Spencer Pratt says he doesn't want celebrity endorsements in his LA mayoral campaign, loves attacks

Spencer Pratt, the reality television star who rose to fame on "The Hills," is making an unconventional pitch to Los Angeles voters as he campaigns for mayor of the nation's second-largest city: don't expect him to be courting A-list endorsements.

In a Thursday appearance on Fox News' "Gutfeld!," Pratt said he has no interest in celebrity backing and would rather win over what he calls "the moms and the animal lovers in LA."

"I actually don't want celebrities to come out and endorse me," he told host Greg Gutfeld. "I don't want anybody to endorse me except for the moms and the animal lovers in LA. That's my entire vote."

Pratt added that he is unfazed when famous figures attack him on social media or in public.

"I love when the celebrities attack me because then I'm like, oh, I am doing so well," he said.

Despite that posture, Pratt has drawn notable support from Hollywood figures, including Dennis Quaid, Paris Hilton, Los Angeles Lakers owner Jeanie Buss, singer Katharine McPhee, and musician David Foster. He has also claimed that actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx have privately endorsed his campaign, though neither has done so publicly. On the other side of the race, actor Samuel L. Jackson and Star Wars director J.J. Abrams have contributed to the campaign of incumbent Mayor Karen Bass.

Pratt, a self-identified Republican running in deeply Democratic Los Angeles, has nevertheless built a fundraising operation that outpaces those of Bass and progressive challenger Nithya Raman. A UC Berkeley-Los Angeles Times poll of likely voters shows Bass at 26%, Raman at 25%, and Pratt at 22%, placing the political newcomer within striking distance.

The primary election is scheduled for June 2.

Much of Pratt's appeal, he argues, comes from the voters he says are most directly affected by conditions on LA's streets: parents navigating sidewalks with strollers.

"This is my favorite thing the internet says. They're like, he's so big on the internet, but is he big in the streets? Yes," Pratt said. "The people I'm surging with are the people having to step over the naked drug addicts and step into human poop to get their $20 matcha."

He described his core supporters as "the moms across Los Angeles who have to use their strollers around fentanyl, needles, and naked drug-addict zombies with machetes that maybe will chop a limb off."

Pratt has built much of his campaign around criticism of Bass and Raman, particularly over the response to the January 2025 wildfires and the city's ongoing homelessness crisis. He launched his mayoral bid in January with a pledge to unseat Bass, accusing city leadership of "criminal negligence" in its handling of the fires, which destroyed thousands of structures in the Pacific Palisades and surrounding neighborhoods.

Pratt, who said his $3.8 million Palisades home was lost in the fires, claimed he was living in a trailer in the aftermath, though media reports later indicated he had been staying at a hotel in Bel-Air.

His campaign has drawn attention for its aggressive tone and viral advertising style. Pratt told Gutfeld that despite his conservative leanings, "all" of his supporters are Democrats and framed his candidacy around "common sense" rather than partisan ideology.

"I identify as the 'look around' candidate," he said. "You look around and see with your own eyes what I'm saying, and it's true. And that's why I'm going to win, because my opponents just lie, and they've had 10 years combined that they've created everything that they are looking around and seeing. So I would say, no more of this."

On the wildfires, he told Gutfeld he believes some Bass voters are simply uninformed about what happened.

"Yeah, there's definitely lunatics," he said of Bass supporters whose homes were not damaged. "Their houses didn't burn down, but they could have been saved by the U.S. Forest Service, who came in to save the day, Chief Bobby Garcia on the 8th."

"These people have convinced themselves that Palisades burned down because of climate change, and these imaginary hurricane winds that did not exist," Pratt claimed. "So for them, they go, 'Oh, it's the winds and it was the climate change. That's what it was. It wasn't that Mayor Bass was drinking in Ghana and defunded the firefighters by the 17 million.'"

Wind gusts during the January 2025 fires reached as high as 86 mph, according to a Los Angeles Fire Department report, though Pratt disputes the role wind played in the disaster's severity.

On homelessness, Pratt called conditions in parts of Los Angeles "a horror movie" and called for mandatory medical treatment for people using fentanyl and methamphetamine on the streets.

"We're going to get all your tax money that these two have been stealing to put these naked drug addict zombies — that are going number two and number one in front of your houses, your businesses, maybe trying to machete you or stab you — we're gonna get them mandatory medical treatment," he said. "Not an empty bed. They need help to get off fentanyl and super meth."

Whether that message resonates with enough Los Angeles voters to overcome a two-term Democratic incumbent will be tested when ballots are counted in June.