David Dayen
Rep. Katie Porter, left, is running for a third House term, in California’s 47th Congressional District, centered in Orange County.
“If your hand isn’t sore at the end of the day, you’re doing it wrong!” Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) explained to about 35 supporters at a canvass launch event last Sunday at her campaign office in Huntington Beach. It was the second of three canvass launches that morning, the core of an organizing strategy that began weeks prior. Porter, a law professor before entering Congress in 2019, was in full pedagogy mode, humorously acting out the fundamentals of door-knocking. She even had her ubiquitous whiteboard, prearranged with four shorthand slogans that stressed the need to have meaningful conversations, ask for votes, and remain relentlessly upbeat:
- Knock loud, be proud
- Dropping lit ain’t it
- The ask is the task
- Don’t fear, bring the cheer
“This is a fun thing,” Porter told the canvassers. “Our community is amazing. And we are out in the sun talking to our neighbors to fight for our country. That is a privilege to live in a democracy like this.”
The canvassers in Huntington Beach were stepping into virgin territory. After redistricting, about 70 percent of voters in California’s 47th Congressional District will see Porter’s name on the ballot for the first time. Her new district supported Joe Biden in 2020 at about the same rate as her old one (by roughly a ten-point margin), but Democrats have a mere 1.4 point voter registration advantage. And that unfamiliarity—the streets around the Huntington Beach office were littered with yard signs promoting Republicans—means that Porter’s mobilization needed to start early.
“This is the critical period to communicate,” Porter told me in an interview. Ballots are mailed to California voters the week of October 10, which the campaign sees as Election Day. Since Labor Day, Porter’s canvasses have been focusing on persuading and identifying voters, but starting next week, volunteers will return to the doors of supporters to get out the vote, a month before balloting closes. In October, canvassing will happen daily.
The unfamiliarity is compounded by the fact that Porter’s base, at the University of California, Irvine, where she taught, is just returning to campus. “Classes started [last] Thursday,” Porter explained. “So I have not had any runway to engage these kids. The real crunch is September 22, when these guys came back, to October 10 when ballots go out.”
Of course, Porter doesn’t need much of an introduction. During our interview at a coffee shop in Irvine, a woman who looked young enough to be a student approached us. “I just wanted to ask, are you Katie?” she queried. “I love you. That’s it. Love you.”
PORTER HAS BECOME A DEMOCRATIC MEDIA SENSATION over the past few years, beloved for her takedowns of corporate CEOs in hearings and her general no-bullshit attitude. What’s more, she did it as a frontliner, Washington’s name for House Democrats in swing seats whose electoral outcomes typically determine which party controls the chamber. Where frontliners often aim for the most inoffensive, bland position possible on any issue, pandering either to an imagined fussy median voter or to the donor class, Porter’s more unyielding stances are what she believes gives her broad buy-in with a divided electorate.
After redistricting, about 70 percent of voters in California’s 47th Congressional District will see Porter’s name on the ballot for the first time.
“I didn’t run as a typical politician,” she said. “And I think I’ve delivered on not being a typical politician.”
This fall, Porter faces Scott Baugh, a state assemblyman in the 1990s and the former chair of the Orange County Republican Party. The fact that Baugh paid fines for multiple state campaign finance violations while in the legislature, and became a lobbyist for the county after his terms in the assembly, plays into Porter’s narrative about taking on special interests.
“I think there’s a pretty clear contrast between someone who is one of the dozen members of Congress who doesn’t take lobbyist money, and someone who’s been a professional lobbyist,” she said. “I ran on good governance, and on standing up to special-interest money, and he has been involved in projects that corrupt our political system.”
Porter’s popularity has given her an insurmountable fundraising lead, with an incredible $19.8 million in cash on hand as of the end of June. Baugh had about $1.1 million in the bank at that point. The Congressional Leadership Fund, the leading House Republican PAC, has spent a nominal sum of about $800,000 on the race.
Still, Porter has never won more than 53.5 percent of the vote in her two House victories, and Republicans are loaded for bear against her. First, they highlighted a discounted home she purchased in University Hills, on the UC Irvine campus, as part of a program the university uses to attract professors who would otherwise be priced out of a city where the median home price exceeds $1 million. Because she is currently on leave from the school, some have questioned whether Porter should still be eligible for that discount, or whether under the rules of the arrangement she should have to pay off the mortgage entirely.
David Dayen
Porter has become a Democratic media sensation over the past few years, beloved for her takedowns of corporate CEOs in hearings.
Porter referenced the matter when talking to me about housing policy. “If you say to voters, we need affordable housing, people freak out. They just don’t know … are you saying we need high-rises, are you saying we need public housing? We don’t have that here. But if you say to voters, Orange County has a housing affordability problem, every eyeball blinks open,” she said. “We are a job center, so we also need to be a housing center. You I’m sure have seen the debacle about workforce housing with UCI and me. But this is actually an example of the kind of program we need to be thinking more about, how we can provide programs like this.”
Perhaps nobody in Congress has more experience with the burdens of housing than Porter. In 2012, then–state Attorney General Kamala Harris named her the independent monitor for California’s part of the National Mortgage Settlement, and she got personally involved in thousands of foreclosure cases, leading to better outcomes for the state than anywhere in the country. “I think the party that wins and dominates for the next 20 years will be the party that delivers housing solutions,” Porter said.
Conservatives have used other lines of attack. Fox News complained that Porter earned royalties on a textbook she co-authored and used in her classes, a self-aggrandizement charge weakened by the fact that she earned a similar level of royalties after pausing teaching to go to Congress. (Unless the problem is authors being paid for their work at all.) And this week, Fox News released texts showing Porter’s anger at the Irvine Police Department over an altercation with Trump supporters at one of her town hall events that led to the arrest of Julian Willis, whom she formerly lived with. This aligns with a resurgent tough-on-crime message that conservatives are using as a dog whistle in tight races.
Before that last story came out, Porter at her canvassing events touted the recent House passage of her bill, the Mental Health Justice Act, which would fund mental health responders to 911 calls for cities and counties. “One in five 911 calls come from someone experiencing a mental health crisis,” Porter said at the Huntington Beach canvass event. “And just like we don’t send police in to fight fires, we shouldn’t send police into mental health situations.” She noted that Orange County sheriff Don Barnes, a Republican, endorsed the legislation.
In our interview, Porter said that the communities she represents have relatively low crime, but that it’s become a proxy for a general unease or instability. “I’ve talked with our local law enforcement about what they’re seeing, they feel that they have the resources they need,” she said. “I think the number one thing is trying to address problems of homelessness, of mental illness, of substance use disorder. And our police need us to respond to those situations differently, so that they can be focused on solving crimes.”
OPPO RESEARCH ASIDE, TWO MAJOR ISSUES are dominating the 47th District race: abortion and inflation.
“The word ‘extreme’ gets tossed around a lot,” Porter says to camera in her only television ad of the cycle thus far, “but making it illegal to have an abortion, no exceptions, truly is extreme.” Porter explained to me that this was the fastest and simplest way to introduce herself to new voters and demonstrate instantly where she stands. “People don’t want to lose rights,” she told me. “In talking to voters, this was the issue that united the broadest range.”
The state of California is also trying to turn up the intensity on abortion after the Dobbs ruling. It is one of five states with an abortion-related measure on the November ballot. Prop 1 would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution.
But while it was thought that lawmakers put Prop 1 on the ballot to drive turnout from young voters and women inclined to give greater margins to Democrats, and to specifically help in swing-seat races like Katie Porter’s, she finds that it presents a messaging challenge.
“Abortion isn’t at risk because of our California laws and levers,” Porter said. “Abortion is at risk because of our national laws. Lindsey Graham said there would be a national abortion ban.” The attention that state Democrats have placed on abortion creates a false sense of security, she continued. “There’s a little bit of a contradictory message there. They say, ‘I’ve got you in California.’ And I’m out there saying, actually I need to you understand something, which is, California’s only got you until the federal government takes action.”
David Dayen
Rep. Katie Porter with her whiteboard
On inflation, Porter told a closed-door House Democratic Caucus in May about the personal toll of having to do with less, as a single mom with two residences (one where she lives in Irvine and one where she works in D.C.) and high child care costs. “I do a lot of my best campaigning in the grocery stores,” she said. “Both in terms of meeting constituents but also talking to the staff about how people’s shopping has changed. My shopping has changed.” With gas prices back on the upswing after months of decreases, particularly in California where prices have spiked over 60 cents a gallon in a month, Porter and her colleagues need a story to tell.
She has followed a trend among Democrats, who are using the inflation problem to talk about corporate power, amid the highest corporate profits in 70 years. At a hearing last week, Porter highlighted the work of the Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal, who found corporate markups as a primary driver of higher prices, well above increased wages. Under questioning from Porter, Konczal explained that companies with pricing power before the pandemic were able to increase prices at a higher rate when the economy reopened.
“One of the things I say to people is the only people who benefit from monopolies are monopolists,” Porter said. She cited President Biden’s executive order on competition as the “sexiest thing” he has done in his first term. At a Monday meeting of the White House competition council, Biden announced an initiative to crack down on “junk fees” for financial services, airline tickets, hotel rooms, and more.
“It’s Jonathan [Kanter] and Lina [Khan] and Tim [Wu],” Porter said, referencing the heads of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, the Federal Trade Commission, and the White House competition policy czar. “It’s you know, those dumb mugs. But they really are doing it. It’s not a quick fix. It’s a structural fix. But that is going to be transformative for workers, consumers, for small business, for our economic stability, for our global competition.”
AFTER PORTER’S IRVINE CANVASS LAUNCH, I tagged along with two volunteers, Andrea Howlett and Marcie Obstfeld, as they snaked their way through subdivisions and large apartment complexes. “I truly believe that we can make a difference,” Marcie told me. “Change can happen if you work for it.”
Amazingly, they managed to find voters at virtually every door they knocked on for about an hour, a success rate I’d really never seen in my experience. In a development just off a golf course, they had a long conversation with a recently naturalized citizen who didn’t know if he was registered. “I think it’s super-important to vote,” Andrea told him. “I can tell by your face, you do too.”
In a huge cookie-cutter apartment complex, they talked to an engineer who said his most important issue was paying the rent. An older lady said she was worried about retirement. A Korean woman told them she votes every year, but didn’t want to tell them her preferences. They had a ten-minute conversation with a man about mental health issues who didn’t previously know who Porter was. “We connected with him,” Marcie said. “We’re really selling out here.”
Porter had canvassers ask about not just her but all the local down-ballot candidates. “I’m the top of the ticket,” she said. “They’re counting on me to help drive turnout.” We’ll find out soon whether this vast effort from her and her small army of volunteers, going door-to-door for two months across the district, will bear fruit.
