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MY SUBSTACK - When Spencer Pratt announced his campaign for mayor of Los Angeles, I did what a lot of people in this city did.
I rolled my eyes.
Pratt was a reality television villain from The Hills. A crystal salesman. A paparazzi-era internet personality whose entire brand was provocation and spectacle. He staged his announcement in January amid the ruins of the Palisades fire — standing before a sparse crowd in a faded Pacific Palisades t-shirt and ripped jeans, delivering a chaotic, highly animated speech that leaned heavily on his celebrity and his grievances. One local television station noted that some viewers “may even have thought it was a spoof.”
I wasn’t far from that reaction myself.
Politically, the campaign seemed even less plausible than it was culturally. Los Angeles is not merely Democratic. It is one of the defining centers of progressive politics and culture in the country. Pratt’s combative online style, his immediate embrace by right-wing influencers, his rhetoric about disorder and institutional failure — none of it seemed to match the political identity of the city. His campaign wasn’t just ridiculous. It was impossible. After all, this was Los Angeles. Solid blue.
But I had an uneasy feeling. I’d seen this movie before. The celebrity candidate who shouldn’t be taken seriously. The combative outsider who “doesn’t understand politics.” The crowds that the professionals kept explaining away. We watched that film play out nationally, and it didn’t end the way the smart people predicted.
Then came the NBC4 debate. Then the polling. Then something harder to explain. The voters responding to Pratt weren’t conservative activists or MAGA diehards. They were affluent Democratic women. Hollywood liberals. Former Obama supporters. People who had watched The Hills and initially followed the campaign ironically — and then found themselves, to their own apparent surprise, genuinely drawn in.
What the hell was happening here?
At the NBC4 debate, while Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman did what I likely would have done as a candidate — cited statistics and referenced policy frameworks — Pratt told stories. He talked about losing his home in the fires, and about his fury at the officials he held responsible. He talked about moms — thousands of them, he said — who didn’t feel safe on the street regardless of what the crime statistics showed. He talked about his friend Rachel, who works downtown and can no longer eat lunch outside because her colleagues are afraid to leave the building. He talked about producers who told him they have to pay gang members to keep streets safe enough to film on.
Some of what he said was inflammatory. Some of it was factually dubious. Some of it was outright ugly. And yet something was happening in that room — and on the screens of everyone watching — that conventional political analysis kept failing to capture.
His opponents were speaking the language of governance. Pratt was speaking the language of fear and anger. Of a city that felt, to a lot of people, like it was coming apart — and of institutions that seemed either unable or unwilling to acknowledge it.
He wasn’t making an argument. He was building a world.
What Pratt was constructing, whether he knew it or not, was a complete narrative. A Los Angeles in freefall. Neighborhoods destabilized. Institutions absent during catastrophe. Ordinary people — parents, workers, small business owners — left to navigate a city that felt increasingly ungovernable, while the people in charge spoke the language of process and policy rather than the language of lived experience.
His story had clear characters. Victims: ordinary Angelenos trying to hold their lives together. Villains: the leaders who failed them, the institutions that enabled the decay, and what he characterized as drug-addicted “zombiesa’ living on the streets. And a protagonist: an outsider who had suffered alongside his neighbors, who actually talked to people, who was angry in the way his audience was angry.
In retrospect, this shouldn’t be surprising. Reality television is a narrative factory. It doesn’t train people to explain or argue or govern. It trains them to create characters, establish conflict, and generate emotional investment in an audience that has no particular reason to care. Pratt spent years inside that machine — learning, whether consciously or not, exactly how to make people feel something. That turns out to be more useful preparation for modern politics than a policy briefing or a law degree.
Not everyone drawn to that story believed every detail of it. Some of the voters gravitating toward Pratt weren’t buying his most dystopian claims. But the underlying emotional architecture resonated — the sense that institutions were not working, that government was not responding, that the people in charge were more comfortable with their own language than with the actual experience of the people they were supposed to serve. Pratt was giving voice to something people already felt but hadn’t heard named.
His emotional force was more convincing to many voters than his opponents’ policy fluency. You don’t have to believe every detail to feel the shape of a story. And the shape — betrayal, abandonment, the possibility of rescue — was doing work that carefully calibrated policy arguments simply cannot do.
This is not a new phenomenon. It is an ancient one.
Long before there were policy platforms or polling crosstabs or municipal white papers, there were stories. Human beings gathered around fires and made sense of the world through narrative — explaining natural disasters as the anger of gods, passing down family history through repeated telling, binding communities together through shared myths of origin and purpose. Every major religious tradition is built not on theological argument but on story: parables, prophecy, exodus, resurrection. Every culture that has ever existed has transmitted its values, identified its enemies, and motivated collective action primarily through narrative.
This is not irrationality. It is not weakness. It is how we make meaning of the world. We do not experience life as data. We experience it as plot — with characters, betrayals, struggles, and the possibility of redemption. A statistic can inform us. A story allows us to locate ourselves inside the argument. And once people locate themselves inside a story, they are capable of being moved in ways that no policy paper has ever managed.
Marshall Ganz, the Harvard organizer and theorist whose work on public narrative has shaped a generation of progressive campaigns, explained what great leaders and movements had always understood intuitively — that people commit to political action not when they are given better information, but when politics becomes a story about who they are, what threatens their community, and what must be done right now.
I knew this. I had seen it work. And I had seen what happens when you forget it.
After Prop 8 passed in 2008, I worked with the Courage Campaign to train organizers in Ganz’s public narrative method, preparing to go back to the ballot and repeal it. LGBT leaders had spent years making the rational case for marriage equality. They argued about constitutional rights. They debated competing interpretations of scripture.
None of it moved people.
What moved people were stories. Gay men and women talking openly about their relationships — the holidays, the anniversaries, the hospital waiting rooms, the mundane and sacred details of a life built with someone. Straight allies talking about their gay neighbor, their coworker, their child. The Courage Campaign produced a video called “Fidelity“ — no narration, no argument, just photographs of same-sex couples set to music — that reached over a million people. It didn’t make a case. It told a story. And it cracked something open that years of policy argument had not.
The lesson wasn’t that facts don’t matter. It was that facts alone had never been enough. People needed to locate themselves inside the story before they could be moved by the argument.
Narrative is not inherently noble. It is a tool — one of the most powerful tools in politics — and it can be aimed in any direction. It can call people toward something better or push them away from something threatening. It can build coalitions or it can scapegoat. It can inspire sacrifice or it can stoke fear.
Ronald Reagan understood this as intuitively as any politician of the twentieth century. “Morning in America“ wasn’t just a campaign ad. It was the crystallization of a story Reagan had been telling for decades — about American exceptionalism, optimism, and self-reliance — that millions of people already carried inside them and were waiting for someone to name. Reagan didn’t create those feelings. He recognized them, articulated them, and gave people a story in which those feelings had a political home. Democrats who disagreed with his policies voted for him anyway, because the story felt true in ways that his opponents’ arguments did not.
In 2020, Raman herself mastered the art of the narrative. In the middle of a pandemic that had shut down the city and exhausted everyone in it, she unseated an incumbent by telling the story of a community with the collective capacity to do big and good things together. At a moment of isolation and anxiety, she offered people a story in which they were protagonists building something, not just victims surviving something. It pulled in the opposite direction from Pratt’s narrative. But it worked by the same mechanism.
The story is always the thing.
Which brings us back to a reality television villain in ripped jeans standing in the ash of the Palisades.
The AI-generated ads his campaign has produced are instructive. In them, his opponents are literal villains — corrupt, menacing, cartoon antagonists. Pratt himself is rendered as a superhero. It would be easy to laugh at this. It would also be a mistake. Because those ads are not trying to inform voters. They are doing what stories have always done — encoding a moral universe, assigning roles, and inviting the audience to choose a side. They are their own form of mythology. And mythology travels faster on social media than a policy white paper.
What his candidacy reveals — regardless of how it ends — is something important about this city and this moment. The anxiety he is tapping into is legitimate and widespread. People do feel abandoned by institutions. Government does feel unresponsive. The fires exposed something that many Angelenos had long suspected: that the systems designed to protect them might not hold. Pratt's dystopian details may be inflamed or outright false — crime in Los Angeles is actually down. But the wound he is pressing on is genuine to people on the left, on the right, and in the middle.
And here is what the Trump and Sanders campaigns should have already taught us: you can tell very different stories about institutional failure and elite betrayal. Trump’s villains are immigrants, globalists, the deep state. Sanders’ villains are billionaires, insurance companies, a rigged economy. The wound is the same. The diagnosis is completely different. The call to action leads somewhere else entirely. Narrative is not the message itself. Narrative is the framework that supports the message — and that framework can be built around truth or around fear, around solidarity or around scapegoating.
The question is not whether voters will be moved by story. They will. They always have. The question is which story resonates — and what it tells us about what this city actually needs.
The answer to a false or distorted narrative is not a more soothing one. It is a truer story — one that meets people where their anxiety actually lives, names what is genuinely failing them, and offers them a real role in building something better. Fear and scapegoating are narratively easy. An emotionally honest story that elevates and inspires takes courage and craft.
Right now, that story is waiting to be told.
The question is whether anyone who believes in a different Los Angeles will find the right way to tell it.
(Mike Bonin is executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State University Los Angeles and served as a member of the Los Angeles City Council from 2013 to 2022.)
