the edit, vol. 35
the price of attention
A campaign video posted to X in early May shows the Hollywood sign on fire. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass appears in Joker makeup. Governor Gavin Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris feast at a candlelit table while a Batman-like figure moves through the streets fighting armed agents. The video is entirely AI-generated. It has been viewed more than five million times. It is currently among the most-watched pieces of campaign communication in the Los Angeles mayoral race, and its purpose is to support Spencer Pratt, a former reality television star whose home burned down in the January 2025 Palisades Fire and who has now polled, in surveys this month, between 22 and 30 percent — with two surveys placing the race within margin of error — in a city where his party is outnumbered three to one. On June 2, Los Angeles will hold its mayoral primary. The polling suggests Pratt is likely to advance to a November runoff. The structural question this race raises is not about Pratt himself. It is about what kind of campaign has now become competitive in a major American city, and what that says about the relationship between political rhetoric and the constituencies that rhetoric is actually for.
the audience and the electorate
Los Angeles has approximately 2.1 million registered voters. Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by roughly three to one. The last Republican mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan, left office in 2001. In November 2022, Karen Bass defeated billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who spent more than $100 million of his own fortune on his campaign — by some calculations, $176 per vote received — by a margin of more than 46,000 ballots. Caruso ran on a platform centered on visible disorder, homelessness, and crime. He lost.
This is the electorate Spencer Pratt is now competing for. By his campaign's own description, however, his audience is substantially larger. Pratt entered the race with more than five million social media followers across X, Meta, and TikTok, accumulated over roughly two decades as a reality television personality. His mobile-home campaign ad, posted to X in late April, drew more than 10 million views. The AI-generated Bass-as-Joker video has drawn more than five million. His campaign communications routinely reach audiences in the millions. The number of votes cast in the 2022 Los Angeles mayoral general election was approximately 880,000.
The gap between the audience watching this campaign and the electorate that will vote on it is not incidental. It is, increasingly, the central fact about how the campaign functions.
the toolkit
The rhetorical and visual toolkit Pratt is deploying is recognizable. It includes AI-generated attack content depicting opponents in unflattering or surreal contexts. It includes viral grievance video built around personal disaster and institutional blame. It includes the common sense framing — Pratt has rebranded himself the "look around" candidate, urging Angelenos to "open their eyes" to what he describes as a city of "drug addicts" and lawlessness. It includes the deployment of specific policy levers as signature commitments. Pratt has pledged to use California's Senate Bill 43, the 2023 law that expanded the definition of "gravely disabled" under the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act to include severe substance use disorder, to compel people with addiction or mental illness into mandatory treatment. Disability Rights California and other advocacy organizations have publicly warned against local officials attempting to use the law as a broad mechanism for clearing homeless encampments, noting that its statutory criteria require severe clinical impairment rather than visible disorder.
The toolkit also includes a documented operational layer beneath the campaign's public face. Pratt has repeatedly described himself as nonpartisan. "I do not represent a party," he told NBC. "All my supporters in Los Angeles are Democrats," he told CBS. A May 2026 investigation by The Hollywood Reporter found that Pratt's campaign headquarters is a tax services office in Imperial Beach, San Diego County, operated by the wife of former Republican Congressman Brian Bilbray. His treasurer is Bilbray's daughter, a former Republican Party delegate. The campaign's online fundraising runs through Anedot, a payment processor widely used by Republican campaigns, and Revv, a platform co-founded by a former Republican National Committee chief digital officer whose largest client was Donald Trump. The Hollywood Reporter also reported that Pratt's campaign has paid more than $60,000 to the executive director of America First California, the state chapter of a MAGA-aligned advocacy organization founded by former Trump advisors. Pratt has confirmed that he is a registered Republican and that he voted for Donald Trump in 2024. On May 20, 2026, Trump publicly endorsed Pratt's candidacy, telling reporters "I heard he's a big MAGA person.”
These are not characterizations. They are filings and disclosures. The question they raise is not whether Pratt is a Republican; he is. The question is what it means that the campaign's stated identity and its operational infrastructure point in different directions, and that the gap between them has not, so far, been a barrier to his polling rise.
the inheritance
The components of Pratt's campaign — the AI-generated attack content, the visible-disorder framing, the celebrity-as-outsider credential, the "common sense" rejection of expertise — were not invented for this race. Each has been refined through national campaigns over the past decade, and political science research on American campaign communication has documented their concentration on one side of the political spectrum.
On the AI-generated content specifically, the pattern is recent and identifiable. In October 2025, the National Republican Senatorial Committee posted a fully AI-generated deepfake of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, using his real words about the government shutdown but inserting them into a fabricated likeness. In February 2026, the Loudoun County Republican Committee in Virginia released three AI-generated ads showing newly elected Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger appearing to say lines like "working hard to bring in commie socialist Marxism, free stuff for illegals, gun grabs and erasing gender norms." She had said no such thing. In March 2026, the South Carolina lieutenant governor, Pamela Evette, posted a fully AI-generated campaign video depicting her primary opponent, the state's attorney general, rejecting a phone call from President Trump. Also in March, the NRSC released an AI-generated video of Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico appearing to read his own old social media posts on camera — a video Talarico had never filmed.
A Reuters investigation published March 28, 2026 confirmed that AI-generated content is now an active and increasingly dominant tool in 2026 midterm advertising, and that, as of publication, there was no federal regulation constraining its use in political messaging. The pattern visible in those investigations — the candidate or party deploying the technology, the candidate or party targeted by it — is asymmetric. The Pratt campaign's Bass-as-Joker video, in this context, is not anomalous. It is municipal.
The same is true of the rhetorical structure. The framing of a city as a wasteland, of its elected officials as either malicious or absent, of expertise as suspect and "common sense" as sufficient, of an outsider unburdened by political experience as therefore qualified — this is a template that political science researchers, including Lilliana Mason and the team of Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, have documented as a defining feature of post-2015 Republican campaign communication at the federal level. The novelty is not that the template exists. The novelty is that it has now been deployed, with measurable polling effect, in a nonpartisan municipal race in a city whose electorate has, in every recent election, declined to endorse it.
texas, may 26
The most direct evidence that the toolkit can convert audience into outcome arrived in the Texas Republican primary runoff for Senate on May 26, 2026, one week before the Los Angeles primary. State Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated four-term incumbent John Cornyn. Cornyn had been backed by the institutional infrastructure of the Senate Republican Conference, which poured significant resources into his reelection. Paxton, in the first quarter of 2026, had raised $2.2 million; his eventual Democratic opponent had raised more than $27 million in the same period. Paxton had been impeached by the Texas House in 2023 on charges including bribery and abuse of office (he was acquitted by the Texas Senate). He had been indicted on securities fraud charges. His campaign was, by every traditional metric, structurally disadvantaged.
On May 19, 2026, one week before the runoff, Donald Trump endorsed him. Paxton won.
The Texas Tribune described his coalition as a "MAGA base that sees him as a victim of political persecution in much the same light as Trump." The campaign was sustained, throughout, by an audience-and-attention economy that operated largely outside the institutional channels of Republican Party fundraising and field operation. Paxton trailed in money the entire race. He won anyway.
The structural parallel to Pratt is not perfect — Paxton was running in a closed Republican primary, Pratt is running in a nonpartisan open primary in a Democratic city — but the underlying mechanism is the same. A campaign that would have been disqualified by traditional metrics survives, and competes, because the constituency it cultivates online is no longer the same constituency that the institutional gatekeepers used to filter for. The audience funds the campaign. The audience generates the polling. The audience produces the donor interest and the media coverage and the institutional infrastructure that then translate, sometimes, into votes.
what the primary will measure
There is a version of this story that is not new. Celebrity candidates have been a feature of American politics for a long time — Ronald Reagan, Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Franken, Jerry Springer, and Donald Trump himself all crossed from entertainment into elected office, with varying degrees of preparation and varying degrees of success. Caitlyn Jenner ran for governor of California in 2021 and lost decisively. Clay Aiken ran for Congress twice in North Carolina and lost both times. The celebrity-to-politics pipeline is old.
What is new is the specific architecture of the contemporary version: the AI-generated content, the audience-electorate decoupling, the rhetorical template refined through national campaigns now arriving at the municipal level, the operational infrastructure that produces an "outsider" candidate as a deliverable product. The question this raises is not whether Spencer Pratt will be the next mayor of Los Angeles. The polling suggests it remains unlikely; Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman remain strong, and the 3-to-1 Democratic registration advantage in the city is a real structural constraint. The question is what it means that he is competitive at all — that a campaign whose primary product is content for an audience that does not include its electorate has reached the point of forcing a major American city's mayoral race into a likely November runoff.
When campaigns optimize for audience rather than electorate, the political incentives shift in ways that affect governance regardless of who wins. The audience is national. The accountability is local. The two are no longer the same constituency, and they are no longer subject to the same constraints.
On June 2, 2026, Los Angeles will produce one measurement. The more durable measurement is already in: the toolkit has traveled. It works whether the city it describes matches the city it depicts. What that means for the relationship between political rhetoric and political accountability — for who campaigns are now actually speaking to, and what they need to be true to keep speaking — is the question this race has already answered, regardless of how the primary lands.
