The Other McCain

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‘Progressive Rock Star’ Katie Porter Spends $24 Million for Reelection

Posted on | November 11, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘Progressive Rock Star’ Katie Porter Spends $24 Million for Reelection

California Rep. Katie Porter and her mentor, Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Apologies for the lack of blogging Thursday, but because today is Veterans Day, my day job required me to do two days of work in advance, blah blah blah. Anyway, I happened to click on a Hot Air item by John Sexton, toward the end of which, this part caught my attention:

Finally, another race I’ve been watching is the one to decide who will be my representative in California’s 47th district. At the moment, progressive rock star Katie Porter leads GOP challenger Scott Baugh by a slim margin of 1,552 votes with 58% of the total vote counted. That’s a pretty impressive showing for Baugh so far who was massively outspent in this race. Porter ran ads nonstop for weeks spending over $21 million dollars to save herself.

For a “rock star,” she’s kinda fat, isn’t she?

Southern California used to be all about “the beautiful people,” and I can’t help but think that the election of this pudgy dumpling to Congress was somehow symbolic of how the Golden State has fallen into ruins in the 21st century. Porter’s district includes some of the most beautiful (and expensive) beach towns in Orange County, and it was once a Republican stronghold. The congressional districts have been redrawn three times since GOP Rep. Christopher Cox represented the 47th in 1990s. Katie Porter was first elected in 2018 to represent the 45th District, another former Republican stronghold that once sent the likes of Duncan Hunter and Dana Rohrabacher to Congress. After the most recent redistricting, Porter sought reelection in the 47th District.

Although I was vaguely familiar with Porter — I recognized her name — I didn’t know much about her, so I clicked onto her Wikipedia page:

Porter . . . grew up in the small farming community of Fort Dodge, Iowa. . . .
After graduating from Phillips Academy . . .

(Whoa! Stop right there! Phillips Andover is one of the most elite private schools in America, where the cost of attendance is currently $61,950 a year. How does a kid from small-town Iowa end up in this posh East Coast boarding school? But never mind . . .)

Porter attended Yale University, where she majored in American studies, graduating in 1996. . . . Porter also interned for Chuck Grassley during this time.
Porter later attended Harvard Law School . . . She studied under bankruptcy law professor and future U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, and graduated magna cum laude with her Juris Doctor in 2001. . . .

(Again with the expensive elite East Coast schools, you see.)

Porter was a law clerk for Judge Richard S. Arnold of the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in Little Rock, Arkansas. She practiced with the law firm of Stoel Rives LLP in Portland, Oregon . . .
Porter was Associate Professor of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Law. In 2005, she joined the faculty of the University of Iowa College of Law as an associate professor, becoming a full professor there in 2011. Also in 2011, she became a tenured professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. . . .
In March 2012, California Attorney General Kamala Harris appointed Porter to be the state’s independent monitor of banks in a nationwide $25 billion mortgage settlement.

This is why people spend big money to send their kids to elite schools, to put them on the fast track to wealth and power. I don’t know if you kept track there, but Porter was already a law professor at UNLV prior to joining the faculty at Iowa at age 31, and six years later she got tenure at UC-Irvine. Become a tenured law professor before age 40? Man, you got it made in the shade. Porter is fiendishly clever. According to this article, she went to Phillips Andover as some sort of psychology research project about gifted kids after she got a perfect score on the SAT in seventh grade, but I don’t know if that’s actually true, because Porter is so fiendishly clever that I suspect some of her life story has been embellished, or at least dramatized, for the sake of presenting a useful narrative. For example, this article says, “The daughter of an Iowa farmer-turned-banker, Porter grew up during the farm crisis, watching ‘the entire economy around me go to hell.’” Wait a minute here — “farmer-turned-banker”? How common is that career track?

Then I check that against the other story, which says that, in attending Yale, “Porter broke away from a family tradition of going to Iowa State University.” Oh, so there was a “family tradition” of university education? How many generations of college-educated Porters were there before Katie broke the “family tradition” by choosing Yale over Iowa State? Because I’m guessing that her “farmer-turned-banker” father wasn’t just some random rural clodhopper, y’know? Anyway . . .

As an expert in bankruptcy law and a “consumer advocate,” Porter made a point of not accepting PAC money in her 2018 campaign, but I’m looking at her reelection campaign and she’s spent $24 million.

Man, I remember when even $1 million was considered a lot of money for a congressional campaign, but now Democrats — you know, The Party of the Working Man™ — are rolling in so much big money that Porter’s Republican opponent raised $2.7 million and was outspent 9-to-1 by the incumbent Democrat. That’s not counting whatever “dark money” outside groups may have spent to defend Porter’s California seat. And this pattern of Democrats vastly outspending their GOP opponents has been repeated in many races across the country. It has been said, for example, that the race in Michigan’s 7th District is the most expensive congressional campaign in American history. The Democratic incumbent, Elissa Slotkin, raised more than $9 million while her Republican challenger raised about $2.5 million, but that’s just a fraction of the total spending in MI-7. In the second week of October, more than $27 million had been spent on the race, more than half of which was from outside groups. The most recent count shows outside groups spent about $12 million on each side in MI-7, including spending by the party national campaign committees, so that the final tally is going to be more than $35 million for this one House seat. Meanwhile, in the eight most competitive Senate races (Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio and New Hampshire), a combined total of $858 million was spent by outside groups, and in none of those states did the Democrats get outspent by the Republicans.

Well, guess what? Money matters: “Of the House races called so far, 96% were won by the biggest spender, a new OpenSecrets analysis found.”

Every conservative blogger and pundit is pointing fingers of blame for the failure of the GOP to produce a “Red Wave” this year. Some are blaming Trump and others are blaming the Republican establishment, but the reality is that the “Red Wave” was stopped by a Democratic “Green Wave” of campaign cash. And, by the way, I noticed something almost immediately after Joe Biden was “elected” (nudge, nudge), namely that the liberal media started talking about the 2022 midterm before Biden was even inaugurated. That is to say, having seen big losses in the 1994 and 2010 midterms, Democrats and their media friends knew very well what they’d be facing this year, and one of the things they did — it is now obvious in hindsight — was get an early start feverishly raising money for this year’s midterms, and organizing “dark money” operations to help support their effort to stem the anticipated midterm backlash.

It now appears that the progressive pudgeball’s $24 million has bought her another term in Congress, and while the Super Genius™ Pundits are busy with all their big-brain “What Does It Mean” post mortem analyses of the midterms, I didn’t ace the SATs in seventh grade, so my dumbass guess is that maybe we should start trying to figure where Democrats are getting all this money? Because it seems strange to me that a political party grimly determined to strangle capitalism and install a Weimar America regime would be so popular with big-money fat cats.

Is this some kind of kinky BDSM thing? Corporate CEOs kneeling before leather-clad Mistress Katie, begging her, “Demonize me in your rhetoric! Destroy my business with regulations! Tax me more, please!”

Meanwhile, please explain to me how somebody in Iowa with a “family tradition” of university education becomes a “farmer-turned-banker,” because that story seems too weird to be true . . .




 

Category: California, Congress, Election

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