Spencer Pratt Made the LA Runoff. Jimmy Kimmel Told His Audience “We Should Be Very Embarrassed.”

On June 5, 2026, three days after the Los Angeles mayoral primary, Jimmy Kimmel opened Jimmy Kimmel Live! with the only story he wanted to talk about: reality-TV figure Spencer Pratt (R) had finished second, ahead of a sitting city councilmember, and was on track to face incumbent Mayor Karen Bass (D)in November. Kimmel’s verdict on his own city’s voters: “We should be very embarrassed.”

It was the second monologue in nine days Kimmel had built around Pratt. The first, before the vote, called Pratt “another narcissist looking for attention” and warned that “mayor should not be your first job.” The second came after the votes were counted — and the votes did not cooperate.

This is a story about the meltdown, not the candidate. The interesting fact is not that a reality star is running for mayor. It is that the most-watched late-night host in Los Angeles spent two shows trying to talk his audience out of an outcome they had already chosen — and, in the middle of it, admitted the thing his side is not supposed to say out loud.

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By the night of June 5, roughly 60% of the vote had been counted and the result was no longer in doubt: Bass would advance, and Pratt was holding second place. Kimmel devoted his opening monologue to it. His framing, reported by the Hollywood Reporter and TheWrap, was not that the city had a choice to make — it was that the city had already disgraced itself.

“We should be very embarrassed. Spencer Pratt should not be a top-two finalist for mayor.”

Jimmy Kimmel — 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' monologue, June 5, 2026

Kimmel went further, joking that in November “Los Angelenos are going to have to choose between a woman named Karen and a man who is one,” and that “it could take a while for Democrats here in Los Angeles to figure out which of their friends secretly voted for Spencer Pratt.” The bit assumed its own conclusion: that a vote for Pratt was a thing to be hidden, not explained.

The June 5 meltdown was the sequel. The original ran in late May, as the June 2 primary approached. In that monologue Kimmel called Pratt “another narcissist looking for attention” and built the argument around competence: “Mayor should not be your first job. The mayor of L.A. is in charge of a $14,000,000,000 annual budget. Spencer Pratt is not the person who should be in charge of that.”

He mocked Pratt as “the screaming jerk on reality shows” whose “house burns down,” compared his rise to Donald Trump’s, and needled a campaign ad in which Pratt claimed to live in a trailer while, Kimmel said, actually staying at the Hotel Bel-Air. In a follow-up show he ran a mock campaign ad calling Pratt “a ridiculous choice.”

Buried inside the mockery was an admission against interest. Kimmel, defending the incumbent Democrat and ridiculing her Republican challenger, paused to concede the premise of the challenge: “Let’s be honest, this city is a mess.” The Hollywood Reporter headline captured the contradiction directly — Kimmel targets Pratt, “yet admits ‘this city is a mess.’”

“Let's be honest, this city is a mess.”

Jimmy Kimmel, on the city Karen Bass has run since 2022

That is the whole TDS dynamic in one line. The host can see that the city is failing — homelessness, the 2025 wildfire response, the budget — and can say so on air. What he cannot do is connect that failure to the person who has been mayor through all of it. The energy goes entirely into the outsider, never the incumbent. Pratt’s standing exists precisely because, as Kimmel himself noted, “for the first time in his life, people are agreeing with what he has to say.”

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Pratt did not absorb the monologues quietly. He treated the free airtime as a gift, posting “Jimmy’s secretly voting for me” and arguing that being a lifelong Angeleno watching the city decline was itself a qualification. When Kimmel pressed the “no experience” attack, Pratt’s answer was that his experience was living in the result.

Then Pratt escalated. After Kimmel mocked him, Pratt resurfaced a screencap of Kimmel performing in blackface on “The Man Show” in the early 2000s — an old controversy Kimmel has previously apologized for. As Fox News documented, the candidate the late-night establishment was trying to embarrass had a ready answer that put the host on defense instead.

The reason the monologue curdled into a meltdown is that the result was real. Per ABC7 and Fox News tallies updated after the June 2 primary, Bass led with about 35.1%, Pratt held second at roughly 29.4%, and Councilwoman Nithya Raman trailed at about 23.4%. No candidate cleared 50%, so the top two advance to a November runoff. A two-term incumbent mayor could not put away a reality-TV first-time candidate in her own primary.

The Kimmel meltdown is not really about Spencer Pratt’s qualifications, which are thin and which Pratt does not pretend otherwise about. It is about who gets to be embarrassed. When a late-night host tells the audience that they — the voters — should feel shame for a result he dislikes, he has stopped doing comedy and started doing scolding. The instinct to treat an unwelcome vote as a defect in the electorate rather than a verdict on the incumbent is the same instinct that has made late-night a steadily shrinking audience.

And the runoff guarantees Kimmel will have to keep returning to it. Every monologue he builds around how embarrassing Pratt is doubles as an in-kind ad reminding Angelenos that the political and entertainment establishment is unanimous, loud, and — by Kimmel’s own admission — running a city that is “a mess.”

“It could take a while for Democrats here in Los Angeles to figure out which of their friends secretly voted for Spencer Pratt.”

Jimmy Kimmel, June 5, 2026 — describing a vote his own audience apparently cast

The contrast underlines the dynamic. The president and the right cheered Pratt’s finish as a rebuke to the incumbent; the late-night host treated it as a civic humiliation to be corrected. Both responses are about the same data point — a sitting Democratic mayor who could not break 40% in her own city.

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