Katie Porter and the politics of real life

September 20, 2023 at 5:00 a.m. EDT

Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) in March. (Michael Robinson Chávez/The Washington Post)

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I had been granted an hour with the congresswoman, which felt generous, but she was about 15 minutes late, which was understandable. The House is an insane place to work, running for Senate is an insane thing to do, and having three underage kids, and about 755,000 constituent bosses, and 19 hours of commuting every week between Washington and Orange County, Calif. — well, time is scarce for Rep. Katie Porter. When the California Democrat arrived earlier this year for our meeting at a coffee shop near her basement apartment on Capitol Hill, she enthused about the shamrock hue of her outfit, which jibed with the unusually green lapel pin of the 118th Congress. She herself hasn’t been a great match for the House of Representatives, which she describes in her book, published in the spring, with startling honesty.

“Being a single mom of young kids in Congress was not possible,” she writes of her first year in office. The job was “just too hard.”

The day before the 2019 in-person deadline to file for her first reelection campaign, Porter was here in Washington, far from the Orange County Registrar of Voters, and “so tired I couldn’t see straight.” She was resigned to failure, to being a one-term congresswoman, because she couldn’t get her act together to run again. She was “seething” that the Founding Fathers had wives and servants “to do their bidding while they endlessly debated in Washington, without worry about their children getting to bed on time.”

But 3½ years later — near the beginning of her third term, a campaign for Senate and a book tour — Porter was a vision of energy and focus. The growing pains had been tough, but now she was ready to reach higher, for the upper chamber.

“With Senator Feinstein ending her service, with Nancy [Pelosi] not being speaker” and “with Gavin [Newsom] on a different path, shall we say, there are big shoes to fill in California, politically,” said Porter, 49, shaking a Splenda into her coffee. “And if we don’t have a scrappy, strategic, strong messenger in that role, we will not be able to win in every part and pocket of California.”

Power is what Porter wanted when she ran for office — the power to confront cheating corporations, to make the government responsive to the people. A “durable majority” of Democrats in Congress is what Porter wants now. She’s fed up with the party’s struggle to keep its head above water. “We’re going backwards in terms of the number of Democratic women” in the Senate, she told me. “To me, equality is not electing Joni Ernst‚” the Republican senator from Iowa. “Like, that’s not helping.”

Porter thinks her presence in Congress — and her way of being a congresswoman — is helping. “I know how to win in tough areas,” she said, a nod to how she flipped a district that previously favored a Republican by 17 points. “And it’s not by talking about Democrats and Republicans. It’s by talking about, ‘This is the thing that’s making my life hard.’”

For a while, this job made Porter’s life hard. And, in turn, Porter made difficult the lives of people in her orbit, according to murmurs that began in December, when Sasha Georgiades, a former military fellow in her Irvine office, alleged mistreatment of staff. That inspired self-described ex-staffers to send their own complaints about Porter to the “Dear White Staffers” Instagram account, a clearinghouse for anonymous, unverified harangues about congressional bosses.

On “Pod Save America” on Jan. 12, co-host Jon Favreau asked her about it: Is she as tough on her staff as she has been on Wall Street CEOs, the villains of her lauded oversight work in Congress?

“Well, I’m really proud of my staff,” Porter answered, bringing up the ex-fellow: “I regret if this employee feels disgruntled. … I’m willing to expect people to work hard. … I’m a teacher, so if I see a staffer making a mistake — or maybe we can do it better — let’s work on it.”

On April 17, Porter was asked on “The View” about the notion that she oversees a “toxic workplace.” And, in Porter fashion, she trimmed a thorny subject into a clear message for an audience of millions.

“I saw this as a professor, certainly: Female professors, particularly women of color, get much worse teaching evaluations, … even when all the professional evaluations are the same,” Porter said on air. “And so we see this again and again: Lots of [these] so-called ‘bad bosses’ are women and, disproportionately, people of color. I think it’s really unfortunate, because those are the very voices we need more of in our government. So I’m proud of my staff. I’m proud of the relationship we’ve built. I’m proud to have them as my team moving forward.”

It was a deft answer. And it prompts more questions: Why is Porter trailed by this cloud of insinuation — and should it matter at all? How can leadership be properly judged in a world built with double standards, and wired with infinite triggers and sensitivities? What is the price of surviving and thriving in politics?

No question: The Hill is a harsh place to work and to lead. No one knows this better than Katie Porter.

When Porter first ran, in a bitter Democratic primary in 2018, the state party backed another candidate. No House Democrats in the California congressional delegation endorsed her. Porter won the nomination anyway and blazed into Congress as an outsider — and, by some accounts, remained one. Porter’s book is littered with jabs at colleagues, both Democratic and Republican.

“The author seldom misses an opportunity to take a swipe at someone—her staffers and House colleagues get especially rough treatment,” noted Kirkus Reviews. In the course of the book, Porter mocks Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) three times, for example. (Though who could blame her.) She ribs fellow Democrat Abigail Spanberger (Va.) for being able to do only one push-up during a contest at the House gym, and refers to Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.) as the answer to the eternal Hill question, “Who is that old guy?” Porter praises her staff while also referring to their “raised-by-wolves” behavior. Her depiction of life in Congress is both tongue-in-cheek and knives-out.

Her sniping extends beyond the written page. On the podcast “Lovett or Leave It” in May, Porter referred to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as “queen of the dips—s.” The live audience erupted in joyous applause. (The cheeky title of her book is “I Swear.”)

Porter eschews decorum and pageantry when they don’t make sense to her. She “is incredibly smart and works her staff hard on issues that matter to the middle class,” said a former senior House staffer from California, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. “She comes from a place of thoughtfulness. Plenty of members work their staff to the bone over a park-naming, and that’s not Katie.”

While seated for the marathon voting for House speaker earlier this year, Porter made sure the online masses could see her reading material: “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.” She has created such viral moments since her first days in Congress, when during hearings she used a whiteboard, math and common sense to rattle barons of finance and break through to the public.

“Watch a Congresswoman destroy Equifax CEO Mark Begor,” said part of a Fast Company headline, mere weeks after her first swearing-in.

“Coupon-cutting congresswoman stumps big bank CEO,” declared MSNBC when Porter grilled a witness on his employees’ pay.

The head of Wells Fargo resigned two weeks after Porter and other Democrats flayed the bank’s business practices during a 2019 hearing.

“How many lives did Katie Porter save today using a whiteboard, a bulls— detector, and an ability to retain focus?” tweeted television producer Hart Hanson in March 2020, after Porter wielded her oversight power to extract a public pledge from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director that coronavirus testing would be free for all Americans.

Some of the American public, starved for catharsis and accountability, has been riveted by these performances. For years now — at committee hearings, during cable-news spots, on Instagram Live — Porter has distilled complex policy into razor-sharp messaging.

“Some would say she’s probably a little further left than Orange County, though Orange County has been moving left,” says political strategist Stephanie Schriock, who advised Porter on her 2018 run. “But she makes her arguments so well, in such a truly intentional manner, that she’s pretty good at bringing people with her.”

Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) on Oct. 28 demonstrated the sizable difference between Shell Oil Co.’s planned investments in fossil fuels and in renewable energy. (Video: The Washington Post)

Many Americans see Porter as an avatar or role model: an Iowa farm girl who went to Harvard, survived a difficult marriage and set her sights on Congress, all while teaching and breadwinning and shuttling her kids — now 11, 15 and 17 — in a minivan with plates that say “OVRSITE.” Her 2022 House campaign was buoyed by small donations (each less than $200) that added up to nearly $14.3 million, five times the average total haul for House members that cycle, according to OpenSecrets. Porter has styled herself as a “real person,” and many “real people” — those who can only spare so much cash for a favorite politician — love her.

The most cutting observation in Porter’s book, though, is on the subject of realness.

“Being a real person and having a real life,” Porter writes, “is in fundamental conflict with American politics.”

This line comes as she recounts a major regret: going public about the details of her failed marriage, in a strategy to prevent opponents from using that messy part of her life against her.

In 2013, her then-husband was arrested and jailed for (but never charged with) domestic battery after, as Porter later wrote in her book, he punched a wall next to where she was standing. (I tried to reach him via two publicly available phone numbers, with no success.) During the 2018 Democratic primary, Porter detected a whisper campaign that the troubling behavior had gone both ways — because after she filed for a restraining order against him, he responded by requesting his own against her. She tried to stamp out the insinuations by sharing court and police records with HuffPost. (HuffPost also couldn’t reach the ex-husband.)

“I protected my family” and “ended a marriage that was troubled,” Porter said then, adding: “I think it’s important that people understand that when real people run [for office], they run with their real lives, and those lives might often include painful times.”

Two days after “I Swear” was published, this April, Fox News Digital resurfaced those court records, which included allegations of mistreatment that Porter’s ex-husband made against her, and tied them to the toxic-workplace chatter. A spokesperson for Porter told Fox that her account of the saga “was supported by police accounts, a doctor’s recommendation after a child custody evaluation, her sole request for a move-out order and property control, and ultimately a judge’s decision granting her majority physical custody” of their three children.

Last year, Fox published text messages from Porter to the mayor of Irvine regarding the 2021 arrest of Porter’s boyfriend for striking a disruptive Donald Trump supporter during a scuffle at one of her district events. The congresswoman reacted to the incident in a way that, according to some former staffers, exemplifies her temper. “Your police force is a disgrace,” Porter texted the Irvine mayor, according to messages. (A Porter spokesman told Fox that the congresswoman “was upset that a planned family-friendly town hall was hijacked by extremists” and that, despite advance warning, police officers “were hundreds of feet away and did not intervene immediately when fighting broke out.”)

What to make of all this? I thought back to something Porter told me over coffee. In response to questions about friendly fire from Democrats, and murmurs about her reputation as a boss, she referred to “doubters” and “haters” as being a natural part of public life.

“It’s like a competition,” she told me, “between how loud you let those voices get in your head, whether they’re online, whether they’re little whisper campaigns … versus sort of staying focused on the really consistent, generally consistent positive feedback from everyday people who stop me, who are like: ‘I know you. You’re great. This is what I want to see. Keep it up.’”

The day after our coffee chat, when I would’ve started writing, I got a text message from a former member of Porter’s team who had heard that I was working on an article. I had reached out to this person separately, via email, almost simultaneously, to determine whether the “bad boss” stuff amounted to petty grievances or ingrained sexism — the sad sorcery of doubters and haters — or whether it was actually worth exploring.

Here we get into tricky territory. My chat with the ex-staffer was revealing, and it prompted me to reach out to others. Four people — each formerly in Porter’s employ or orbit — told me about upsetting experiences working for her that spanned her first 3½ years in Congress; three additional former staffers told similar stories to one of my Washington Post colleagues. But to define the credibility of these seven sources, or to specify their allegations of “bad boss”-ness, is to give away their identities, which they do not want. Nobody wants to go public in ways they might regret.

“You’re not the first reporter I’ve talked to about Katie,” said one of Porter’s former campaign associates. “We all work in this industry, and nobody wants to ruin their career, and that’s the tough part. A lot of things were said to me and done to me, and it would be obvious they were done to me.”

“I personally like her a lot, and I personally would never work for her,” said the former senior House staffer from California, adding: “I love what she brings to the table, nationally. I’m really worried about what she brings to the table for the state.” Meaning that, for a senator to succeed, especially in representing a behemoth like California, her office needs stability and collegiality, this former staffer said. This has largely been the case for Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s some 30-year operation; this has not always been the case for Porter’s House office, according to interviews with former Porter staffers.

I tried to corroborate allegations that could not be fully corroborated, at least on the record, so I had broader, deeper conversations with a variety of people about what separates a demanding boss from a domineering one. About how female leaders are unfairly expected to have a baseline of maternal warmth. About why the pressures of working in Congress can hobble a human at any level of authority. I thought about the subtitle of Porter’s book, “Politics Is Messier Than My Minivan,” which encapsulates the tension between the pressures of a high-powered job in public service and the demands of a divorced working mom’s home life.

The idea that Porter was initially overwhelmed by her duties is corroborated by the congresswoman herself, in her book. “I was doomed on day one,” Porter writes, adding: “I failed to wake up to get my kids off to school on time, and I left them unsupervised for the evening when I fell asleep at 6:00 p.m., badly jet-lagged.” Of her first year in office, she writes: “I felt like a toddler, powerless against forces that were stronger than me, and out of solutions except rage.”

“I heard that last week was a cry-heavy week for everyone,” wrote one staffer to colleagues during Porter’s second month in office, according to an email shared with me.

Porter realized early on that Congress was not set up to accommodate her reality as a single mother trying to do the job. “I tried talking to House leadership and my congressional colleagues,” she writes. “The majority leader explained that they could not run Congress around my unique needs. Repeatedly, I heard that I had a ‘special situation.’ I came back with statistics about the 13.6 million other single parents in America.” (The office of then-Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer [D-Md.] does not comment on private conversations between members.)

On the day in 2019 that she admitted to a small group of female politicos that she hadn’t filed for reelection, Porter was in tears. “Listen to me,” Porter had told them, according to her book. “I’m beyond exhausted, my kids are suffering and angry, Congress is frustrating and broken, and I don’t fit in here.”

But then, slowly, Porter stopped worrying about fitting in perfectly. Or, as she told me over coffee: “I’m done reaching for something that isn’t me.” The way she described herself then (“scrappy, strategic, strong”) and the way she billed herself in her Senate campaign announcement (“a warrior”) — it’s a brand that can inspire from afar and agitate at closer range, especially if you’re a woman.

“People ask: ‘What’s Amy Klobuchar like? What’s Pramila Jayapal like?’ I have never been asked about this for a man,” says Ashley Woolheater, a former senior staffer for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who was Porter’s professor and mentor at Harvard Law School. “And I know a bunch of [Porter’s] staff; I’ve seen her interact with staff, and I’ve interacted with her before. And nothing’s ever raised any red flags for me. She is totally gracious.”

Woolheater continues: “Look: Are these difficult jobs? Can I imagine doing them while raising children and flying back and forth to California? Yeah, I can imagine some stressful moments. I don’t necessarily think it’s fair the way that we tend to gossip and chatter more about women bosses in those stressful moments than we do about male bosses in those stressful moments.”

An eighth former staffer — who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly in Porter’s defense — pushed back on the criticisms from my other sources, and described Porter as a “relentless” hard worker who “does not sleep” and who possesses a “strong sense of how to get s— done.” Porter’s first year in office “was chaotic,” this ex-staffer said, and it was not Porter’s fault alone: “There was a constant barrage of unforced errors that she had to deal with then because she had a young staff who were setting up a brand-new office while Katie was flying across the country every Friday and Monday. There’s no blueprint for being a single mom in Congress.” That kind of situation would be “frustrating for anyone,” said the ex-staffer, who believes that Porter later “really did try to be more sensitive to the stress on staff.”

Porter rebuilt her office at the end of her first year, she told me in the spring, to make it “less fearful, less anxious.” She won reelection once, then twice.

“She really struggled early on,” says Schriock, the strategist. “It was hard. She was in a group of members — most of them parents — that I worried about whether they would make it another cycle. … She grew a lot in those years, in the House. And she’s just really found her footing.”

A current staffer in Porter’s Irvine office — who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly — affirmed that the congresswoman struggled with a steep learning curve in her first term, but has since “improved significantly” as a boss.

None of the people who shared criticisms with me currently work for Porter. All of them, regardless of their allegations, value her priorities and skills, which they believe are good for the Democratic Party.

A former staffer who thinks Porter’s behavior as a boss makes her “wildly unfit” to be a senator nevertheless told me: “She’s one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met.”

Months after our coffee chat, after I’d had numerous conversations about Katie Porter, I looped back with a representative for Porter. What did the congresswoman make of all this?

“It’s no secret that I hold myself, staff, and Congress to a high standard,” Porter said in a written statement to me. “I am not shy about calling out when something isn’t meeting my expectations. I believe in accountability on behalf of my constituents, but it has never been my intention to be overzealous or to make anyone feel undervalued in their work. As I’ve served in Congress, I have sought to be more intentional at demonstrating my gratitude to my staff for the important work they do in service to our country. They work incredibly hard, and I am so proud of what we have accomplished together.”

The congresswoman, despite the messiness of her proverbial minivan, has always had a clear agenda. Her special skill is venturing into the weeds of monetary policy and emerging with clear, teachable talking points, says Mehrsa Baradaran, an expert in banking law at the University of California at Irvine’s School of Law, where Porter used to teach.

“My uncle lives in north Iran,” Baradaran says by way of example. “He’s a regular Iranian guy. He’s never studied here. He’s a smart guy, but barely speaks any English. But he had followed Katie Porter’s hearings from Iran, and he was talking about it at the dinner table. It had traveled all the way there, and he was very impressed. It had nothing to do with foreign policy or Iran. He was just listening because it was interesting. He really found her compelling.”

A purple district has awarded Porter three victories. A national audience has showered her with steady praise and tens of millions of dollars over her political career. Among House candidates in the 2022 cycle, Porter was second only to McCarthy in fundraising, a feat she accomplished without money from corporate PACs or lobbyists, according to OpenSecrets. Her drive to win runs down the ballot, to races she could easily ignore, where her advocacy amounted to party-building, not showboating.

“She not only endorsed me but she came out to one of my kickoff events,” says Stephanie Wade, a Porter constituent who ran for city council in Seal Beach, Calif., this year. “I don’t think it bought her much. But it did a lot for me.”

In the last session of Congress, Porter sponsored 54 bills, more than twice the median for members, according to OpenSecrets. Last year, some of her proposed legislation — on raising royalties on fossil fuel companies, on reclaiming taxpayer dollars from pharmaceutical companies that raised drug prices faster than the inflation rate — found a home in the Inflation Reduction Act.

The stressors — and perhaps the doubters and haters — will keep coming for Porter. Fellow California Reps. Barbara Lee and Adam B. Schiff, both Democrats, are also running for the Senate seat. Lee has been endorsed by Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which Porter also belongs to, as well as the mayors of San Francisco, Los Angeles and Porter’s own city of Irvine. Schiff has so far been endorsed by 22 of the 40 Democrats in the state congressional delegation (to Porter’s zero, for now). Schiff’s campaign raised more than twice as much money as Porter did in the second quarter of this year. Porter, Lee and Schiff were the only candidates who reached double-digit support in a June poll from the Public Policy Institute of California, with Porter and Schiff separated by a statistically insignificant three percentage points.

The primary is in March. The top two vote-getters on the all-party ballot will advance to the general in November 2024. Schiff and Porter are the good bets right now — Los Angeles Magazine likened that epic matchup to “King Kong vs. Godzilla” — but the campaign hasn’t heated up yet.

In the meantime, Porter has been focused on what’s making people’s lives hard. In an oversight hearing last week on the year-old Inflation Reduction Act, Porter spoke about a resident of her district with “real person” problems: They haven’t had air conditioning all summer, but they also need to fix a 20-year-old dishwasher and a stove with only one working burner.

“How can the Inflation Reduction Act help this Californian afford a heat pump and lower their bills without breaking the bank?” Porter asked a witness, who then described the legislation’s tax credits for energy-efficient home upgrades.

“Treasury is working on guidance — ” the witness began.

“Oh stop. Stop there, Mr. Higgins,” Porter said, holding up a finger. “This Californian is hot today. Can they go. Get a heat pump. Using this credit. Today?”

The answer, as Porter knew, was no. Not yet. Maybe in a year. Government was moving slow, as usual, and Porter was impatient. There were real people out there with real problems. Including her.

“You might be interested to know,” she said, “that ‘this Californian’ is me.”

Camila DeChalus contributed to this report.

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