After losing her race for U.S. Senate, Katie Porter is shamed for speaking the truth | Opinion
Can we all just calm down about Katie Porter?
Before we jump all over her for claiming the U.S. Senate race was “rigged” by billionaires, let’s consider the totality of what she had to say.
After finishing third in the election, behind Rep. Adam Schiff and former professional baseball player Steve Garvey, Porter condemned the role of Big Money in politics.
“Special interests and billionaires spent close to $20 million attempting to keep me out of the Senate,” she told supporters in post-election remarks. “They like politics as it is today.”
She got that right.
Fairshake, a SuperPAC backed by the crypto-currency industry, spent $10 million on a smear campaign targeting Porter.
“She claims not to take corporate PAC money,” one ad said in part. “No. Instead, Katie Porter takes her campaign cash directly from Big Pharma, Big Oil and the Big Bank executives. More than $100,000.”
(The Sacramento Bee rated that claim mostly false.)
Another SuperPAC, Standing Strong, spent $9.1 million on ads intended to bolster Steve Garvey’s chances — that’s in addition to the millions the Schiff campaign spent on similar ads.
It was all perfectly legal, though perhaps ethically questionable - and definitely slimy - for Schiff to deliberately sabotage Porter’s chances to make the runoff. He knew he would have a far better chance of beating Garvey.
Porter had the nerve to use that three-letter word, “rig,” to describe what happened.
“Thank you to everyone who supported our campaign and voted to shake up the status quo in Washington” she posted on X. “Because of you we had the establishment running scared — withstanding 3 to 1 in TV spending and an onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rig this election.
The reaction was immediate, and it was harsh.
“Fellow Democrats are excoriating Rep. Katie Porter for saying her opponents, including Rep. Adam Schiff, sought to ‘rig’ California’s Senate primary — language that echoes former President Donald Trump’s election denialism,” Politico wrote.
The Daily Beast called her accusation ”sour grapes,” and New York Magazine advised that Katie Porter should drop the word from her vocabulary.
Los Angeles Times columnist Mark Z. Barabak went into full hair-on-fire mode: “That word — rig — suggesting there was something illicit, fishy or not entirely kosher about this week’s California primary, wasn’t just groundless and self-serving. Given today’s fraught environment, it was reckless and wildly irresponsible, like tipping kerosene on a fire, or handing a child a loaded pistol.”
Porter clarified her statement in another tweet: “I said ‘rigged by billionaires’ and our politics are — in fact — manipulated by big dark money. Defending democracy means calling that out. At no time have I ever undermined the vote count and election process in CA, which are beyond reproach.”
That still didn’t satisfy the language police, who accused her of “doubling down” on her claim that the election was “rigged.”
Perhaps Porter should have consulted a thesaurus before she posted.
Thesaurus.com has several suggestions: falsify, fix, manipulate, tamper with, doctor, engineer, fake, juggle, fiddle with, trump up.
Speaking of Trump, Porter never suggested the election was stolen. Implying otherwise is ridiculous.
Porter was stating the irrefutable by saying that corporate money plays an outsized role in politics — and most voters would agree.
Instead of shaming Porter for her choice of words, we should focus on her message: Huge sums of money paid by special interests too often have a much louder voice than the working people that Porter championed in her campaign. She is a single mom who was inspired to run for office from outside the same old pathways that groom compliant politicians to do the bidding of the people funding them. We need more people like Porter, not fewer.
Can Porter be blunt in conveying her message? Yes, but her message is righteous and she deserves more than to be another opinionated woman getting pummeled on Twitter for being “difficult.” In the end, the overblown reaction to Porter’s tweet said more about her critics than it said about her.
This story was originally published March 7, 2024 at 2:13 PM with the headline "After losing her race for U.S. Senate, Katie Porter is shamed for speaking the truth | Opinion."
