“Brazenly Cynical”: Why California’s US Senate Race Has Democrats at Each Other’s Throats

Adam Schiff roots for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Katie Porter is an Angels fan. Baseball allegiances are not, however, the source of their current bitter dispute over Steve Garvey, the former first baseman for the Dodgers.

The friction comes from Schiff, a Democrat, running ads attacking Garvey, elevating the Republican candidate’s profile. This could help Schiff’s primary bid to defeat fellow Democrats Porter and Barbara Lee and become California’s next US senator. “It’s a very intentional effort to erase qualified Democratic progressive women from the race,” Porter tells me. “He shouldn’t be trying to eliminate an ongoing, small d, democratic contest.” Schiff, unsurprisingly, sees things differently. “Some Democrats feel the only way they can lift themselves up is by pulling other Democrats down. I don’t feel that way,” Schiff tells me. “Steve Garvey is either tied for second or alone in second. He’s out there on Fox News attacking me. He’s not attacking the other Democrats. And I’m certainly going to fight back.”

This bit of strategic triangulation and intramural bickering is brought to you by California’s “jungle” primary system, in which candidates from all parties compete on the same ballot, with the top two finishers moving on to the general election. Porter says she believes Schiff, the front-runner, is scared of facing her one-on-one, so he has adopted the “brazenly cynical” approach of talking up Garvey to boost Republican primary turnout—because if Garvey finishes second in the primary, he would very likely be far weaker than Porter as a November opponent. Schiff scoffs at the notion that he fears anyone. “I’m certainly going to run the race that I think is best to win. All of my colleagues are going to do the same,” he says. “I’m drawing the contrast on issues with Mr. Garvey, and I’m drawing a contrast on effectiveness and leadership with my Democratic colleagues.”

All this skirmishing has only broken out in the final weeks of the campaign; the primary is on March 5. “Things are getting interesting! Finally!” a top California Democratic strategist tells me. Indeed, the race to succeed the late senator Dianne Feinstein had been both very expensive and sleepy for the past year. But its leading contenders are fascinating characters and highly qualified politicians.

Among the Democrats, Schiff, 63, has leveraged a combination of cable media stardom and powerful patronage into a consistent lead in fundraising and polling. In 2020, he rose to national prominence when Nancy Pelosi, then the House Speaker and eternally a California power broker, selected Schiff as the lead House manager in President Donald Trump’s first Senate impeachment trial. Porter, a 50-year-old single mom, rose to somewhat less national prominence as the whiteboard-toting, frequently funny and profane congressional-hearing scourge of corporate big shots. Meanwhile, Lee, 77, is considerably less well-known outside her Oakland-area district. But she has been a pioneering progressive for decades and was the sole member of Congress to vote against authorizing the war in Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks.

As the Democrats with the best chances of advancing to the general election, Schiff and Porter have clashed the most; they are also natural antagonists, given their divergent biographies and political perspectives. Schiff is a moderate whose strengths are his ties to the Democratic establishment and his talents at working the inside game. “I fully expect Joe Biden is going to win. Even so, I don’t think our democracy is going to be out of trouble. And God forbid Trump should be successful. So I think we need someone in the Senate that can take on that challenge,” Schiff says. “But we also need someone like Senator Feinstein that has a record of getting things done.” Porter is the outsider eager to disrupt the status quo. “[This race is] about whether we’re going to continue the kind of Washington that’s dominated by big corporations and by corporate PAC spending, or we’re going to have a Washington that focuses on how to create opportunity and economic prosperity for California families,” she says. “[Schiff] is someone who took money from Big Pharma…. I’m in the grocery store. I’m raising three kids. I understand what childcare and college costs. Not 30 years ago—today!”