Spencer Pratt held second place in the Los Angeles mayoral race for days after Election Night, until California's glacial mail-in ballot count buried him. On June 11, nine days after polls closed, the former reality television star broke his silence with a pointed social media post: "Are they done counting yet?"
The four-word jab landed on a raw nerve. Pratt, a registered Republican who entered the race after losing his $3 million home in last year's Palisades fire, had spent months hammering incumbent Democrat Mayor Karen Bass over her wildfire response and the city's homelessness crisis. On Election Night, June 2, he told supporters he was confident he would make the runoff. He was right to feel that way, at the time.
But as California officials kept tallying mail-in ballots, which voters were allowed to send until 8 p.m. on Election Day, progressive City Council member Nithya Raman, who had appeared to be in a distant third place on election night, steadily climbed. By Sunday she had overtaken Pratt. By Monday night, the Associated Press called it: Raman, not Pratt, would advance to a November runoff against Bass under California's top-two system, the Daily Mail reported.
Pratt's candidacy was never conventional. The former star of MTV's *The Hills* announced his run after watching his Palisades home burn while Bass faced withering criticism for her absence during the disaster. The LA Times reported that Bass had been at an embassy cocktail party in Ghana when the fires were raging.
That backdrop gave Pratt an opening few reality television figures would ever get. He ran as a populist outsider, repeatedly attacking Bass for the city's homeless problem and the wildfire response. His campaign drew an unusual coalition of Hollywood names willing to cross political lines. Kelsey Grammer told Fox News Digital that Pratt was "the only guy that's a real option." Dennis Quaid, asked why he backed Pratt, told Fox simply: "Why? What are you talking about? Why? Just look around, man."
Katharine McPhee and David Foster threw Pratt a fundraiser earlier this year. Paris Hilton, Selma Blair, and Diplo all posted supportive comments on his social media. Bill Maher endorsed Pratt's bid, calling him "authentic", a word not typically associated with reality television alumni, but one that captured the mood of a city fed up with its political class.
President Donald Trump endorsed Pratt as well, adding national weight to a local race already drawing outsized attention.
On the night of June 2, Pratt and wife Heidi Montag gathered with family members and supporters at Don Antonio's, a Mexican restaurant, for a private watch party. Early returns showed Pratt surging past his Democratic rival, and the mood was bullish.
"She knows it's on," Pratt said of Bass that night. "I hope she's ready. I literally could not be more excited."
Raman, by contrast, appeared emotional while addressing her own supporters, she seemed to be staring at a distant third-place finish. Democrats outnumber Republicans in LA County three to one, and Raman had entered the race in February just hours before the filing deadline. Backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, she looked like a long shot even within her own party's left flank.
Then the mail-in ballots started arriving.
California's election rules allow mail-in votes to be sent as late as 8 p.m. on Election Day, and the counting stretched for days. Sunday's updated tallies showed Raman pulling ahead of Pratt. Monday night, the AP made it official. The November runoff would pit Raman against Bass, two Democrats, no Republican.
The slow count did not go unnoticed at the federal level. President Trump sent a top Justice Department official to Los Angeles to oversee the counting nearly a week before Pratt's Thursday post. Trump raised concerns about the integrity of the process as late-counted ballots flipped early Republican leads across the ballot.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched California elections in recent cycles. Early in-person and early-arriving mail ballots often skew one direction; the late-arriving mail ballots, counted over days or weeks, skew another. The result is a slow-motion shift that can reverse Election Night outcomes entirely.
For Pratt's supporters, the frustration was specific: a candidate who led on election night watched his position erode over nine days of counting, in a state where the rules governing ballot receipt deadlines and processing timelines heavily favor the party that dominates mail-in voting infrastructure.
The November runoff now offers Los Angeles voters a choice between Bass, the embattled incumbent, and Raman, a progressive council member aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America. The organization has seen recent success nationally, Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral race with DSA backing and easily won the general election in November.
For LA residents who wanted an alternative to the city's progressive establishment, the options have narrowed to zero. Bass, who faced bipartisan criticism over her wildfire response and the homelessness crisis, now faces a challenger running to her left. Taxpayers and fire victims who rallied behind Pratt's outsider campaign are left without a candidate in the general election.
The Hollywood split over the Bass challenge underscored how deeply the Palisades fire had shaken the city's political alignments. Celebrities who rarely wade into local politics took sides publicly. But celebrity endorsements and viral social media presence could not overcome the structural math of a deep-blue county where mail-in ballots arrive for days after the polls close.
Pratt, for his part, does not sound like a man retreating. His "Are they done counting yet?" post drew immediate engagement from supporters, and the backlash he received from late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for his loss only seemed to sharpen the sense among his base that the political and media establishment wanted him gone.
Pratt's campaign was easy to dismiss as a celebrity stunt. But his core message, that Los Angeles is failing its residents, that the wildfire response was a disgrace, that the homeless crisis has been met with excuses rather than action, resonated well beyond his reality television fan base. Enough voters put him in second place on Election Night to prove that.
The question now is not whether Pratt was a serious candidate. It is whether a system that counts ballots for more than a week after polls close, in a jurisdiction where one party holds a three-to-one registration advantage in mail-in-heavy voting, can ever produce a result that feels legitimate to the losing side.
When the rules let a distant third-place finisher on election night leapfrog into the runoff over nine days of counting, voters are entitled to ask the same question Pratt asked: Are they done counting yet? And if not, why not?
