Spencer Pratt's LA Mayor Campaign Is Optimized For Attention, But Will It Get Votes?
Spencer Pratt is everywhere. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this is the early 2000s, but he seems to be creating a master class in how to capture attention in politics. The big question, though, is does this translate into electoral success?
Every political campaign has to do four things:
Earn votes
Raise money
Get attention
Upset the opponent
In the creator economy, this current era we find ourselves in where attention is the reserve currency, campaigns have a harder challenge where we can be really good at capturing attention and driving the conversation, but it doesn’t always correlate to electoral success. The political version of mistaking motion for progress.One of the things that makes politics particularly difficult compared to other enterprises is you can only vote once in an election and you can only vote in the place where you live. So intensity might feel good, but doesn’t always bode well. There is a big chasm between getting attention and getting elected.
Breaking The Pattern
Immediately we see that Spencer Pratt subverts expectations. He doesn’t speak or act like a politician. He certainly doesn’t have the sort of career that someone would expect from a typical political candidate. Because it’s surprising, because he can say, “I’m not a politician,” it makes us stop. It’s really easy to tune out when it all sounds the same, like when all politicians are just slightly different shades of beige. In this case, we have a real difference. Nobody outside of California would be paying attention to the LA mayor’s race if it weren’t for Spencer Pratt.
Tapping Into The “Leave Us Alone” Coalition
Spencer Pratt’s message is resonating with the “leave us alone” coalition, as Grover Norquist likes to call it. These are people who just want the government to leave them alone, and candidates on the right are most successful when they are able to activate this audience.
In the case of Los Angeles, these are voters who don’t want to be part of some sociological experiment. They just want to live their lives without homeless encampments or rampant crime and with functioning services like a fire department. Spencer Pratt, in his specific case of having a house that burned down in a fire that could probably have been mitigated by more common-sense policies and his rebuild is being tripped up by red tape, has found this “leave us alone” coalition and is using his campaign to activate it.
A Remix-Ready Message
The Pratt campaign also has a simple message that makes it easy to remix and adopt for his supporters: “Save LA” We’ve seen this before with “Make America Great Again” or “Yes We Can”. They also point to something bigger, but they’re not so rigid that they’re a policy prescription, and people feel like they can adopt them and make them their own.
The Pratt campaign even has posters that people can download and incorporate into their own social media.
Platforming Supporters
In the current era, campaigns are no longer simply platforms for their candidates but become venues for their supporters, their communities, their messages. We see this with Spencer Pratt’s AI-generated videos. They’re not coming from the campaign; they’re being made by supporters. It’s highly unlikely that any campaign would ever put out videos like this.
A couple of things are going on here:
The creators feel like they are a part of the campaign.
The campaign is promoting it.
More creators get involved, and there’s a small economic incentive within the creator economy for those people who are creating compelling content. That is different for the creatives who are making TV ads for the campaigns that follow different rules for paid media.
A Post-Partisan Campaign
Pratt himself is a registered Republican. But if you go to his campaign site, there is no mention of that designation. His campaign is avoiding partisan labels and topics that trigger the left-right divide. This is easier for someone running for an executive position, like mayor, where you’re not going to vote on legislation. He’s also helped by California’s unique electoral system.
Data + Story
The messaging coming out of the Pratt campaign is a mix of storytelling (what people individually experience) as well as data and facts. By weaving in big numbers, like the amount being spent on the homeless population of Los Angeles, with people’s lived experiences, his argument becomes more resonant. We’ve seen in some of our own research that combining logical arguments with very emotional topics can sometimes be the most persuasive.
Can He Win?
Now we turn to the question of whether he can win. Getting attention is great, but the winner of an election is not the person with the most views on social media or the most followers. It’s the person with the most votes. Sometimes those things are correlated, but not always.
Yes, he’s dominating the conversation, yes, he’s shaping the narrative, yes, he’s probably keeping the incumbent mayor up at night, but does that mean he’ll get the votes he needs to win?
Digital Infrastructure
Pratt clearly has significant digital infrastructure in place that is holding up to all of this attention. One thing that is interesting to me is that he has three donation platforms:
Anedot
Revv
eFundraising Connections
I don’t know why he’s using three systems, but they’re all doing different things for him. It’s clear that they’ve got the capacity to handle this attention.
Growing Opt-Ins
The social attention is really good, but the question is, does that turn into an owned audience? There’s clear focus on growing the opt-ins. When you sign up for his email list, you get a confirmation message and followup emails. He’s collecting mobile numbers from supporters as well. His campaign is turning attention into an opt-in audience that he can fundraise from, that he can mobilize, that he can recruit and turn out.
Where’s The Ground Game?
One thing that’s missing from Pratt’s social media is evidence of a ground game – that there are actual supporters on the ground who are attending events, who are knocking on doors, who are recruiting voters. This was, to be fair, a criticism that many in the Republican Party made against Donald Trump in 2016, and yet he won. Contrast this with someone like Zohran Mamdani, who made grassroots organizers a focus of his digital campaign.
The differences between Republicans and Democrats partially explains this. Republicans typically aren’t joiners – remember that “leave us alone” coalition. Democrats are more willing to go out and talk and be participating. Again, does it mean that that’s not going to work out for him? It’s just something that we currently don’t see evidence of.
Two Challenges
In the remaining weeks of the campaign, Spencer Pratt has two main challenges:
Education-based turnout. The 2022 mayoral primary was considered “high turnout” and just 30% of eligible voters participated. Pratt is tapping into Trump’s coalition of infrequent voters who turn out only in presidential years. That’s going to be the number one challenge: converting that attention into opt-ins and then converting that into turnout.
Credibility. He needs to convince voters that they aren’t wasting their votes on him. The more that there can be this sort of solidarity around Spencer Pratt, the better for him, because once you start seeing signs pop up around town, you realize that you’re not the only one who supports this candidate.
I personally think AI videos make campaigns feel less authentic and reduce the close connection between voters and candidates. However, your points about these videos being created by supporters and helping campaigns grow are reasonable. Thank you, good piece!