In 2018, a political newcomer named Katie Porter defeated a two-term incumbent Republican to represent California’s 45th district in the US House of Representatives, turning the famously conservative Orange county blue.
Porter, a 44-year-old law professor and Elizabeth Warren protege, had a refreshing message, vowing to stay laser-focused on addressing the ways America’s financial institutions prey on ordinary people.
Over six years as the representative of Nixon’s birthplace and Reagan’s political stronghold, Porter has built a national political profile with viral videos of her confronting bank CEOs and Republican appointees with basic financial calculations, illustrating her numbers on a quickly iconic whiteboard.
Now, she’s hoping her image as a fierce fighter, a savvy communicator and a champion of ordinary people against big corporations will propel her to the US Senate.
Porter is one of three prominent Democrats running to fill the seat of the late US senator Dianne Feinstein come November.
This time, Porter is not running as the most progressive candidate in the race. She is competing against Barbara Lee, a longtime Black congresswoman from Oakland whose sterling progressive record includes being the sole member of Congress to vote against authorizing George W Bush’s war in Afghanistan, and one of the first Democrats to call for an immediate, permanent ceasefire in Gaza last year.
The campaign Porter wants to run for US Senate is one focused on her economic policy record, her willingness to break with the national Democratic establishment, and her comparative youth. At age 50, Porter is 13 years younger than the Democratic frontrunner in the race, Adam Schiff, and 27 years younger than Lee – a representative of a completely different generation than most of Washington’s bipartisan gerontocracy.
But the US Senate race Porter wants to run is looking very different from the race she’s actually competing in.
As the civilian death toll of Israel’s war in Gaza divides Democrats and alienates younger and more progressive voters, Porter has become the centrist candidate in a three-Democrat race with an unexpected focus on foreign policy. While Schiff has maintained a staunchly pro-Israel stance, and Lee called for a ceasefire in Gaza on 8 October, Porter initially cast blame for the conflict on the US’s foreign policy towards Iran, and then, in mid-December, belatedly broke with the Biden administration and called for a “bilateral ceasefire”, in what was seen by some progressives as a much slower and less principled response than Lee’s.
Current polling for the race shows Schiff in the lead, Porter coming in second among Democrats and Lee trailing relatively far behind. But Porter is also polling neck-and-neck with a late Republican entrant to California’s non-partisan Senate primary: Steve Garvey, an ageing LA Dodgers baseball star.
Garvey – a 1970s pinup-boy candidate with a widely panned debate performance and a troubled family life – has no chance of winning the general election as a Republican in California. But the state’s Republican base is large enough that Garvey does have a chance of beating Porter and advancing to the runoff, and ensuring that Schiff, the most centrist of the California Democratic candidates, can cruise to victory in November.
A Pac backed by cryptocurrency investors is already hammering Porter with millions of dollars in attack ads to push her out of the race.
Some California progressives say that at another moment, it might have been easy for supporters of Lee to take the pragmatic stance and vote for Porter, to ensure that California voters at least get a choice between a progressive and a centrist Democrat in the general election. But this moment is different, they say, with widespread grief and outrage over the killings of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza making many want to cast a moral vote for Lee – whether it’s strategic or not.
Then there are the Democrats who are furious with Porter for entering the Senate race at all. Her purple House district, which she held on to with a margin of only 9,000 votes in a fiercely fought 2022 election, is now one of the closely contested races that will determine whether Democrats can win control of the House of Representatives.
Porter’s campaign argues that her House district is less vulnerable than it appears: “This district was carried by President Biden by over 10 points in 2020,” campaign spokesperson Lindsay Reilly said. “It was particularly competitive last November because of redistricting, which meant Katie had to introduce herself to 70% new voters during a tough election year for Democrats. But in a presidential year, Democrats in CA-47 [the 47th congressional district] have a clear path to victory.”
But with Porter and Schiff, both prodigious Democratic fundraisers, focused on competing against each other, they’re taking up attention and cash that might otherwise be devoted to helping vulnerable candidates in races that will not inevitably be won by a Democrat, some California Democrats argue.
A San Francisco Chronicle analysis found that in recent years, Porter, Schiff and Lee have voted the exact same way at least 94% of the time. With control of the House of Representatives up for grabs during a potential second Trump presidency, how much does the variety of Democratic senator that California elects even matter?
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For Porter’s staunch supporters, her battle to win a US Senate seat is a fight worth fighting, even in a troubled political landscape.
In a more global context, the current California Senate race might not even be considered a fight between three members of the exact same party, said Alex Lee, a young progressive Democrat who represents the Bay Area in the state assembly.
The US’s two-party system has made the Democratic party “so big of a tent” that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Biden are members of one party, even though, “In Europe, they’d be two political parties apart,” he said.
California has the world’s fifth-largest economy, and is home to some of the biggest and most influential corporations on earth. If the state had a truly progressive senator who was able to challenge billionaire CEOs and hold Wall Street accountable it would mean a lot, Lee said, which is why he has endorsed Porter.
Lee said he had been impressed to hear Porter talk about housing affordability and the problems it caused for younger people and lower-income workers in every campaign speech, before every audience.
That subject – not a typical one for a national candidate – seemed to resonate, he said: even people secure in their own housing situation, like wealthy Orange county homeowners, “are concerned about their kids, their grandkids. Are they going to be able to afford this?”
One of Porter’s central pledges to voters is that she “doesn’t take a cent of corporate Pac or federal lobbyist money”, as her campaign website puts it. Though she has touted in some fundraising emails that she does not take donations from executives at big oil, big pharma or Wall Street banks, the Daily Beast found that some people with high-level jobs on Wall Street had donated to her, though it found that “overall she has relatively paltry support from corporate or special-interest linked entities”, compared with other members of Congress. (Nearly 200 corporate Pacs contributed $2m to Schiff between 1999 and 2022, CalMatters reported.)
Schiff attacked Porter in the last debate for taking money from “Wall Street bankers”, but his campaign received donations from two of the same Wall Street donors highlighted in the Daily Beast’s report.
While Schiff has channeled his professional expertise as a prosecutor into managing Trump’s first impeachment, and becoming a national spokesperson and bestselling author on America’s crisis of democracy, Porter’s backers say she attracts a different, and more fervent, kind of political support.
Kari Helgeson, a 58-year-old healthcare worker and Porter “superfan”, said she owns socks with one of Porter’s favorite slogans, “No time for bullshit”, and a whiteboard autographed by the congresswoman herself.
Though she lives in Eureka, at the north-west edge of California, Helgeson has been donating “for years” to Porter’s congressional campaigns nearly 700 miles to the south.
“She really is for the people, she truly is,” Helgeson said. “She is a huge advocate for the working class and unions.”
Helgeson praised Porter’s brilliance in grilling people like JPMorgan Chase’s CEO, her willingness to actually show up on union picket lines, and her relatable persona.
“She really is a single mom that drives a minivan and is managing two households, somehow, across the country,” Helgeson said. “She’s not fancy with her dress, she is who she is, and she’ll speak her mind, and she’s not afraid.”
The fact that Porter still drives a minivan is important because it means “she’s not bought,” Helgeson said. Though Porter holds a powerful position and is known for her confrontational moments, “She’s not a bully. She is powerful with facts.”
Helgeson said she was excited, but not surprised, when a strong majority of her fellow members of the National United Healthcare Workers voted to endorse Porter in the Senate primary last fall.
While Helgeson said she respected Lee’s record and thought she still seemed sharp, “I don’t want to put the age thing in here, but it does kind of matter. It is a six year term.”
If Porter makes it to a two-person race against Schiff, being a woman may be an advantage in a state that used to have two female senators and that, if Schiff wins, may end up having two men.
“Do we need more white men, more white straight men in politics? I would say, as a progressive, we don’t,” said Fatima Iqbal-Zubair, the chair of the Progressive Caucus of California’s Democratic Party.
But the experience that Porter would bring to the senate as a white woman from Orange county, Iqbal-Zubair said, is very different from the experience Lee would bring, as a Black single mom from Oakland who has spoken publicly about experiencing homelessness and domestic violence.
For progressives, the chance to elect a Black woman with that life experience and an uncompromising progressive record is “so unique” and a “once in a lifetime” opportunity, Iqbal-Zubair said.
But arguments that Porter should not have run for senate to protect her House district reeked of misogyny. “Women are always told to ‘wait your turn’,” she said.
“I think she saw Schiff, and she thought Schiff wasn’t it.”
