TV host Billy Bush can see similarities between Spencer Pratt and former president Barack Obama.
“He’s been positive as can be from the beginning,” Bush, 54, told Los Angeles’ ABC affiliate outside Pratt’s election night celebration on Tuesday, June 2. “He’s a manifester. He thinks he’s closing 50 percent tonight [and] that would be a small miracle at this point, but it looks to me like, better than not, it will be Karen Bass and Spencer Pratt going through the summer and into the fall. Then you got a situation where this is a guy that knows how to communicate with people.”
According to Bush, “the last time” individuals saw a “community organizer bring hope and excitement to a large populous” like Pratt, 42, was Obama’s 2008 first bid for president.
“Spencer Pratt has that ability to connect with people, and he’s done it,” Bush said.
Pratt announced in January that he planned to run for L.A. mayor. After the city’s primaries on Tuesday, multiple outlets reported that incumbent Bass, 72, would face Pratt in a runoff election in November. As of Wednesday, June 3, The New York Times reported that Bass had received 34.8 percent of votes to Pratt’s 30.4 percent with only 63 percent of the ballots counted.
“LA is coming back,” Pratt wrote via Instagram on Tuesday.
While Pratt has no previous political experience, he ran on a platform supporting the unhoused population and wildfire recovery efforts. (Pratt and his wife, Heidi Montag, lost their home in the January 2025 wildfires, as did the reality TV star’s parents.)
“When I announced [my run] in front of thousands of fire victims, everyone cheered so much that it kicked off a new path of being taken seriously,” Pratt exclusively told Us Weekly in a cover story published last month. “As I go to all of these communities and meet with community leaders, they just have so much faith in me.”
He continued, “I truly never imagined I would actually probably [become] the mayor. I just wanted somebody to [tell] the truth, and I wanted to have that platform as a candidate against [Bass] to get the truth. You can just get away with lying if you don’t have somebody saying that’s not true.”
Pratt further revealed why he believes that he is the best candidate for the job.
“My No. 1 qualification is I’m not corrupt. I have humility in that I know that I’ve never run a city, so I’m going to put a team around me of the smartest, most talented people,” he told Us. “We need to bring in people who aren’t just bureaucratic city-entrenched people. We need people from the private sector who are running major corporations with bigger budgets to advise and help us become a more profitable city. My biggest skill is being an actual outsider.”
