Katie Porter, a California Democrat who harnessed the power of social media and whiteboards in Congress to gain popularity, is no stranger to brutal political races.
Porter received attention nationwide for taking CEOs of big pharmaceuticals to task, but she was no match for then-Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) Senate campaign machine. Schiff outmaneuvered her in the state’s dramatic 2024 jungle primary. He made a risky gamble of securing his position by boosting a Republican contender, former baseball player Steve Garvey, and edging Porter, his toughest competitor, out of the race.
The move sparked outrage from Porter and her supporters, who made accusations of dirty politics and called for donor purity tests, but she knew she had been sidelined by a bigger player in her own party.
“It was deliciously ironic to watch that play out,” Rodney Leong, a political strategist and member of the California Republican Party, told the Washington Examiner. “I shed no tears for that.”
Porter faces the same risk next year in an already-crowded field to replace termed-out Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Déjà vu
After months of hinting she would run, Porter launched her bid for governor on March 11 and instantly became the front-runner. She announced her 2026 gubernatorial campaign in a social media post in which she touted her independence from special interest groups and corporations and returned to one of her favorite subjects, attacking President Donald Trump.
“I first ran for office to hold Trump accountable,” she said in the video. “I feel that same call to serve now to stop him from hurting Californians. 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.”
While Porter seems to have the needed momentum, plus more than $1 million left over from her last race, her standing as the top contender would almost assuredly get reshuffled if former Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris entered the race.
Porter said in December that Harris entering the race would have a “near field-clearing effect” on Democrats. What she didn’t say is how a Harris run would affect her race.
Will she or won’t she?
Harris has been flirting with the idea of jumping into the contest and purportedly told people at a pre-Oscars party that she would make a decision by the end of the summer. If she does, it would take a 2028 presidential run, which she is said to be considering, off the table.
Even though early national polls have her leading the Democratic pack in a 2028 matchup, advisers have told her how hard a presidential primary could be. When she ran in 2024, she lost every swing state and saw a record number of black and Hispanic voters, who have historically been Democratic, reject her. Several political experts the Washington Examiner spoke to said Harris might fare better in California.
Terry McAuliffe, the former Virginia governor and Democratic national chairman, told the New York Times he had spoken with Harris a few months ago. He encouraged her to run for governor and thought that she would.
“I told her, ‘It’s a great job,’” he said. “‘You get out of bed, you sign executive orders, you get a lot of stuff done.’”
An aide to the former vice president told Politico that Harris has been intrigued by the idea of becoming the governor of the fifth-largest economy in the world, not to mention the first woman governor of California and the first black woman governor in America.
California has problems
Still, there are many reasons she might not want to get into the race, said Rob Stutzman, president of Stutzman Public Affairs.
“The path to the governor’s mansion is relatively hurdle-free, but that doesn’t make it the right path,” said the former deputy chief of staff for communications for Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “Imagine a piece of white paper with the pros written in ink on one side of the page and the cons on the other. The ink against this idea is going to dominate.”
The next governor of California will inherit a difficult budget situation brought on by fiscal mismanagement and multibillion-dollar gaps due to the flurry of spending by Newsom and the Democratic-led legislature. Spending increases include expanding Medi-Cal coverage to all of California’s 1.6 million undocumented migrants, costly climate policies, homelessness, and inadequate disaster relief that left so many in an insurance crisis following this year’s fires.
Stutzman said the “reality” under Newsom is that spending has increased 63%, or $127 billion.
“To make it worse for Harris, all the challenges described above are even more daunting for a Democrat,” he added. “The party’s constituencies like government spending and want more. Environmentalists are a Democrat subsidiary. And progressives will lose their minds about enforcing laws against homeless populations … even if it’s for their own good.”
If Harris decides to give the governorship a go, voters, already in an agitated state, might not embrace her the way she hopes.
Harris was known as a progressive hero in her home state of California. In 2019, the watchdog site GovTrack named her “the most liberal” member of the U.S. Senate and the senator least likely to sign onto bipartisan legislation. When she ran for president, she started to shy away from some of her more extreme positions, quietly erasing her record and turning herself into a centrist Democrat because she thought it would make her more electable. She very publicly changed her mind on fracking, border security, the Green New Deal, and taxes on tips.
But California voters can see through politicians who are disingenuous, longtime California-based Democratic strategist Darry Sragow told the Washington Examiner.
Voters in the blue state have been shifting away from progressive beliefs. Last year, for example, Californians overwhelmingly approved a measure on stricter sentences for crimes, ousted two progressive district attorneys, and voted out San Francisco’s progressive mayor.
“We saw that in the last election, people were voting for issues rather than the individual,” Leong said. “In San Francisco, we have a large geographic swath of the city that had the largest support for President Trump and also had the same amount of support for our new [Democratic] mayor. Both candidates pitched about fixing things that were broken.”
Porter, unlike Harris, has been unapologetically progressive. It might not serve her well in the primary, but she doesn’t need to win the primary, Sragow said. She just needs to get through it.
“We have a top-two primary, so you could make the argument that some Democrat is going to make a run more to the middle in order to attract independent and Republican votes in the primary, but the objective here is not to win the primary,” he said. “The objective in California is to wind up in the top two, and then you have a whole race to run for the fall. My guess is that she would stay the course she is on now, the course she has been on since she’s been in office, and let some other Democrat and what other Republicans get in the race act more to the right and in the middle.”
Porter’s game plan
For now, Porter’s game plan should be to start building a lead as fast as she can.
“My assumption is that Porter is working really hard to get her name out there,” Samantha Pettey, associate professor of political science at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, told the Washington Examiner. “This will be key. As a member of Congress, she has experience and is likely well liked in her district, but California is a geographically large and diverse state. Running a statewide campaign is difficult, and part of the difficulty is getting that name recognition. Harris has already won statewide office and also has higher name recognition since serving as VP and running for president.”
Pettey added, “Harris will still have to run a campaign and one that would be very different from the one she just ran.”
But if Harris gets in the game, Porter will likely have to change hers.
Strategy change
Leong, unlike Pettey, believes that to pull away from the other contenders, Porter will have to go in hard on the former vice president and current governor.
“She would have to attack Kamala on her record, attack Gavin on his record, because she and Gavin are sort of the same wing of the party, and then actually talk about real issues,” he said. “Discount all the bulls*** about Trump this, Trump that, that Democrats use to rile up the base and not have to answer any questions. She has to ask the questions about the people who are in charge like Gavin and company, and then questions for Kamala would be, ‘What makes you think you are qualified for being governor? You’ve never held that kind of position before. You’ve been a backbench senator’ and also attack several positions that Kamala has held personally that she’s flipped on.’”
Pettey, though, cautioned against preemptively going anti-Harris.
“Women candidates tend to be viewed more harshly for going negative, so it’s a strategy she might want to avoid,” she said. “Her current tactics of running as a pushback to Trump are likely popular since his approval is dwindling, but in a governor race, the issue priorities will eventually need to focus more on California. Voters are smart and recognize and distinguish between state-level and federal-level races. California is continuously experiencing fires and insurance companies raising premiums to address these concerns, so my guess is that her race will eventually have to focus much more on those issues.”
Sragow believes there is a happy medium.
“[Porter] has developed a profile as a tough, resolute, energetic, determined person with strong convictions, and for any candidate, that’s an excellent profile to enter a race with,” he told the Washington Examiner. “She has to be 100% herself.”
TRUMP’S TARIFFS ARE TRAMPLING ALLIANCES AGAINST CHINA
Nine candidates are in the race so far, including former Democratic California Attorney General and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, Democratic Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, former Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Democratic entrepreneur Stephen Cloobeck, Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, former Democratic state Controller Betty Yee, former Democratic state Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins, and Democratic state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.
Multiple calls to Porter’s campaign for comment were not returned.
