TDS Watch · LA Mayoral · May 25, 2026 · 12:30 AM ET

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Drew Carey Called Spencer Pratt a “Serial Scammer.” He Didn’t Mention the Mayor Who Slept Through the Fire.

On Friday, May 22, 2026, the longtime Los Angeles resident and Price Is Right host Drew Carey— not a Democrat, not a Republican, a self-described libertarian and one of the most stable celebrity presences in the city — posted to Threads that anyone voting for, or endorsing, Spencer Pratt’s mayoral campaign needed to “get their head out of their ass.” Carey called Pratt a “serial scammer without a soul or moral compass.” He offered no specifics.

The post landed twenty-four hours after President Donald Trump (R)told reporters he’d “like to see” Pratt do well, and forty-eight hours after the latest filings showed Pratt had raised $2,700,000 in a single one-month window — roughly 9.6 times the $282,000 Mayor Karen Bass (D–Los Angeles)pulled in over the same April 19–May 16 reporting window per LA Magazine’s read of the City Ethics Commission filings. Carey aimed his Threads post at the challenger. He did not mention the incumbent.

That choice is the story. Pratt is, by any honest reading of his public record, an unconventional candidate — the Hills reality-TV alumnus who, with his wife Heidi Montag, blew through a documented $10,000,000 in earnings on crystals, bodyguards, and a fake-divorce memoir stunt, per CNBC’s 2018 reporting. He is also the candidate who lost his Palisades home in the January 2025 firestorm that killed twelve people while Bass was at a U.S. Embassy reception in Accra, Ghana, and who has used that loss as the spine of his campaign. Carey’s attack treats the unconventional bio as disqualifying. It does not treat the incumbent’s documented absence as worth mentioning. That asymmetry is what this page is about.

• $2,700,000pratt one-monthPratt’s reported fundraising for the April 19 – May 16, 2026 City Ethics window · per LA Magazine’s read of the filings
• $282,000bass one-monthBass’s reported fundraising in the same window · about 9.6× less than the challenger she leads in polling
• 30% / 22% / 19%Bass / Pratt / RamanEmerson College / The Hill LA mayoral poll · field dates May 9–10, 2026 · per Newsweek’s LA-mayor election tracker · ±3.5 pts
• ~16%undecidedDown from ~51% in the March 2026 baseline · share collapsing as voters lock in for the June 2 primary
• ~66–67%Bass win prob.Polymarket / Kalshi point-in-time pricing of the LA-mayor primary at publication · prediction-market consensus still favors the incumbent
• 12Palisades deathsConfirmed fatalities in the January 2025 Pacific Palisades firestorm · the fire Mayor Bass was out of country for during the ignition window · per CBS News, ABC7
• $1,000,000,000Bass FY26 gapNearly $1B FY 2025–26 LA budget shortfall flagged by the mayor’s top advisor · per KTLA
• 1,647layoffs proposedLayoffs initially proposed to close the gap · averted via union concessions and five unpaid holidays · KTLA
• Jun 2, 2026primaryLos Angeles mayoral primary date · top-two advance to the November runoff · per Ballotpedia

Drew Carey’s Threads post is, in full, two sentences. The first names the conduct he wants Angelenos to avoid — voting for or endorsing Pratt. The second supplies the characterization that did the work and the headlines — “serial scammer without a soul or moral compass.” That phrase is what Fox News led with, what The Blast led with, what Just Jared led with, what TV Insider led with, what Parade led with. It is the entire editorial payload of the post.

What the post does not contain is also instructive. There is no specific scam Carey alleges, no transaction he points to, no victim he names. The CNBC 2018 piece on Pratt and Montag burning through $10,000,000on a crystal-collection era of their lives is part of the public record — but Carey does not cite it. The fake-divorce memoir publicity stunt the couple ran for a 2010 book is part of the public record — but Carey does not cite it. Pratt’s on-record statements about homelessness that critics have called dehumanizing are part of the public record — but Carey does not cite those either. What Carey supplies instead is the conclusion: a phrase calibrated to brand the candidate. That is what makes this a characterization story, not a documentation story.

“Anyone who votes for, or endorses Spencer Prattfall for Mayor of LA needs to get their head out of their ass…some serial scammer without a soul or moral compass.”

Drew Carey · Threads · May 22, 2026 · per Fox News, Just Jared, The Blast, TV Insider, Parade

Drew Carey is sixty-seven, a longtime Los Angeles resident, host of The Price Is Rightsince 2007, and a public self-described libertarian. He is not an extreme partisan on social media; his Threads feed is mostly photographs of his dog and notes from set. The Pratt post is, by Carey’s own standards, an unusually pointed political intervention. It is therefore worth noticing what intervention he chose to make.

Pratt is the challenger. He is the candidate with no governing record, no payroll responsibility, no fire-department reporting chain, no budget-shortfall obligation. He was a private citizen who lost his house in the January 2025 Pacific Palisades fire, entered the race, and raised $2,700,000 in the next available City-Ethics reporting window. He is unconventional. He is also a challenger.

Mayor Karen Bass (D–Los Angeles) — formerly U.S. Representative for California’s 37th Congressional District (D-CA-37) — is the incumbent. She is the candidate with the governing record, the payroll, the fire-department reporting chain, the budget-shortfall obligation, and the documented absence from the city during the deadliest urban-wildland fire in Los Angeles history. Drew Carey’s Threads feed does not, as of publication, contain any equivalent attack on her.

CBS News reconstructed the timeline of Mayor Bass’s January 2025 trip to Ghana from her own public itinerary, State Department photographs, and post-return public statements. The outline that emerges, in CBS’s wording: the Palisades fire ignited the morning of January 7, 2025; roughly an hour and a half later, Bass posed for a photograph at a U.S. Embassy reception in Accra; her flight back to Los Angeles connected through London; she arrived back in the city after the fire had grown to a multi-thousand-acre conflagration. By the time the fire was fully contained the death toll stood at twelve and thousands of structures — including Spencer Pratt’s home — were destroyed.

“It was a mistake to travel… if I had all of the information that I needed to have, the last thing I would have done was to be out of town.”

Mayor Karen Bass (D) · post-fire interview · per ABC7 LA

That admission is, by political standards, candid. It is also the predicate for one of the strongest Pratt-campaign attack lines: the contention that the mayor who said it was a mistake to leave town is the same mayor running for re-election on a steady-leadership message. The Deadline interview Bass gave on the race in May 2026 leans heavily on her work after the fire — the budget restructuring, the fire-chief replacement, the federal-aid posture. It does not extensively re-engage with the Accra timeline. Pratt’s campaign does. That asymmetry is, again, the story.

The operational record Bass is asking voters to renew is, per KTLA’s reporting on her own top advisor, a fiscal-year 2025–26 budget facing a shortfall of nearly $1,000,000,000. The mayor’s initial proposal to close that hole included 1,647 city-worker layoffs. The number was averted via union concessions and the introduction of five unpaid holidays into the municipal calendar. That is a meaningful policy outcome. It is also not the picture of fiscal stewardship a re-elect message normally rests on.

The operational picture on public safety is messier. Former LAFD Fire Chief Kristin Crowley— who Bass terminated in the post-Palisades fallout — has sued the city for wrongful termination. The litigation is pending and both sides will get their day; what is in the public record now is that the city’s top fire executive during the deadliest fire of the mayor’s tenure was fired by that mayor and is now in court with her city. None of this is in Drew Carey’s Threads feed either.

Spencer Pratt’s candidacy is, on its face, a stunt that has stopped being a stunt. The numbers are now too large to wave off. $2,700,000 in one City-Ethics reporting window is a quantum-level fundraising performance for a non-traditional candidate in a non-presidential race. Emerson’s May 9–10 field has him at 22%, eight points behind a sitting Democratic incumbent in a Democratic city, with the undecided share collapsing toward 16%. He has a Trump endorsement. He has the second-most attention on the race after the incumbent. He has, in short, become a real candidate for mayor of the second-largest city in the United States.

His platform is, by his own description on mayorpratt.com, three planks: clear the unsheltered encampments via mandated drug treatment, rebuild and re-staff the fire department to a force level matched to a city in a permanent wildland-urban interface, and reform the City Council structure that he argues has produced the budget hole and the fire posture. The platform is not subtle. It is also not, on its face, the platform of someone running for the publicity.

The most-quoted line from Pratt in the cycle, per ABC7’s May reporting, is also the line his critics have used hardest against him — a claim about Los Angeles’s unsheltered population that strips away the “homelessness” frame and re-labels the population as drug users:

“They're not homeless. They're drug addicts. Most of these people are addicted to fentanyl and meth.”

Spencer Pratt · per ABC7 LA · May 2026

The line is, depending on the reader, either a refreshing departure from a political vocabulary that has not produced measurable results in Los Angeles — or a dehumanization of a vulnerable population in the service of a more punitive policy. Both readings are available. What both readings have in common is that they are about policy. Carey’s Threads post is not about policy; it is about character. He calls Pratt a serial scammer. He does not engage the homelessness line, the fire-staffing line, or the council-reform line.

The Pratt-Montag financial history Carey gestures at without citing is the 2018 CNBC piece — an extended interview with Pratt and Montag about how, by their own account, they spent through roughly $10,000,000 in Hills-era earnings on, among other line items, a $1,000,000 personal crystal collection and a stretch of weekend bodyguard spending at $15,000 per night. That spending happened. Pratt has not, in 2018 or since, denied it. What is contested is not whether the spending occurred but whether spending one’s own previously-earned reality-show money on crystals and bodyguards is “scammer” behavior in the criminal-fraud sense of the word, or whether it is simply ostentatious self-described kitsch from a couple who built a career on it. The first reading is Carey’s. The second reading is Pratt’s. Civic Intelligence does not adjudicate the question.

The question this page is asking is not whether Drew Carey is sincere about Spencer Pratt. He almost certainly is — Carey has no obvious reason to fake an opinion of a reality-TV personality, and his Threads feed is not an account that traffics in pose. The question is why his sincere opinion went public the same week Pratt out-raised the incumbent nine-and-a-half-to-one and Donald Trump endorsed him on the record — and why the same sincere opinion does not extend, in the same Threads feed, to the incumbent who left the country during a fire that killed twelve people.

The two most common answers in the LA political-class chatter since the post landed: that Carey is a celebrity citizen whose sense of civic decorum has a partisan asymmetry, or that Carey is genuinely concerned about Pratt as a person and views Bass as a problem of governance rather than character. Both answers are defensible; neither is dispositive. The observation this page is making is narrower: the Threads post is in the public record, the silence about Bass is in the public record, and the asymmetry between the two is itself something readers should see.

President Trump’s May 21 endorsement of Pratt is, by the available reporting in Time, the Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline, verbal and to reporters — not a verbatim Truth Social post we have been able to confirm independently. That distinction matters: an in-person remark to a pool reporter is an endorsement, but it is not an endorsement of the kind that comes with a screenshot and a permalink. We render the Trump posture as a paraphrase below, on that basis.

The honest accounting of this story, in order: Carey is entitled to his opinion of Pratt. Pratt has a documented self-spending history that has made him an easy target for the characterization. Bass has a documented absence from her city during a fire that killed twelve people, a documented near-billion-dollar budget gap, a fired fire chief now suing her, and a documented polling collapse that has compressed her primary lead to single digits. The Carey post is a sincere personal attack on the challenger. It is also a sincere choice not to attack the incumbent. Both things are in the public record, on the same Threads account, in the same week.

Civic Intelligence’s lane on this is narrow. We do not endorse mayoral candidates. We do, as a matter of editorial policy, name the officials voters elected to do the jobs that went wrong, with their party affiliation and their jurisdiction. The official with the governing job in Los Angeles is Mayor Karen Bass (D–Los Angeles). The official who was out of country during the deadliest fire of her tenure is Mayor Karen Bass (D–Los Angeles). The official whose top advisor flagged the FY26 budget gap is Mayor Karen Bass (D–Los Angeles). The official who fired the fire chief now suing the city is Mayor Karen Bass (D–Los Angeles). None of those facts are characterizations. They are dates, dollar amounts, and personnel actions.

Whether a Drew Carey post about an unconventional challenger is the most useful contribution a longtime Angeleno celebrity can make to that conversation, eleven days before the polls open in a primary the incumbent is no longer a lock to clear, is a judgment we will let readers reach for themselves.

For the broader policy backdrop on which this race is being fought — particularly the unsheltered-population and fentanyl-use frame Pratt has built much of his platform around — see Civic Intelligence’s earlier coverage at /society/la-drug-not-homeless.