First Spencer Pratt, now Farrah Abraham: reality TV stars are coming for your city council
The Teen Mom star finished dead last in Austin. The number next to her name is why nobody's laughing.
Farrah Abraham lost her race for Austin City Council District 5 on Tuesday, finishing fourth of four with 10.05% as incumbent Ryan Alter (47.77%) and David Weinberg (26.18%) headed to a December 12 runoff. A last-place finish should be a punchline. The percentage is the problem: one in ten voters in a real American city district looked at a ballot and picked the Teen Mom alum with no political résumé.
She's not treating it as a loss, either. "This was lesson one– and the path to 2028 has officially begun," she posted, confirming an Austin mayoral run and joking that Alter "might work" for her someday.
The bench is warming up
Abraham is the second data point this year, and the first one was bigger. Spencer Pratt — The Hills villain turned fire-victim populist — took 25.5% and 217,977 votes in June's Los Angeles mayoral primary, finishing third behind Karen Bass and Nithya Raman. A quarter of America's second-largest city voted for a man whose prior executive experience was managing Heidi Montag's album rollout.
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Line the two up and reality TV starts to look like American local politics' farm system. Its candidates arrive with the two things local races can't buy: universal name recognition and twenty years of on-camera training. They lose, but they lose with numbers career politicians would kill for in a first run — and they immediately file for the next race.
Farrah Abraham lost with 10 percent of her district. The sitting US Transportation Secretary launched his career on The Real World.
That's the precedent that keeps this from being a joke. Sean Duffy went from MTV's The Real World: Boston to Congress to the Cabinet, and the pipeline has only gotten faster since. Austin voters can shrug at District 5, but the Fauxmoi thread reacting to Abraham's totals read the same chart and reached for the city next door:
"That along with 25% of LA voting for Spencer Pratt... can we just agree that reality stars don't belong in politics"
Agreeing is easy. The votes say otherwise, twice in one year, in two of the most politically engaged cities in the country. Somewhere between Pratt's quarter of LA and Abraham's tenth of Austin is a threshold, and the first reality star to clear it won't be a punchline — they'll be an incumbent.
Previously we wrote: After the midterms, watch which celebrities suddenly remember they were Democrats