Gogarty adds, with his suggestion that armed people should head to voting precincts if state law allows. “But we’ve seen others talking about the National Guard, the military, or ICE being at the polls. We’ve also seen far-right election deniers pushing for Trump to take additional executive action,” which includes declaring a national emergency or pushing for an executive order imposing more sweeping action against alleged fraud.
Defeated Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt speaks to the media outside of an election night party at Don Antonio’s Mexican restaurant.Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times/Getty
It’s a crowded field, but for Pratt, as a failed candidate willing to engage in conspiracy theories about his loss, there is a bounty of potential opportunities for self-promotion. Gogarty says that Pratt could be following in the footsteps of far-right sting videomaker James O’Keefe, calling his recent content blitz “very reminiscent” of some of O’Keefe’s tactics, who, as Gogarty puts it, produces “often misleading and inflammatory content to advance a certain narrative.”
The simple willingness to engage in voter fraud allegations can, of course, be valuable politically under Donald Trump. Indeed, it has become a prerequisite for anyone appointed by Trump—from the head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to lower-level political appointees—to assert that the 2020 election was stolen and that former President Joe Biden lost. Pratt could be traversing a path followed by people like election denier Kari Lake, who lost her Congressional election in Arizona in 2024. While she never won elected office, she’s now heading Donald Trump’s version of the United States Agency for Global Media and has been nominated to serve as the Ambassador to Jamaica. Other current administration officials also came from the election-denying right-wing media sphere, including FBI Director Kash Patel, who has engaged in stolen 2020 election claims, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who claimed in 2021 that the 2020 election was rigged using mail-in ballots.
Whatever Pratt chooses to do—become a new media figure, a voter fraud warrior, or retire to the life of a reality TV star once again—he “almost doesn’t need to stay involved,” Gogarty added. “He’ll be synonymous with the California primary and these voter fraud allegations.” Which means that for the midterms and in the 2028 presidential election, if the election-denier ecosystem has its way, California will become synonymous with fraud, at least as long as it’s politically expedient to do so.
