Jimmy Kimmel used his Wednesday night Jimmy Kimmel Live! monologue to target Spencer Pratt, pushing viewers to vote against Pratt and framing the candidate as part of Los Angeles’s problem rather than its solution.
On air, Kimmel did not soften the blow. “Let’s be honest, this city is a mess,” he said, arguing the city’s shortcomings were exposed during the Pacific Palisades fires and that people whose homes burned are frustrated because nothing seems to change. He acknowledged the appeal of Pratt’s anger—“It’s hard not to agree with what he has to say.”—but kept returning to the same charge: Pratt offers criticism without workable fixes.
Kimmel pointed viewers to a nine-minute video Pratt has posted laying out promises to boost fire response resources and a plan to combat homelessness, but he said those proposals fall short. He accused Pratt of staging an image of hardship while privately living in a luxury hotel, saying Pratt is living in Hotel Bel-Air while making a video that claims he lives in a trailer on the burned-out lot where his house was. Kimmel also drew an explicit parallel to the 2016 presidential path of Donald Trump: “This is exactly what Donald Trump did,” he said, adding a barb that “The difference between Donald Trump and this guy is Donald Trump actually had a job before he was president.” Kimmel closed the segment by urging viewers to vote against Pratt.
Pratt’s run for mayor began in January and he is running as a Republican in a race that includes incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and City Council member Nithya Raman. The top-line date for voters is June 2, when the Los Angeles mayoral election is scheduled; if no candidate wins a majority, the top two finishers would face each other in the November general election. Kimmel explicitly placed Pratt’s candidacy in the context of the city’s recent crises, citing the Pacific Palisades fires as the moment when many Angelenos saw the failures he is now campaigning on.
The segment’s friction was plain. Kimmel admitted Pratt taps into a familiar anger about public safety and fires—“It's hard not to agree with what he has to say.”—but immediately undercut that admission by saying Pratt lacks solutions. The host’s other sharp contention—that Pratt’s public persona is staged while he resides in Hotel Bel-Air—creates a gap between message and messenger that Kimmel used to argue voters should reject the candidacy. That contradiction is the central tension of the moment: voters may share the grievances Pratt raises, but Kimmel framed those grievances as insufficient reason to elect someone he portrays as inauthentic and unprepared.
With just weeks before the June 2 election, Kimmel’s broadside amounts to a high-profile media intervention that puts Pratt’s claims and conduct under scrutiny. Kimmel made an unmistakable call to action for his audience to oppose Pratt at the ballot box; whether that call changes the trajectory of a race that also includes Bass and Raman will be decided at the polls. For now, Pratt enters the final stretch of the campaign having been publicly challenged by a prominent late-night host on the core questions he says he is campaigning to solve: credibility, residence, and whether he can actually deliver solutions for a city “that’s a mess.”
