Spencer Pratt, the star of a long-running reality show, is closing in on a renewal in the Los Angeles mayoral race, but this season’s finale may yet contain some surprises.

With 62 percent of the vote counted by 6 p.m. Wednesday evening, the Hills star-turned-political gadfly sat in second place with just under 30 percent of the vote in his bid to run California’s largest city, ahead of his third-place rival, progressive City Council Member Nithya Raman, by 7 percent. Pratt has garnered 157,000 votes to Raman’s 120,000 — but a whopping 300,000 votes remain to be counted. Tranches were expected to be released slowly in the coming day, or days.

If the totals were to hold and Pratt were to advance against Bass, it would set up a made-for-vintage-MTV showdown. The battle between the two would be one of the fiercest and most colorful elections the city has seen in decades. Pratt has repeatedly gone after Bass in the primary campaign, reposting AI videos of her portrayed as the Joker and deriding her response to the 2025 wildfires and the city’s housing crisis. After previously ignoring hm, Bass has recently gone after Pratt, too, calling him a “TV reality star villain.” Pratt has received the seal of approval of another reality star turned politician, Donald Trump, though he rebuffed the endorsement.

A Pratt win over Raman would mean a rebuff for progressives in the city, though it would also stir up some Monday-morning quarterbacking about the decision of Rae Huang, a Democratic Socialist of America candidate, to stay in the race and siphon votes from her. Of course, Raman’s late entry into the race itself may have taken votes from Bass, who might have hit the 50 percent threshold and avoided a runoff with Pratt if Raman had stayed out. (Think Nader-Gore-Bush in 2000.)

A Raman comeback, on the other hand, would amount to a jarring defeat for Pratt, who surged in recent weeks on the back of the viral videos and general discontentment over the challenges of a city run by Bass. It would end one of the most surprising and novel campaigns in an era of surprising and novel campaigns, halting an outsider run that conservative-coded entertainers have made their stock-in-trade dating back to Jesse Ventura in the 1990s, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 2000s and Donald Trump in the 2010s.

Despite Pratt’s entertainment bona fides, it was Bass who sought to position herself as the candidate of Hollywood in her speech to supporters Tuesday night. She called L.A. “the creative capital of the world” and decried an “industry that was leaving, but we are bringing it back.”

Pratt, for his part, has kept Hollywood, or at least the media, at bay — he appeared to ban reporters from covering his election-night party at Don Antonio’s in the Sawtelle neighborhood of Los Angeles, according to two people on the ground, in contravention of long-standing election-night practice but in keeping with his anti-elites theme. He did speak to reporters outside the restaurant, generally striking a restrained tone but offering a few more trash-talky challenges to his presumptive runoff opponent. “She knows it’s on. I hope she’s ready,” he said of Bass.

In the California governor’s race, another critic of Democratic incumbents has turned out a strong showing. Former Fox News host Steve Hilton — like Pratt, a TV figure who has never run for elected office before — had climbed handily to the top late Tuesday night. With 57 percent of the ballots counted, he had a sturdy lead of 27.8 percent of the vote, compared to 25.4 percent for Democrat and pollster frontrunner Xavier Becerra, and a full 8 points ahead of progressive Democrat Tom Steyer. But the margins — 1.4 million for Hilton, 1.3 million for Becerra and 1 million for Steyer — were hardly conclusive, with nearly 4 million votes left to be counted.

Hilton has run a race lambasting incumbent Democrats, particularly Gov. Gavin Newsom, and campaigned on a traditional conservative platform of lower taxes and fewer regulations. “Change is coming,” he chanted with supporters at his election-night event. He has also said he would raise the film tax credit ceiling to as high as 60 percent. In the speech to supporters, Hilton nodded to his England-born status. “I know some of you who are watching thinking, ‘Who is this guy with a funny accent thinking he can be governor,'” he said, then segued to a reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger and a conversation Hilton had with the former governor about Hilton’s pursuit of the job.

Steyer had staked out a far more activist government position than Hilton, arguing for more climate regulations, more worker protections and novel proposals such as the “token tax,” which would charge people for AI usage and put the money in a pot for displaced workers. Some polls had put the billionaire entrepreneur in second place in the days leading up to the race.