Katie Porter lost it.
The Democratic front-runner for governor of California was giving a routine TV interview to the CBS station in Sacramento when reporter Julie Watts asked if she supported Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting proposal, Proposition 50 on the Nov. 4 special election ballot. Porter said she did. The next question caused all the trouble.
“What do you say to the 40% of California voters — who you’ll need in order to win — who voted for Trump?” Watts asked.
You’d have to go back to 1939, when Judy Garland threw a bucket of water on Margaret Hamilton, to find a comparable reaction captured on camera.
“How would I need them in order to win, ma’am?” Porter asked, leaning forward into the shadows with an expression that Margaret Hamilton could only achieve after hours in make-up. Then, as Watts referred to the math of a crowded Democratic field in the primary, Porter turned to look at someone off-camera and rocked with laughter.
“Unless you think you’re going to get 60% of the vote,” Watts continued. “You think you’ll get 60% of the — all of the — everybody who did not vote for Trump will vote for you. That’s what you’re a…”
“In a general election, yes,” Porter said. “If it is me versus a Republican, I think that I will win the people who did not vote for Trump.”
“What if it is you versus another Democrat?” Watts asked.
“I don’t intend that to be the case,” Porter snapped back.
As Watts persisted to find out what Porter meant by that statement, Porter looked off-camera and said, “I don’t want to keep doing this. I’m going to call it.” The former congresswoman and former candidate for U.S. Senate declared that she would not continue the interview if the reporter was going to “make up a follow-up question” on every question.
The sense of entitlement was so familiar.
Last year we saw Vice President Kamala Harris grab the Democratic nomination without a primary and then go 39 straight days without giving an interview or holding a press conference. Harris didn’t bother to reach out to Americans who had voted for Donald Trump. She campaigned with Liz Cheney, the defeated former congresswoman from Wyoming who called Trump, among other things, “a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.” President Joe Biden chimed in, calling Trump’s supporters “garbage.”
But the champion of entitlement has to be the former first lady, secretary of State and U.S. senator from New York, Hillary Clinton. She famously called Trump’s supporters “a basket of deplorables” as she marched toward her inevitable, historical, glass-ceiling-shattering, fireworks-off-a-barge presidential election victory that did not happen.
It’s easy to say the election failures of Porter, Harris and Clinton are the product of reactionary patriarchal antipathy to decolonial feminist intersectionality — OK, it’s not easy to say, but it will get you straight A’s in 99 classrooms out of a hundred.
In fact, their election failures are much simpler to explain. These are arrogant, entitled politicians who believe they’re far above the need to campaign for the votes of people they think are beneath them. Their playbook calls for cleverly or corruptly forcing their Democratic Party rivals out of contention, then letting party machinery deliver the votes to win. People who vote for the other party can be insulted, laughed at or dismissed as irrelevant.
Watch the clip of Katie Porter as she scowlingly asks the reporter, “How would I need them in order to win, ma’am?”
The answer that was obvious to the reporter is that with five or more prominent Democrats running on the same primary ballot with two Republicans, if a fraction of the 6 million Californians who voted for Trump in 2024 supported one of the Democrats, it could be enough to give that candidate the victory.
There’s also this: if the 6 million Trump voters cast their ballots for the two leading GOP candidates for governor, while the Democratic vote is split between half a dozen candidates, Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco could both get into the November general election, freezing the Democrats out completely.
So what’s the plan on the Democratic side to prevent that outcome?
Toni Atkins withdrew from the governor’s race last week, writing that “uniting as Democrats” is essential to fighting Trump. Eleni Kounalakis had already dropped her campaign for governor to run for state treasurer. Betty Yee, describing herself as “the last viable female candidate in this race,” called on Porter to drop out.
But in the interview, Porter flatly said she intended to be the only Democrat in the general election.
How? She could be referring to the strategy Gavin Newsom used against Antonio Villaraigosa in 2018 and Adam Schiff used against her in 2024. In both campaigns, the front-running Democrat in the primary spent campaign funds on ads to elevate the public profile of a Republican, a carefully managed manipulation of the projected vote totals to ensure one Democrat and one Republican in the November runoff.
Would it work for Katie Porter? Even if she’s still the Democratic front-runner after the interview debacle, it might not.
There certainly will be some Democratic voters in California, especially men, who would vote Republican, stay home or move to Mars before they would vote for the whiteboard-wielding woman with the terrible sizzle reel, clip after hideous clip of a haughty former congresswoman berating people who are just trying to do their jobs.
Is that sexism?
No. It’s more similar to what a college student told me in 2005 was the reason he would never, ever, in a million years, vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton for president.
“She wants to ban violent video games,” he said. “Who does she think she is?”
Like Kamala Harris, she thought she was the next president of the United States. And then Trump reached out to Democratic voters.
Katie Porter thinks she’s the next governor of California. It’s the best chance Republicans have had to win a statewide race in years.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley