Saying the quiet part out loud

Katie Porter dared to acknowledge what most Americans ignore

Last week, the supposedly progressive State of California rejected two prominent progressive women running for a U.S. Senate seat, and instead embraced a pair of warmongering conservative men as the state’s final choices this November for its next U.S. senator.

I wrote a few months ago about the opportunity created by the opening of the late Senator Dianne Feinstein’s seat, and how Governor Gavin Newsom failed to rise to the occasion.

This post will both update that analysis of California’s open seat in the Senate, and also observe troubling implications of not only the primary race for it, but also any number of other offices around the country.

California abandons its supposed values

California has always prided itself on rejecting cultural orthodoxy. Our nation’s most populous and prosperous state, it has also been a petri dish for its counter-cultures, iconically representing alternatives to the dominant culture’s conservatism. California has incubated new paradigms whose influence on America is visible in music, community, relationships, and mind-altering substances. California has also been the epicenter for any number of social movements, from the movement for LGBTQ equality, to movements seeking peace in the face of Washington’s relentless bipartisan militarism.

Yet the results of last week’s primary election defy that tradition, particularly by advancing two conservative men to the general election, and denying two progressive women the chance to serve in the Senate.

First, it’s important to note that gender does not explain the outcome. Until she became Vice President, one of California’s most recent senators was Kamala Harris. The tension between her 2016 victory and the 2024 defeat of Barbara Lee and Katie Porter by Adam Schiff suggests that California does not embrace straightforward political misogyny, but rather a unique aversion to progressive women serving in higher federal office.

Katie Porter and Barbara Lee are among the more inspiring voices in the House of Representatives.

Porter has gained viral fame for her thoughtful work in oversight hearings. Her use of visual aids to illustrate important concepts has helped bring the arcane work of congressional committees home to voters and viewers. It has also deftly highlighted the absurdity of claims made by business leaders and government officials who appear before them.

Meanwhile, Barbara Lee is an even bolder figure. When Bush invaded Iraq, Lee was among the few voices in Congress to speak out, and she was the only vote in Congress against the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force that every president since then has contorted as a basis for imperial aggression. She has consistently sided with workers against Wall Street, and with the people of the United States against the Pentagon, unlike the vast majority of her colleagues.

While rejecting Lee and Porter, California voters chose two other candidates who emerged from last week’s primary: Republican Steve Garvey and Democrat Adam Schiff.

Garvey rode a wave of name recognition to electoral victory, based almost entirely on his previous career as a sports figure.

Meanwhile, Schiff owed his primary victory largely to his role in the Trump impeachment process. That made him a nationally visible figure, even though he pursued a co-opted strategy hamstrung by Democrats to avoid raising issues of corruption that inconveniently stray in bipartisan directions.

In a fundraising email distributed last week, Schiff observed the many corners of support he secured from across the state, including “18 statewide labor unions” and “over 80% of California’s democratic house delegation.” His race was not the first time that labor leaders abandoned the interests of their rank and file. In too many cases, rank-and-file workers never even get a chance to participate in determining union endorsements.

Porter’s political blasphemy

In the days following the election, a fascinating discourse emerged that may have been more important than the election itself.

Reflecting on her loss, as well as the role played by media outlets in crafting public opinion and suppressing dissenting voices, Porter publicly lamented “an onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rig this election.”

Voices across the political spectrum decried Porter’s comments, likening her rhetoric to that of former president Donald Trump. After all, the critics reasoned, both Trump and Porter have said outright that elections are unreliable.

But in conflating Porter’s comments with Trump’s, critics failed to observe a crucial distinction: Trump’s words reflected outrage about an electoral outcome, whereas Porter simply observed a political process lacking any legitimacy.

Ultimately, Porter’s critics chose to clutch their pearls while defending a vision of democracy in America that stands at sharp odds with a painful contemporary reality.

Any number of figures have chosen (not only over the past week, but also long before) to depict the political process in the United States as a sophisticated mechanism that translates the political will of the electorate and steers our government in line with the consent of the governed.

Those figures might want to put down their keyboards for a minute and leave the house for once. A more disappointing reality has long been painfully apparent to millions of Americans who recognize the farce of the presidential election looming this November.

Campaign finance poisons the well

Political scientists tend to present capitalism and democracy as aligned concepts, despite a profound tension between those two values that reveals itself in every election across the country at every level of government.

Democracy is based on political equality, and the idea enshrined in the Supreme Court’s 1964 Reynolds v Sims decision as “one person, one vote.”

In sharp contrast, capitalism is based on, and actively facilitates, economic inequality.

Political equality and economic inequality need not necessarily stand in sharp opposition, since the equality required for democracy to be meaningful is political, not economic. But another Supreme Court case decided in 2010 unfortunately conflated those spheres, subverting democracy by subjecting its processes to the inequality that should be limited to economics.

In 2010, the Supreme Court decided in Citizens United to effectively strike down the campaign finance regime that I worked as a young lawyer to successfully defend in the lower courts. The 2003 McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act tried to take Corporate money out of politics, and a team on which I worked won a legal battle in 2005 before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that forced the Federal Election Commission to pass regulations more faithful to a bipartisan act of Congress aiming to insulate the campaign finance arena from corporate influence.

30 years early, the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision set the stage for Citizens United by conflating money and speech. That decision effectively extended constitutional protection for speech far beyond actual speech, striking down limits on election expenditures as unconstitutional, even though Justice Byron White recognized in his dissent that Congress had legitimately decided that unlimited election spending “[w]as a mortal danger against which effective preventive and curative steps must be taken.”

By constitutionally protecting opportunities for wealthy people—and corporations—to skew the political process in their favor, the 2010 Citizens United decision portended a disturbing future that many are only now coming to realize.

At the end of the day, voters are supposed to pick who wins any particular office. Yet, elections are functionally decided by the few who both care, and are in a position, to invest in political campaigns.

In any given election cycle, less than 1% of voters contribute more than $200 to candidates. Ultimately, because most Americans are either too broke—or too disengaged—to invest in political campaigns, they are effectively reduced to passive observers of a political process driven by their relatively more affluent neighbors.

There’s nothing democratic about party insiders and super PACs picking who will serve in Congress. Describing a political process that allows that pattern as “rigged” is a lot more accurate than pretending that it enjoys any legitimacy.

Campaign finance skews media coverage

Most media discussions about politics in the United States steer clear of any discussion of policy, history, or the actual subject matter of governance. Instead, media reports about elections tend to emphasize their aspects indistinguishable from a horse race: who appears to be leading, who appears to be trailing, what the prospects are for their positions changing, and often, prognostication about the eventual result.

Lost in that style of coverage is any meaningful attempt to expose voters to the backgrounds of candidates before running for office, their policy proposals and positions, and the outcomes of positions they may have taken in the past. Of course, each of these themes is more salient to voters than observations about the state of the race.

Yet—even though the press enjoys constitutional protections under the First Amendment specifically because of its role in enabling transparency and accountability—journalists and editors have long declined to show up for work.

In the months leading up to elections, reporters often focus on polls as well as fundraising results as proxies for the strengths or weaknesses of campaigns. More frequently, they ignore elections entirely, choosing only to report on campaigns that overcome fundraising barriers to establish minimum thresholds perceived to indicate political viability.

In other words, the press serves a crucial gatekeeping function to block the public from ever hearing about most candidates for public office, many of whom offer compelling, and even visionary alternatives to the failed policies of their (often corrupt) predecessors. That’s not a trivial failure. It’s a bit like cutting democracy off at the knees by turning a sector trusted to promote transparency to instead obscure electoral alternatives. To that extent, the press has been weaponized against the public it is supposed to serve.

That pattern unfortunately infects every election from California to Maine and Florida.

Democracy requires debates

On the one hand, the race for California’s open seat in the U.S. Senate at least featured a public debate. That’s a far cry from most seats in government, or those held by the most influential policymakers. The one against whom I mounted congressional campaigns from 2018-2022 has not debated an opponent since 1987. And the 2024 presidential primaries have proceeded as a foregone conclusion, as the leading candidates have ducked debates rather than face their challengers.

At the end of the day, no election lacking a public debate can be described as legitimate. To imagine that voters understand the contrasts between candidates without opportunities to observe them directly exchanging views is frankly ridiculous—especially when considering how media coverage of candidates and campaigns obscures policy proposals and substantive ideas.

Some might pretend that editors enjoy the sophistication necessary to vet candidates and differentiate those who are serious from those who are clowns. The bizarre and revealing saga of George Santos proves that not to be the case, even in major media markets served by legions of journalists.

My favorite example of this particular kind of failure is embodied by Clara Jeffery, editor-in-chief of Mother Jones. Despite running a “progressive” publication, she has a habit of punching down at immigrant voices and publicly praising at least one corrupt oligarch who has spent multiple generations filling her pockets while denying human rights, smearing her opponents, and ducking debates. 

Jeffery’s example illustrates how even progressive journalists have abandoned their jobs and ethical principles to instead cultivate cults of personality. Those cults of personality, and the fawning sycophancy among journalists that enables them, offer a poor substitute for the reasoned exchanges on which democracy would depend.

Beyond California

The reason that Porter’s political blasphemy drew condemnation from across the aisle is because the ruse in Washington depends on Americans ignoring the pervasive corruption in plain sight.

It may have been rhetorically convenient for Porter’s critics to conflate her with Trump. But it would be more honest to recognize the disturbing insight apparent in her comments, and recommit journalism to public transparency and accountability.

Paid subscribers can access a summary of a new project I’m undertaking here in an effort to help other candidates currently running for office overcome these patterns. While the demagoguery of co-opted editors ended my attempt to make better policy in Washington, I do hope to help highlight better alternatives to the corporate shills they relentlessly promote.