Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, facing the tightest reelection fight of her career, turned to an 88-year-old actress for a public boost, posting Jane Fonda's endorsement to her X account as polls show her once-comfortable lead shrinking to the margin of error.
The move lands at exactly the wrong moment for a Democratic incumbent already weighed down by a catastrophic wildfire response, persistent homelessness, and a challenger who lost his own home in the blaze. If celebrity endorsements could win elections, Kamala Harris would be president.
Bass won the mayor's office in 2022 on promises to end the homeless crisis and tackle rising crime. Nearly three years later, Los Angeles still has the second-largest homeless population of any American city, with roughly two-thirds of those people living on the streets. The Palisades Fire burned more than 11,000 structures and caused billions of dollars in damage. And Bass's answer to voter anger, as the Daily Mail reported, is a photo op with Jane Fonda taken at a dinner in Cannes, France.
The latest Los Angeles Times poll puts Bass at just 26 percent. Councilwoman Nithya Raman sits one point behind at 25 percent. Reality television personality Spencer Pratt, who entered the race as a vocal critic of Bass after losing his home in the Palisades Fire, stands at 22 percent and climbing.
Both Raman and Pratt have surged eight points since March. Bass's numbers have not moved.
More ominous for the incumbent: in a hypothetical November runoff between Bass and Raman, the councilwoman leads 32 percent to 28 percent. Undecided voters have dropped from 26 percent in March to 10 percent now, and they are not breaking toward the mayor.
Fourteen names will appear on the ballot. A primary is scheduled for Tuesday, with a November runoff widely expected. Bass has lined up the full weight of the Democratic establishment, Kamala Harris, Governor Gavin Newsom, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the city's powerful labor unions. None of it has moved the needle.
Spencer Pratt is not the candidate central casting would have sent. The former star of MTV's The Hills became a fixture of Los Angeles fire coverage after the Palisades blaze destroyed his home. He channeled that visibility into a mayoral campaign built on a simple argument: the city is failing, and its leadership is responsible.
Pratt told CNBC on Thursday:
"We are not going to have this level of failure in our city for four more years."
He has been blunter still about conditions on the ground:
"The city is not safe. It's disgusting. We pay with our money to give needles to drug addicts to overdose in front of kids."
In the race's only debate so far, NBC polled viewers and found 79 percent declared Pratt the winner. His jab at Raman, dismissing her as a "random city council member", went viral on social media. Whether or not Pratt can convert debate clips into votes, he has set the terms of the conversation. Bass is playing defense.
Bass's decision to spotlight Fonda's backing fits a pattern that even some Democrats recognize as counterproductive. An anonymous Democratic strategist, quoted in The Hill, offered a blunt assessment of the party's reliance on famous faces:
"Somehow we think if Beyoncé is on stage, that will solve all our problems. What people don't realize is that it actually makes it worse. It reinforces this perception that we are the party of elites, that we don't understand what working class folks are going through."
That strategist was talking about the 2024 presidential race, where endorsements from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé failed to carry Harris over the finish line, and where Donald Trump made gains even in deep-blue states. The lesson apparently did not reach Los Angeles City Hall.
Bass, for her part, framed the Fonda endorsement in lofty terms. "Angelenos need leaders willing to stand up and speak out," she posted. "Jane has never been afraid to do either."
Set aside the question of whether an 88-year-old actress photographed in the south of France is the messenger most likely to connect with Angelenos worried about tent encampments and fire preparedness. The deeper issue is what the endorsement reveals about the Bass campaign's theory of the race: that institutional support and name recognition can substitute for results.
Bass was elected to fix specific, visible problems. Homelessness was the signature issue. Crime was the second. The Palisades Fire, an event no mayor could have entirely prevented, became a stress test of city government's basic competence. More than 11,000 structures burned. Billions in damage piled up. Residents like Pratt watched their homes disappear and concluded that the city had failed them.
Bass has brushed off the competition. "We're almost to the finish line. I'm feeling good," she said Thursday after dropping off her own ballot. The polling does not support that confidence. Her support is flat. Her opponents are rising. The undecided pool is nearly drained, and the remaining voters are not choosing her.
Raman, the councilwoman, is running on housing and cutting red tape for developers, a platform that at least acknowledges the supply-side failures driving the city's affordability crisis. Yet even she has struggled to build institutional support; not a single City Council colleague has endorsed her campaign.
That leaves the race in an unusual place: an incumbent with the full backing of the Democratic machine and Hollywood, a councilwoman with a policy platform but no political allies, and a reality TV star who won a debate by a four-to-one margin and speaks the language of frustrated taxpayers.
The Bass campaign's bet is structural. Harris, Newsom, Pelosi, the unions, these are the pillars of Democratic power in California. In most cycles, they would be enough. But Los Angeles is not in a normal cycle. Residents have watched their city burn, watched encampments grow, watched public spaces deteriorate, and watched their mayor respond with endorsements from celebrities and assurances that everything is fine.
The primary will test whether that coalition still holds when the product it is selling has so visibly failed to deliver. If Bass survives Tuesday, the November runoff could be even harder. In a head-to-head with Raman, she already trails.
Pratt's presence complicates the math further. Even if he does not win, his candidacy has forced the conversation onto ground Bass cannot defend: fire response, homelessness, public safety, and the gap between promises and outcomes. Every voter who rallies behind a former reality star over the sitting mayor is making a statement about the credibility of the establishment that elevated her.
Celebrity endorsements are a lagging indicator. Politicians seek them when they believe their record alone is not enough. Bass has Fonda, Harris, Newsom, and Pelosi. What she does not have is a convincing answer for why the city's biggest problems are worse than when she took office.
Jane Fonda's name on a social media post will not rebuild 11,000 burned structures. It will not clear the encampments. It will not make the streets safer. Voters in Los Angeles know this. The question is whether enough of them are ready to act on it.
When you have to fly in your endorsements from Cannes, you have already lost the argument at home.
