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 film 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 Rae Chen Huang and 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 Kevin de Leon 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 campaign Pratt’s running means he benefits, 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, Bass can point to never having lost an election. Then again, Pratt could say the same thing.