As she was winding up the crowd at a union campaign event this weekend, two-time Los Angeles mayoral hopeful Karen Bass went for a very specific analogy.

“Do we choose a TV reality star villain?” she asked rhetorically. “We don’t need villains in this city.”

The reference of course was to Spencer Pratt’s career on The Hills, but it already showed she was playing the election on his terms: Pratt had gone viral with an AI ad he popularized showing him as Batman fighting off assorted Democratic figures ruled by a Joker-painted Bass. The Charlie Curran piece was one of several that cast Pratt as a Hollywood hero; in another, he wields a lightsaber as a Jedi fighting Bass, an instrument of the Empire. 

Bass was trying to flip the tables on her opponent as the villain he claimed to be fighting. But casting the race in such stark Hollywood terms played into his narrative of cinematic good vs. evil in the first place, reminding voters of the silver-screen legend around him (and distracting from his total lack of political experience).

Pratt has gone from novelty candidate to serious contender to, at the moment, an oh-so-close third-place poller ahead of Tuesday’s primary that will determine what will almost surely be the two candidates who advance to November. (No one running is reaching 50 percent.)

The latest L.A. Times/U.C. Berkeley poll has Pratt at 22 percent, several points of shy of Bass’ 26 percent and progressive City Council member Nithya Raman’s 25 percent. Pratt’s team is counting on the silent vote — the people who, like Donald Trump supporters in 2024, didn’t tell pollsters they were voting for him and went ahead and did it anyway. He also is counting on not getting hexed by the meme curse — what Trump’s opponent learned the hard way that same election. Just because you have a Brat summer doesn’t mean you have a winning November. 

The Palisades Crusader also needs to avoid another pitfall: the lack of a serious ground game. Pratt has largely waged war online, evoking comparisons to another (very different) outsider, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. But Mamdani built an almost unprecedentedly elaborate campaign team who traveled to distant corners of the city to knock on doors and get out the vote, while the candidate himself was ubiquitous in all five boroughs. Pratt has held just scattered events and does not have a robust volunteer team.

Some 600,000 Angelenos voted in the 2022 primary. A race with three viable candidates — not to mention two other candidates in progressive Rae Chen Huang and centrist Adam Miller polling with a combined 14 percent of the vote — means the margin of victory Tuesday will almost certainly be small. The difference between second and third place, in fact, could amount to just a few thousand votes. That spread ranked considerably higher — about 180,000 votes — when Rick Caruso finished in second ahead of City Council member Kevin de Leon back in 2022.

All of this adds up to an election so Hollywood-third-act dramatic it could basically be decided by Jenna Maroney from 30 Rock, a series incidentally that Raman’s husband Vali Chandrasekaran wrote and produced on. And the drama doesn’t count the actual celebrities getting involved. (Jane Fonda, Samuel L. Jackson and JJ Abrams for Bass; Mindy Kaling, Adam Scott and Chelsea Handler for Raman; Joe Rogan, Katharine McPhee and Paris Hilton for Pratt. Though the kind of anti-elites campaign Pratt’s running means he could benefit, as he recently noted, from celebrities endorsing his opponents.)

Raman has what seems like the right kind of upstart credentials — she’s not Bass, but she’s also an experienced politician. For her part, despite an embattled term marked by criticism over her wildfire response, Bass can point to never having lost an election.

If the mayoral race is packed with Hollywood drama, the governor’s race is draining itself of it by the day. But unlike the city contest, the governor’s race — with a series of candidates who have captured neither voters or media attention — could have an effect on actual Hollywood. The governor, after all, could work with the legislature on film tax credit and other policy matters of interest to the entertainment biz.

Three contenders have emerged at the front of the pack: The conservative Trump-approved Steve Hilton and the IATSE- and Sierra Club-approved Tom Steyer, both running solidly behind Xavier Becerra, the former California Attorney General and Biden-era HHS secretary who has surged lately. 

Like the mayoral race, the moderate Democrat is in the lead, the progressive Dem is in second and the conservative outsider trails in third with a shot at getting in the field. Becerra now sits at 28 percent in the latest Emerson College poll, all but assuring he’ll get one of the top two spots. But the second slot is up for grabs — Steyer has made a late push to inch ahead of Hilton with 22 percent to the British former Fox News host’s 21 percent (everyone else is at least ten percentage points out of second).

So really it comes down to which of the two could grab more of the center and edge out their opponent. 

The stakes for Hollywood are not small. Becerra has argued for more streaming-data transparency and a California-wide entertainment summit to save the business and the people who work in it; he’d also redirect some tax credit money to departments that are losing the most work instead of allowing them to be applied anywhere. He does not support uncapping the current $750 million annual limit.

Unlike Becerra, Steyer wants to uncap the $750 million annual limit while also extending it to above-the-line expenses. Hilton has proposed all that as well and has also argued for a massive ramp-up in the tax credit that could go from a ceiling of 45 percent all the way up to 60 percent. He’d also extend credits to postproduction work.

Hilton, who has generally favored tax breaks, would probably do most on the incentive front. But Steyer’s IATSE endorsement means a gigantic Hollywood union believes his policies will actually help entertainment workers. It’s not a race filled with Hollywood drama — but it just might come with plenty of Hollywood consequences.