Socialist city councilwoman Nithya Raman has ousted incumbent Mayor Karen Bass in Los Angeles, and the only person who accurately diagnosed the city's political rot was a reality TV star who finished third in the primary.
Spencer Pratt ran as a populist outsider and lost, but his read on the race — that Bass destroyed the city and Raman won't save it — is the honest account that establishment outlets won't give you. When a former cast member of The Hills is doing the accountability work that the LA press corps refuses to do, the failure isn't his. It's theirs.
NBC News projects Raman as the winner with 52.1% of the vote to Bass's 47.9%, with 76% of ballots counted. Raman holds roughly a 34,000-vote lead. The Associated Press has not yet called the race, and Bass has not conceded.
NBC News framed Raman's win as a "rapid political ascent" by a challenger who "railed against the broken status quo." That's a generous read. Raman was a city councilwoman who endorsed Bass before launching a last-second run in February. She isn't an outsider. She's an insider who saw an opening after Bass botched the worst wildfire in LA history.
Bass was in Ghana for a presidential inauguration while the Pacific Palisades burned in January 2025. The blaze destroyed thousands of homes and killed 12 people. NBC News noted the scrutiny; the New York Post gave it less oxygen. But Pratt — a Palisades resident who lived through the fire — named it directly. "You simply can't destroy a city as much as she did," he wrote on X. "She played with fire, and she got fired."
Pratt didn't celebrate Raman's win. He called her a "moron" and deemed the election a "humiliation ritual." "Nithya won't offer any reprieve, though," he wrote. "She's a moron and the city will continue to decline. The real loser today is LA, but we were gonna tank with either candidate."
He's probably right. Raman is a Democratic Socialists of America member who will join New York City's Zohran Mamdani and D.C.'s Janeese Lewis-George as socialists running major American cities. NBC noted she "touted her progressive bona fides" while stressing "independence" from DSA — a distinction without a difference. Raman also agreed with left-wing influencer Hasan Piker that Israel committed genocide against Palestinians, a position Bass rejected at a September forum co-hosted by the Jewish Federation Los Angeles.
Pratt's advice to Angelenos: keep the pressure on. He called Raman "pillow-soft" and said she can be "bullied into shifting positions." Combined with federal intervention from figures like Bill Essayli, he argued, the damage could be mitigated.
His closing shot was aimed at the voters who let this happen: "Take the primaries more seriously from now on, yeah?" When the general election is a choice between two Democrats who both answer to the same machine, the primary is the only fight that matters. Pratt ran that fight. The press ignored it. LA will live with the consequences.
The 2028 Olympics will now be staged under a socialist mayor in a city that can't keep the lights on for the people who already live there. That's not a framing problem. That's a fact.
