Katie Porter Prepared For The Wrong War

LOS ANGELES — Katie Porter is ending her Senate campaign the same way she started it: by pissing off members of her own party.

She enraged the Democratic establishment from the get-go, jumping into the race in January 2023 before Sen. Dianne Feinstein had announced her plans to leave. Party loyalists were galled at the lack of deference to the elder senator, who would pass away months later.

Now, Porter’s insistence that she lost Tuesday’s primary because it was “rigged” by a deluge of special-interest spending is igniting a swift backlash from Democrats who — in the era of Donald Trump’s election denialism — seethed at any insinuation of a stolen election.

“There was nothing in this election that was rigged,” said Antonio Villaraigosa, the former Los Angeles mayor and a supporter of Adam Schiff, who finished in the top two and is expected to win the seat. “And virtually everyone knows that.”

The bookends of her ill-fated campaign are quintessentially Katie Porter: allergic to political niceties, relishing a fight with the old guard and then punching the gas on her messy minivan as she peels out of the D.C. swamp — possibly for good. Her “pox on all their houses” attitude was core to her brand as a politician and would have made her a more formidable candidate in a head-to-head Senate matchup with fellow Democratic Rep. Schiff.

But that was not the race she had to win.

Porter rode her message of “burn the system down” to a distant third-place finish on Tuesday.

This account of her downfall is based on interviews with eight campaign officials and outside close supporters who were granted anonymity to openly discuss the deliberations of her losing bid, as well as several other people involved in the race.

The voters most energized by her scathing systemic critiques — younger, more diverse, less loyal to party labels — largely didn’t show up in a primary that skewed far older, whiter and more conservative than California’s typical electorate.

“She was preaching to a choir that wasn't going to show up and sing,” said Nathan Barankin, a Democratic strategist who worked for a super PAC backing Rep. Barbara Lee.

Wielding her miniature whiteboard and excoriating corporate fat cats, Porter became a viral sensation after flipping a battleground House seat in Orange County in 2018. At 50, she’s youthful by Washington standards, and insiders in California are already buzzing about her next moves and speculating over whether her disgruntled exit from the race would harm her reputation.

In the Senate race, public and private polls showed her in the game until the home stretch when mail-in ballots started dropping in February. But by that point, she had shifted into neutral and was quickly running out of gas. Porter was done in by Schiff’s three-part formula for winning: A prolific fundraiser who ran an anti-Donald Trump message and secured the early support of House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, Schiff boosted himself and spent millions alongside allies promoting Republican Steve Garvey, while deep-pocketed corporate supporters pelted Porter with attack ads.

The contours of the race boxed her in with few targets to lob attacks of her own. Going after Schiff, a well-liked Democrat, risked alienating voters who had no appetite for an intraparty slugfest. Attacking Garvey would only further consolidate Republican voters behind him. Fourth-place finisher Lee was eating into Porter’s base, especially with liberal women in the Bay Area, but trying to peel voters away from a progressive icon and Black woman would have been rife with landmines.

Instead, she railed against the political system writ large — a campaign for America’s most exclusive club that often felt like one long, expensive subtweet. Porter’s aides and allies contend she was right to stick to her guns, even when circumstances on the ground changed considerably. But she wasn’t merely a victim of those circumstances.

Some of the same aides and allies privately acknowledge she underestimated Garvey’s appeal among Republicans when he jumped into the race in late October. One early decision spoke to that dynamic and could have had a broader impact on the race.

Porter’s team discussed, but didn’t act on, a plan to challenge Garvey’s ballot title, which ultimately became ”professional baseball representative.” Garvey was a star slugger in the major leagues in the 1970s and 1980s, and Porter could have argued, based on California law, that his ties to baseball were too remote. For Garvey, the baseball reference was a useful hint to refresh voters’ timeworn recollections of his glory days on the baseball diamond.

Porter’s campaign was more animated by news that Garvey would be the sole candidate who qualified for the first Senate debate, hosted by POLITICO and Fox 11 News at the University of Southern California. Her team knew that Garvey alone on stage with three Democrats would shore up his status as the only credible Republican in the race. But in three TV debates, all with the same candidates, Porter didn’t have a true breakout moment, let alone an exchange that could go certifiably viral.

Some inside and outside Porter’s camp were overly optimistic about the chances of Lee dropping out before the filing deadline in December. Lee is fondly regarded by Northern California progressives and ate into Porter’s support, including with women. Groups focused on female representation that had rallied around Porter in the past and even featured her likeness in their marketing materials, such as EMILYs List, stayed on the sidelines instead of lining up behind either woman.

Overall, Porter’s campaign message never changed — perhaps to her detriment.

On air and on the debate stage, Porter hammered relentlessly about out-of-touch Washington, promising to “shake up the Senate.” She portrayed herself as a political newcomer, even though she’d been in Congress for five years, to draw an implicit contrast with her fellow Democrats who had each served more than two decades.

It was the extension of a brand she had built in rapid time in the House, complete with her viral whiteboard prop she used to make CEOs squirm. She took particular gusto in calling out her own party; her memoir, released last year, skewered Democrats for being clueless and ineffectual more than the GOP. Just before Election Day, Rolling Stone published an interview with Porter where she torched former Sen. Barbara Boxer for not walking the walk on climate change.

Her crusade against earmarks embodied that approach. She skewered the process as politicians securing money for “pet projects” — the type of backroom sausage-making that gives everyday Californians short shrift. Her stance set her apart from Schiff and Lee, both of whom said it was an essential duty of congressmembers to bring home the bacon.

It was classic Porter, and something her team insists resonates with voters, but in the era of Trump, it was small potatoes, particularly coming from a Democrat.

For someone known for direct confrontation, her critiques of Schiff, her most serious Democratic competition, were unusually circumspect. She rarely attacked him by name, even during debates, where she would often blast him as a candidate “on this stage” who had taken corporate PAC money.

“She said she was going to shake up the system but never said from who or to what,” said Jesse Ferguson, a veteran Democratic operative who advised a super PAC backing Schiff. “What does ‘shake up the Senate’ mean?”

Porter’s team knew that Schiff had a built-in advantage by running against Trump, a crisper point of contrast than Porter’s broader critique of the political system.

“One of the things we struggled with was we were running against corporations and special interests and folks who have an outsized effect in determining outcomes of elections,” a senior campaign official said. “It’s just not the same sort of tangible bad guy as Trump or running against a Republican. [For Schiff], as the Trump antagonist as people see him, he always had a foil there.”

Not that lacing into Schiff more bluntly would have solved her problems. Democratic voters saw both Schiff and Porter favorably, and going negative against him threatened to turn voters off. That dynamic was all the more acute for Porter as a woman.

Being a woman candidate could have been a potent selling point for Porter, given that California was on the precipice of not having a female senator for the first time in more than 30 years. Porter hardly mentioned the threat of losing that representation, even though she spoke often about her own identity as a single mother.

In her view, she told reporters last month at a campaign stop, “People can connect the dots.”

Her team saw no need to stray from her central theme. Their focus groups found that voters preferred a candidate who would challenge the political system — even more than promising to take on Trump. People were craving authenticity, her advisers said, and swerving in her messaging as her poll numbers worsened would have undermined the brand she built.

Porter, who was always a gangbusters fundraiser in the House, found herself in an unusual position as the underdog when it came to money. She didn’t come close to keeping pace with Schiff, who had his own lucrative small-donor network after gaining cable news stardom during the first Trump impeachment.

Schiff hit the jackpot last spring when allies of the former president censured him for actions while chair of the Intelligence Committee. He kept putting up huge numbers, and his super PAC came in with millions of dollars to promote Garvey at the end.

As Porter tried to keep up on air, her campaign didn’t have the funds to try to drill down beyond the likely primary voters.

“We never had the resources for a real turnout effort in that way,” said the senior campaign official. “We were stuck communicating a message to old white people — not necessarily the target audience.”

Meantime, cryptocurrency billionaire investors spent heavily on ads that portrayed Porter as a hypocrite, pointing to her own corporate contributors and her stint working for a mortgage servicing company before running for the House seat in 2018.

She tried to fend off the attacks but was severely outspent, at nearly 4 to 1. Her super PAC finished the campaign with nominal spending on her behalf that didn’t move the needle.

“It’s all volume,” said a person close to Porter. “This is the sad reality of California campaigns.”

Some on her team acknowledge one strategy that could have been pursued harder: trying to blunt Garvey’s momentum by elevating another Republican, far-right perennial candidate Eric Early, to split the GOP vote.

It would have been a tall order. Early is virtually unknown outside the most hardcore GOP activist circles and did not have the same compelling biography as an ex-baseball star.

Porter made a halfhearted effort to raise Early’s profile, but only after she had gone after Schiff’s “cynical” advertisements boosting Garvey, opening her to accusations of hypocrisy. At that point in the race, the campaign did not have enough money to make the Early gambit effective. At the same time, the campaign had to pay for a new round of ads responding to the bitingly personal attacks from the crypto-financed super PAC.

The late barrage was a psychological blow to Porter and her team. Schiff won this race by his shrewd surrogacy for Garvey, but the eleventh-hour mudslinging from wealthy donors epitomized everything that enraged Porter about the political system.

At her election night party on Tuesday, after the race was called notably early against her, Porter had little to say about Schiff or Garvey. Her ire was trained at the super PAC donors who spent millions to keep her out of the Senate.

“You scared them, Katie!” a fan yelled from the crowd.

“I think we scared them,” she responded, before closing with a promise that hinted she may not be fully retired from the political arena. “Take my word for it — I will always, always be fighting for you.”

On Friday, Porter reemerged with an email to her supporters — praising President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address as an inspiring blueprint for an America where the ultra-rich don’t dominate. Included were links to donate to Biden’s reelection campaign.