How does Katie Porter do it?
Then there is California’s Rep. Katie Porter.
If anyone could be forgiven for taking a moderate line, it would be Porter. She’s the first Democratic House member ever elected from California’s 45th District. Her 2018 victory was so close that it took about a week to determine that she defeated the Republican incumbent. While Orange County threw its support to Hillary Clinton in 2016, it’s still hardly a bastion of left-leaning politics: Her district is almost evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats and independents, with Republicans holding a slight edge.
But instead of moving to the center, Porter — who campaigned as a champion of Medicare-for-all and a proud protegee of Sen. Elizabeth Warren — tacked left. And not only are constituents not deserting her, but the Orange County Register this week described Porter as “favored” to to hold her seat against her Republican opponent, Greg Raths.
I reached out to Porter this week to ask a basic question: How does she do it? I want to know how she manages to combine being a high-profile progressive while maintaining a secure grip on what is widely viewed as a swing district.
“Not every swing district is mushy,” Porter tells me via Zoom. “It’s not that people are kind of Republican and kind of Democrat. Some places are swing districts because there are strong Republicans and strong Democrats in equal numbers.”
In other words, just because a district is divided between Democrats and Republicans doesn’t mean the majority of people can meet in the middle. That’s Washington pollster thinking, Porter says, but it often doesn’t reflect the reality on the ground.
In Porter’s view, you need voters to respect you as a politician and a person, and the way to do that is to show respect to them. That doesn’t happen by pandering to the (possibly mythical) centrist voter, but by explaining in non-specialist language what you are doing and why you are doing it.
And, that, Porter does famously on a national scale, excoriating corporate CEOs with her white board and no-nonsense questions. She asked JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon how a bank teller could live on a minimum wage — a question he couldn’t answer. As a result of her harsh questioning, Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agreed to make covid-19 testing free. Last week, she humiliated Mark Alles, former chief executive of pharmaceutical giant Celgene, by pointing out how Americans struggled to pay inflated prices for his company’s cancer drug, Revlimid, while he collected millions of dollars in salary.
At the same time, Porter doesn’t eschew deals with the other team. She picks her causes — recently, for instance, sponsoring a bill with Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) to make it easier to enroll newborns on health insurance plans while protecting new parents from surprise medical bills.
Porter says that Washington might understand politics in Democratic or Republican terms, but that’s not how most people experience it. In many cases, they believe both parties have failed them.
“There is a lot of desire to talk about the issues without having it be about partisanship,” she tells me. “I’ll just say ‘we’ve got a real problem in this country with pharmaceutical prices.’ I don’t say ‘we’ve got a real problem with pharmaceutical prices because of Republicans,’ ” she explains. “The reality is I’ve got a lot of Republican constituents who can’t afford the pharmaceutical prices, too.”
Porter says that after her famous questioning of Dimon, she heard from a large number of people who contacted her office to say, “ ’I’m not a Democrat … but that’s my story. I was that single mom. I work at a bank today and I can’t make ends meet.’ ”
All of this is paying off for Porter — in fundraising, in national recognition and no doubt in votes on Nov. 3. Perhaps the real question is what’s next for the freshman representative. Her name is getting bandied about as everything from a possible appointment to the Senate, should Kamala D. Harris win the vice presidency, to serving in the Biden administration, perhaps as the head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. And once again, Porter is breaking with tradition. She’s not denying interest in moving on. “I would be honored to be asked to consider any position, and I would simply assess what good I thought I could do if I felt like I was qualified,” she told me.
But for now, she’s an incumbent running for reelection. So she quickly adds: “I love this job.”
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