Inside Spencer Pratt’s insurgent LA run: Creative director exposes the unfiltered truth in explosive interview

Many conservatives across the country were tuned into Republican candidate Spencer Pratt’s audacious, underdog run against incumbent L.A. Mayor Karen Bass (D) — but few know about the “creative genius” behind Pratt’s wildly popular social media campaign.

On a recent episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” Pratt’s creative director Gabriel Mann joined the program to pull back the curtain on the raw, grassroots operation that terrified the L.A. political establishment: zero consultants, lightning-fast video production, paid ballot harvesting in South L.A., explosive fraud allegations, and the Hollywood machine that blacklists conservatives while protecting its own.

Mann tells the hosts that unlike the scripted, consultant-heavy world of modern politics, Pratt’s operation ran with zero political advisers.

“I know a lot of people try to portray their campaign as grassroots, but I mean this was legitimately grassroots. ... It was an experiment in completely upending the traditional politico paradigm, so we didn't have any political advisers. It was just me and Spencer,” he tells hosts Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman.

This bare-bones team streamlined the video production process, expediting response ads.

“[Pratt’s opponents] were trying to attack him for not physically living in the Airstream even though that's a sniper's wet dream, so like his security would not let him be on the lot, but people were attacking him saying, ‘Oh, he's bougie. He's living in Santa Barbara,”’ Mann recalls.

“We decided to just immediately attack right back, and so we made this 'Fresh Prince of Bel Air' video ... to turn the energy around because we didn't have any political advisers telling us, ‘Oh, we should focus group this,’ ‘Oh, you shouldn't say that.’ ... ‘Your tone should be like this,”’ he adds. “All we had was Spencer with his instincts and a filmmaker, not a political guy.”

One of the most eye-opening revelations, however, was Mann’s description of how the campaign built its own “ground game” in “hostile territory,” paying approximately $100,000 to Bloods and Crips members to perform ballot harvesting in South L.A. neighborhoods.

He explains that because there is “literally no Republican infrastructure in Los Angeles,” they had to get creative in how they reached voters.

“I'm not joking, like totally above board, totally legal, we paid the Bloods and the Crips to go do ballot harvesting for us in their neighborhoods, and that was the one thing that Spencer did that I think shocked a lot of people,” he tells Rufo and Keeperman.

Mann also pulled back the curtain on Hollywood’s ruthless political machine. While the industry famously protects its own, it blacklists conservatives without mercy. He recounted a crew member being fired on the spot simply for giving Spencer a tour of a "Baywatch" set.

“We’re with Bass. The union is supporting Bass,” was the explanation. Yet behind the scenes, some of the biggest names in entertainment were quietly rooting for Pratt. Mann revealed, “You have no idea how many ... but [they] wouldn’t allow us to trot them out in public.”

Yet perhaps most explosive were the questions surrounding the final vote count itself. On election night, Pratt was neck-and-neck with incumbent Karen Bass and leading democrat socialist Nithya Raman as expected. But in the days that followed, as late mail-in ballots poured in, Raman overcame a roughly 40,000-vote deficit — a stunning net swing of more than 43,000 votes that flipped the race.

“They try to explain it away like, ‘Oh well, Democrats vote late. They vote by mail.’ OK, but just for the one third place candidate? There were two Democrats in the race, so why is it only for the third place candidate, the one person who actually needed the votes?” says Mann, “And the thing is the media will always say that, ‘Oh, there's no evidence of fraud.’ That is evidence.”

“Now evidence is not the same as proof, but a statistical anomaly like that, you ask any forensic auditor they'll tell you yeah that is evidence of fraud, and it needs to be investigated, and so Spencer has been doing this by the books. He's been collecting evidence,” he continues, noting that they’ve built a case with this evidence and have shared it with law enforcement.

For the full, unfiltered conversation and all the behind-the-scenes details, watch the complete episode above.

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