{"id":1877,"date":"2026-05-18T16:35:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T16:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/2026\/05\/18\/spencer-pratt-casts-himself-as-nonpartisan-republicans-are-steering-his-campaign\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T16:35:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T16:35:00","slug":"spencer-pratt-casts-himself-as-nonpartisan-republicans-are-steering-his-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/2026\/05\/18\/spencer-pratt-casts-himself-as-nonpartisan-republicans-are-steering-his-campaign\/","title":{"rendered":"Spencer Pratt Casts Himself as Nonpartisan. Republicans Are Steering His Campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\tLos Angeles mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt<\/a> is attempting to win in a liberal city run by a Democratic Party establishment. The town last elected a GOP candidate to its top job nearly three decades ago.<\/p>\n

\tFor this reason, Pratt, a registered Republican, has sought to cast himself as a nonpartisan figure. \u201cAll my supporters in Los Angeles are Democrats,\u201d he told<\/a> CBS. Everyone I know, my family, are all Democrats.\u201d To NBC he explained<\/a>, \u201cWhen you vote for Spencer Pratt on your ballot today or tonight, it\u2019ll say Spencer Pratt, community advocate because that\u2019s how I identify.\u201d He added<\/a>, \u201cI do not represent a party. I don\u2019t have a campaign manager. I don\u2019t have campaign consultants. There\u2019s no political party backing me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tStill, behind the scenes, Republicans are steering his campaign. Its headquarters, according to city disclosure filings, is a boutique tax service agency run by the wife of former GOP congressman Brian Bilbray in Imperial Beach, a small town in San Diego County just north of the U.S. border. Their daughter, a former Republican Party delegate, is Pratt\u2019s treasurer, with a listed email identifying an entity called \u201cBB Campaigns\u201d which has no discernible public footprint.<\/p>\n

\tSince leaving office in 2001, Bilbray has been paid millions of dollars over the years by Los Angeles County to lobby the federal government, per OpenSecrets<\/a>. It\u2019s common for a large Democratic government entity to work with former elected Republicans to leverage their relationships with party members \u2014 especially committee chairs, money appropriators and agency officials \u2014 to advocate for everything from infrastructure funding and transportation grants to disaster relief and regulatory carve-outs.<\/p>\n

\tPratt\u2019s campaign fundraising events, including intimate April get-togethers held in Beverly Hills and Mandeville Canyon, have been organized in part by Pluvious Group. It\u2019s a L.A.-based political consulting firm which, according to public records, has worked on behalf of a slew of right-wing figures, from President Donald Trump and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton to U.S. Rep Mike Garcia, whose district is just north of Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

\tPluvious also helped elect Nathan Hochman as Los Angeles D.A. in 2024. Hochman, who won as an independent in that race, had previously lost as a Republican two years earlier in the race to be California Attorney General.<\/p>\n

\tGeorge Gascon, a progressive who Hochman beat to become D.A., denounced Pluvious when he was first running for that office in 2019. He noted<\/a> the firm\u2019s work on behalf of Trump as well as its place at \u201cthe center of a money laundering scheme\u201d during one state-level race which, the Sacramento Bee <\/em>explained<\/a> in 2016, \u201callowed the original donors to conceal their identities in filings and avoid exceeding campaign contribution limits.\u201d (California\u2019s Fair Political Practices Commission found that the firm set up the illegal donations and was aware of the plot.)<\/p>\n

\tIncumbent mayor Karen Bass currently holds the lead in polls for the June 2 election. Pratt and progressive L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman are vying for the second slot to make the Nov. 3 runoff. She has called<\/a> him a \u201cMAGA Republican.\u201d He has referred<\/a> to her as a \u201cRamanchurian Candidate,\u201d in reference to the 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate<\/em> about a political puppet.<\/p>\n

\tLittle is known about Pratt\u2019s campaign organization. His spokesperson \u2014 who has worked for him and his wife Heidi Montag long before he announced his candidacy in January \u2014 didn\u2019t respond to THR<\/em>\u2019s inquiry about the identities of its key staffers and consultants.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Los Angeles mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt is attempting to win in a liberal city run by a Democratic Party establishment. The town last elected a GOP candidate to its top job nearly three decades ago. For this reason, Pratt, a registered Republican, has sought to cast himself as a nonpartisan figure. \u201cAll my supporters in Los Angeles are Democrats,\u201d he told CBS. Everyone I know, my family, are all Democrats.\u201d To NBC he explained, \u201cWhen you vote for Spencer Pratt on your ballot today or tonight, it\u2019ll say Spencer Pratt, community advocate because that\u2019s how I identify.\u201d He added, \u201cI do not represent a party. I don\u2019t have a campaign […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1878,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,28,54,977],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hollywood","category-news","category-politics-news","category-spencer-pratt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}