“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!”

Then there’s the Republican, Garvey. The 75-year-old first-time candidate hasn’t raised much money and has performed poorly in two debates; he has also been featured in a Los Angeles Times story in which three of Garvey’s children said he has ignored them for years. (Garvey’s campaign did not respond to the Times’ questions about his children.) Yet Garvey’s 19-year big-league career has given him durable name recognition, and he has lately been neck and neck with Porter in the polls for second place in the primary.

Steve Garvey during a visit to Skid Row in Los Angeles, January 11, 2024.Luis Sinco/Getty Images.

That Schiff’s team would seize on Garvey’s standing to try to squeeze out Porter comes as no surprise to veteran California strategists—trying to choose your opponent in the state has a history of being effective. “This is a 20-year-plus campaign tactic that lazy consultants go to when they have nothing better to do,” says Mike Trujillo, a California Democratic consultant who is not working for any of the current Senate candidates and is only half-joking about the “lazy” part. “It worked for Gavin Newsom in 2018, when he wanted to edge out Antonio Villaraigosa and run against John Cox, a Republican. It worked for Gray Davis in 2002, when he wanted to edge out Richard Riordan, and he got Bill Simon as his opponent.” Garvey’s spokesman has called Schiff’s ad “divisive rhetoric that aims to separate us.”

Porter knows California’s electoral history, of course, which is one reason she’s strenuously calling out Schiff’s use of Garvey as she tries to gain a head-to-head matchup with her fellow Democrat in the fall. “I have shown over and over again in Orange County that I have the ability to win persuadable Republicans and engage independents,” Porter says. “And that is all really, really potent in a general election where you have higher turnout and a more diverse turnout.”

Schiff, steeled by a history of fending off insults from Trump, is unlikely to flinch. “The first time he attacked me on Twitter to his tens of millions of followers—‘Sleazy Adam Schiff, blah, blah, blah’—I was walking on the House floor, desperate to figure out what to do,” Schiff says. “And Mike Thompson, my old roommate from Sacramento, grabbed my arm and said, ‘Adam, you should reply, “Mr. President, when they go low, we go high. Go fuck yourself.”’ If I ever write a coffee-table book on the tweets that I wish I had sent, that will be on the cover.”

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