BOMBSHELL: New Poll Shows Karen Bass In TROUBLE As Pratt Closes…

When Spencer Pratt announced his candidacy for mayor of Los Angeles in early January, the political establishment laughed.

By the morning of May 29, they had stopped laughing.

A man best known for orchestrating drama on an MTV reality show is now running neck and neck with the incumbent mayor of the second-largest city in the United States, and the June 2 primary could send the entire race into a November runoff that no Democrat in this city can afford.

A new UC Berkeley-Los Angeles Times poll released Thursday shows Bass at 26 percent among likely voters, City Councilmember Nithya Raman at 25 percent, and Pratt at 22 percent in a shockingly tight three-way race.

Los Angeles mayoral elections are nonpartisan, and if no candidate wins more than 50 percent in Tuesday’s primary, the top two finishers advance to a November runoff.

This is not where Karen Bass was supposed to be.

Bass won the 2022 mayoral race with 55 percent of the vote against a well-funded Republican opponent and entered this cycle as an overwhelming favorite for a second term.

She had the institutional support of organized labor, the backing of the city’s political class, and the inherent advantage of incumbency in a city that has not elected a Republican mayor since 1993.

But incumbency has become a liability, and Bass has no one to blame but herself.

The story of Bass’s political collapse begins on January 7, 2025.

That morning, a catastrophic wind event swept through Los Angeles, and the Pacific Palisades fire exploded across one of the most densely populated and valuable residential neighborhoods in the country.

Neighborhoods burned.

Families fled.

Homes were reduced to ash in hours.

Karen Bass was not in Los Angeles.

She was 7,500 miles away in Ghana as the fires engulfed her city, sending residents fleeing for their lives.

She later blamed others for not telling her she “shouldn’t have gone on the trip.”

Among those who lost their homes in the fire was Spencer Pratt.

He and his wife, television personality Heidi Pratt, watched their Pacific Palisades home burn while their mayor was attending an international event on another continent.

Pratt told Fox and Friends in January that he never wanted to be mayor but felt he had no choice but to run after uncovering what he described as “criminal negligence” in the city’s fire preparedness and emergency response.

“I never wanted to be mayor,” he said.

“But once you uncover everything I have, these people in charge should have resigned.”

His campaign platform is not complicated, and that is precisely why it is resonating.

He is running on four issues: homelessness, crime, fire preparedness, and the cost of doing business in Los Angeles.

Pratt has argued that the city’s homelessness problem is fundamentally a drug addiction problem and has said he would use California’s SB 43 law to move people with severe addiction or mental illness into mandatory treatment.

“It’s not a homelessness problem, it’s a drug addiction problem,” he said.

He has also pitched himself as a pro-business candidate, promising to cut red tape for builders and push for stronger film tax credits to bring production back to Hollywood.

“If you don’t feel safe on the streets, people don’t go to restaurants,” Pratt said in a recent interview.

“Massachusetts has better tax credits than Hollywood,” he added.

That line lands particularly hard in a city whose entertainment industry has been bleeding productions to other states and countries for years, with studios chasing tax incentives from Georgia to the United Kingdom while Los Angeles politicians have done little to compete.

The political class has responded with contempt, and the contempt has only helped him.

Bass publicly mocked Pratt’s supporters at a recent campaign event, a move that generated significant backlash and played directly into the narrative that the mayor views ordinary Angelenos as beneath her.

Pratt responded by accusing Bass of violating election laws, escalating the public feud and keeping himself at the center of the news cycle at the worst possible time for the incumbent.

Among the Hollywood donor community, the reaction to the state of the race has been one of barely concealed despair.

“A continued mess,” lamented one top industry donor who has followed the race closely.

The implicit admission in that reaction is that the race Pratt is running, centered on the things that have actually made life in Los Angeles dramatically worse over the past decade, is a race the establishment does not know how to answer.

California Governor Gavin Newsom entered the race on Thursday, endorsing Bass in what her campaign is hoping will provide a consolidating jolt of establishment credibility just days before voters go to the polls.

It is a notable rescue operation from a governor whose own standing in Los Angeles is deeply complicated.

Newsom has been widely criticized for his handling of the wildfire recovery and the state’s broader response to homelessness and crime, and being seen as the establishment cavalry riding in to save an embattled incumbent is not necessarily the asset it once was.

The numbers tell a damning story for Bass.

A recent poll found that just 36 percent of voters totally approved of Bass’s job performance as mayor, while 61 percent disapproved.

That is a staggering disapproval rating for an incumbent in a city where Democrats hold every significant office.

It reflects not just frustration with a single mayor but with an entire governing coalition that has presided over exploding homelessness, rising crime, catastrophic fire mismanagement, and a cost of living that has pushed working families out of the city entirely.

Pratt’s trajectory in the polling has been dramatic.

Earlier this year, a UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs survey found Bass leading at 25 percent with Pratt at just 11 percent, already in second place in a crowded field.

As the campaign has progressed and Pratt has received more media coverage, including a CNBC appearance just days before the primary, his support has roughly doubled.

If that trajectory continues through the week of the election, a runoff is not just possible, it is likely.

Bass has the unions.

She has the governor.

She has the endorsements of virtually every institutional pillar of Los Angeles Democratic politics.

What she does not have is a convincing answer to the question every Angeleno is asking:

Why has this city gotten so much worse on your watch?

Until she has that answer, Spencer Pratt will keep climbing.