Samuel Corum/Sipa USA via AP Images
Rep. Katie Porter, a onetime pupil and protégé of Elizabeth Warren, was elected to Congress in 2018 in a historically Republican district in Orange County, California.
California’s reputation as our leftmost state stands to be burnished by what’s shaping up to be the Democrat vs. Democrat vs. Democrat (and with possible addition of one more Democratic heavyweight, vs. Democrat) race to succeed Dianne Feinstein as one of the state’s two U.S. senators in 2024. At age 89, Feinstein is the oldest member of our disproportionately gerontocratic Senate and is widely expected not to be seeking re-election next year. (Normally a constant and prodigious fundraiser, Feinstein has made no effort to raise campaign funds for the 2024 contest.)
Three Democrats have already signaled that they’re seeking the post, one (Rep. Katie Porter) by a formal declaration of candidacy; the second (Rep. Barbara Lee) by an informal declaration; and the third (Rep. Adam Schiff) by already hiring an extensive campaign staff. A fourth, Rep. Ro Khanna, has held open the possibility that he may yet enter the field.
Three of those Democrats—Porter, Lee, and Khanna—have been trailblazing members of the party’s progressive wing. Porter, a onetime pupil and protégé of Elizabeth Warren at Harvard Law who became a law professor in her own right, was elected to Congress in 2018 in a historically Republican district in Orange County (she was at the time a law prof at UC Irvine), and she narrowly held that seat last November after her district had been reshaped in the decennial redistricting to be slightly more Republican. She’s won a national reputation as the House’s toughest and most effective griller of corporate CEOs as she’s gone after their overpricing, monopolistic behavior and general bad citizenship in numerous congressional hearings. That reputation enabled her to raise gobs of money from small-dollar progressive donors, which proved to be a factor in her recent re-election and which stands her in good stead for her upcoming Senate campaign.
Barbara Lee’s district, which she has represented since 1998, is not one where staying in office requires any fundraising at all. Lee represents Oakland and Berkeley in Congress; her predecessor in that seat, for whom she’d worked before being elected to the state legislature, was Ron Dellums, who for years was the sole DSOC (Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee) and then DSA member of the House. Roughly following in Dellums’s radical footsteps, Lee was the sole member of Congress to vote against the resolution passed in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks authorizing the president to conduct a “war on terror,” most immediately in Afghanistan. She urged her colleagues “not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target”—words that struck many as ridiculous at that time but more prescient as our two-decade-long Afghan intervention came to seem both endless and fruitless.
Since the 2016 election, Ro Khanna has represented Silicon Valley in the House, first winning office by ousting the incumbent liberal lion Mike Honda. Khanna, however, has virtually nothing in common with the Valley’s strain of libertarian economics. A supporter of Medicare for All, unions, and recomposing corporate boards so that one-third of their members are elected by the corporation’s employees, Khanna is, with Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, the most prominent exponent of a progressive industrial policy to be found among America’s elected officials. In 2020, he co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.
As Trump’s prosecutor, Adam Schiff has become a national figure able to amass a huge campaign war chest.
The moderate in the field is the member from Pasadena and Glendale—Adam Schiff, who was first elected to represent his district in 2000, as Los Angeles’s historically Republican but rapidly diversifying suburbs were turning from red to blue. Schiff was among the one-third of House Democrats who voted to authorize the war in Iraq in 2002, but more recently led efforts to repeal that 2001 post-9/11 resolution, against which Lee, all by her lonesome, had voted. His reason was pretty much the same as Lee had put forth: Its open-ended authorization of the war on terror no longer made any sense. The now ranking Democrat and former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, as well as a onetime deputy DA, Schiff led House Democrats’ impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump in 2020, for Trump’s efforts to threaten Ukrainian President Zelensky with withdrawal of U.S. aid unless Zelensky came up with some evidence (fabricated would be fine) against Hunter Biden. As Trump’s prosecutor (and as the target of countless Trump tweets), Schiff, like Porter, has become a national figure able to amass a huge campaign war chest, which he still has handy as he plans his Senate campaign.
Now, keep in mind that California has a jungle primary, in which candidates of both major parties, various minor parties, and no party whatever all appear on the same ballot, with the top two, regardless of party, running off in the November general election—unless one gets 50 percent-plus-one votes in the primary, which sure as hell won’t happen next year. Given the state’s overwhelming Democratic tilt, it’s not clear that a Republican will make it into the final two, though if the Democrats split their votes four or even three ways, it remains at least theoretically possible that a GOPnik will make it to November. Since that November election will surely result in a Democratic victory, no Republican with a reputation that extends beyond his or her nuclear family has expressed interest in running.
Khanna has said that he’s waiting to see how the Democratic field takes shape, by which he seems to mean whether Lee can stay in the race. Unlike Porter and Schiff, she’s not done serious fundraising at least since the 1990s, nor does she have the kind of nationwide reputation or contacts that Porter, Schiff, and even Khanna can boast. (Porter has already been endorsed by Warren, and Khanna, should he enter, could well be endorsed by Bernie Sanders.) Another factor working against Lee is age: She’s currently 76, and if elected, her term would run until she’s 84. Considering that Feinstein is not running almost entirely because she’s grown too old to handle most duties of her office, and that the Senate is widely and correctly perceived as an old folks home that on rare occasions makes laws, Lee’s age will not help her. Nor will the fact that the other three Dems have made their reputations in the past couple of years, while Lee’s 15 minutes came 22 years ago.
Should Lee prove unable to sustain a campaign, Khanna might see an opening as the one Bay Area candidate in the field with a shot at winning. The candidacy of either three or even two representatives from the party’s left wing, however, likely will mean a split in the progressive vote, which will greatly help Schiff make it into the final two. However, Schiff is unlikely to corral any Republican votes even if the November runoff pits him against Porter, as Trump and the entire MAGA universe view him as the devil incarnate.
For those of you interested in the workings of Actually Existing American Capitalism, I highly recommend a Zoom event at 6:30 Eastern tonight (Wednesday evening), sponsored by the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. It features author Rick Wartzman talking about his new book, Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism. Wartzman is perhaps the keenest student of American corporate conduct, in particular its apparently irrepressible urge to suppress workers, and in this book he goes deep inside Walmart’s boardroom and Bentonville behavior to document now America’s largest private-sector employer is still an employer that falls woefully short of providing its workers with anything resembling a comfortable existence. To register for this event, please click this link.
And if you can’t make it, and even if you can, buy the book.
