Katie Porter Enters Race To Succeed California Gov. Gavin Newsom

Katie Porter, the ex-Orange County representative who rode an anti-Trump wave to her first elected office, is betting a fresh “resistance” fervor can propel her to a new and bigger job: California’s next governor.

Promising “a little bit of hope and a whole lot of grit,” Porter launched her gubernatorial bid — her second statewide campaign in as many years — on Tuesday. Her kick-off video touches on the anti-corruption, consumer protection themes that transformed Porter into a whiteboard-wielding political celebrity. But the animating cause underpinning her run is, unmistakably, President Donald Trump.

"I first ran for office to hold Trump accountable,” Porter says in her announcement. “I feel that same call to serve now to stop him from hurting Californians.”

Porter enters a field that is stacked with contenders but light on action. The freeze comes down to one factor: former Vice President Kamala Harris, who is weighing a run and could easily bigfoot her fellow California Democrats with her name ID and fundraising prowess. Several Democratic hopefuls, including Porter, have signaled publicly or privately they would stand aside if Harris joins the race.

Absent Harris, however, Porter has considerable advantages to capture the governor’s mansion. Though she lost her 2024 Senate race to then-Rep. Adam Schiff, the campaign elevated her profile statewide. She’s flexed formidable small-donor fundraising muscle, raking in more than $32 million for her Senate bid. And she’s repeatedly won tough House races in swingy Orange County, demonstrating an appeal that extends beyond the Democratic Party’s liberal base.

An internal polling memo released by her campaign showed Porter favored by 36 percent of Democratic and independent voters — a substantial advantage over other declared or likely candidates. She has a 28-point lead over her closest rivals — Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and Antonio Villaraigosa, the former Los Angeles mayor — who are tied at 8 percent. Other contenders, including former state controller Betty Yee, ex-state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, former state Senate leader Toni Atkins and schools chief Tony Thurmond, all lag behind in the single-digits.

Notably, the poll did not include Harris.

Porter’s Trump-centric rallying cry marks a high-stakes wager that California voters are hungry for the vehement pushback to the current president that powered a Democratic wave in 2018, when Porter was the face of her party’s sweeping gains in the state’s purple battlegrounds. The pushback to Trump 2.0 has been far less cohesive, as Democrats lick their wounds over the state’s rightward shift in 2024. So far, party leaders have vacillated between vocal opposition and trying to appease the current president and his leverage over crucial federal dollars.

There’s no such conciliatory tone from Porter, who vows in her video that “as governor, I won't ever back down when Trump hurts Californians — whether he's holding up disaster relief, attacking our rights or our communities, or screwing over working families to benefit himself and his cronies."

It’s a marked shift from Porter’s last race, where she pointedly steered away from a Trump-heavy theme in a contrast with Schiff, who leaned heavily on his role in Trump’s first impeachment and the Jan. 6 hearings to define his candidacy.

“We need someone who's focusing on California and what's really happening in Californians’ lives,” Porter said in February 2024, explaining why her campaign put little emphasis on the then-GOP frontrunner. “We need to be clear-eyed about the threat of Trump. But to be clear, corruption in government, distrust in government — this was a problem before Trump came along.”

Schiff ended up walloping Porter in that primary, who ended up in a distant third. The lackluster showing highlighted some of her vulnerabilities as a candidate. Her pledge to shake up the status quo failed to resonate with primary voters, who tend to skew older, whiter and more conservative than California’s population as a whole. Her ability to generate campaign cash was dwarfed by that of now-Sen. Schiff, who raised enough to elevate himself and GOP baseball icon Steve Garvey. She endured a barrage of negative advertising from a pro-cryptocurrency super PAC and alienated members of her own party when, in parlance echoing the election denialism of Trump, she blamed her loss on billionaires spending large sums to “rig” the election.

Porter has always had a testy relationship with her party’s establishment, particularly former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Only one of 40 Democratic members of California’s House delegation endorsed her Senate bid last year. She crusaded against earmarks as backroom sausage-making even as Schiff and former Rep. Barbara Lee, another rival, claimed the process was essential to bring federal dollars to the state.

Her launch video has flashes of the iconoclasm that has made her a polarizing figure among her colleagues but resonates with voters disgusted with the clubbiness of today’s politics.

"I'll work with anybody, and I'll say no to anybody, because I have never been for sale. And I never will be,” Porter declares, singling out big banks, pharmaceutical companies and oil companies as her corporate foils.

The populist streak has been a throughline for Porter, 51, ever since her childhood in rural Iowa, where the closing of the town bank during the 1980s farm crisis sparked her interest in consumer protection. At Harvard Law School, she studied under now-Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who became an influential mentor (and namesake to Porter’s daughter).

She later became a law professor at UC Irvine, where she is back teaching after a hiatus during her congressional tenure, and was appointed by then-state Attorney General Harris as an independent monitor of a multi-billion dollar mortgage settlement with the country’s five largest banks in the wake of the 2008 housing crisis.

Porter leaned heavily into her consumer-warrior persona — and her everywoman sensibilities — once she landed in Congress, portraying herself as a harried mom with a minivan who just happened to have a knack for grilling corporate executives and Trump administration officials.

In her launch video, she portrays herself as a straight-talking antidote to equivocating politicians — “what a bunch of bullshit,” she declares at the outset — and boasts that she “actually knows” the price of groceries.

That brand has, at times, provided fodder for political rivals. AfterPOLITICO reported that Porter once consulted for a mortgage loan service provider, a stint that was later dashed from her resume, Schiff accused Porter of partaking in the “revolving door phenomenon,” casting her in the same light as the corporate lobbying complex she often rails against.

Her personal life has also faced public scrutiny. After a whisper campaign about the end of her marriage with ex-husband Matthew Hoffman threatened to derail her 2018 House bid, she proactively released her divorce filings. The contents from those filings, including one accusation in a restraining order sought by her ex that she dumped a bowl of boiling potatoes on his head, got renewed media coverage during her Senate race. Porter said her ex-husband filed the order as retaliation after she filed a restraining order against him; a judge later granted Porter a protective order and custody of their three children.

Last year, Porter filed a restraining order against her ex-boyfriend, Julian Willis, alleging “persistent abuse and harassment.” The lawmaker, who was winding down her House term and had not yet declared plans to run for office, said that Willis had contacted multiple reporters with “false and damaging information” that could affect her career and personal reputation. A judge granted her a five-year restraining order in December.

The public airing of her personal life took a toll, Porter revealed in her 2023 memoir. She wrote that her decision to speak out about the end of her marriage negatively affected her children and was “the only thing that I’ve done in politics that I’m ashamed of.”

“Being a real person and having a real life is in fundamental conflict with American politics,” she wrote. “There is no way I could’ve kept my privacy about domestic violence in my family and gotten elected.”