A Democrat Called Her Senate Race “Rigged.” The Reaction Was Furious. She Wasn’t Totally Wrong.

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.

“Thank you to everyone who supported our campaign and voted to shake up the status quo in Washington. Because of you, we had the establishment running scared—withstanding 3 to 1 in TV spending and an onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rig this election.”
—A tweet sent by Rep. Katie Porter after she lost the California Senate primary

Rep. Katie Porter is not known in Washington for having a lot of friends. Nor, evidently, is she a gracious loser. After getting stomped in California’s Senate race Tuesday night by Democrat Adam Schiff and Schiff’s campaign ward, Republican Steve Garvey—who, it must be said over and over, didn’t have a campaign of his own—she weighed in rather bitterly:

“We had the establishment running scared,” she wrote on X, of her own campaign that fell far short, “withstanding 3 to 1 in TV spending and an onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rig this election.”

That last verb perked up some ears! Porter’s would-have-been colleagues, Democratic Sens. Brian Shatz of Hawaii and Alex Padilla of California, pounced. Shatz tweeted: “The election in California was not rigged.” Padilla said her statement was blatantly “not true.”

It’s interesting. You don’t hear a lot of Democrats calling elections rigged these days. As political verbiage, it has been annexed by Trump and his enablers. The backlash to Porter’s tweet (which was voluminous) was clearly an emotional response to the word itself; it wasn’t just that Porter was a sore loser but that she implicated her fellow Democratic lawmakers in some level of MAGA-coded subterfuge. “Rigged,” terminologically speaking, seems to have a different valence after the 2020 election, and the subsequent attempt by Republicans to overturn it.

In response, Porter doubled down by way of clarification: “Rigged means manipulated by dishonest means. A few billionaires spent $10 million+ on attack ads against me.”

And the cycle repeated. (This time, even journalists at major outlets piled on to condemn her.)

Extricating the genuine outrage from some good old-fashioned dancing on the grave of a vanquished, not-entirely-beloved colleague is impossible here; there are elements of both at play. But … was Porter wrong? Everyone knows that money influences elections. Few things in politics are less controversial. And super PACs and billionaire megadonors did play a major role in the California Senate race—regardless of whether “rigged” was the right way to describe it.

Schiff had tons and tons of money. So did Porter, albeit more from small-dollar donations. But one of Porter’s biggest nemeses, Fairshake PAC, was stood up by the cryptocurrency industry she so abhors. That PAC sunk $10 million into the race; half of it came from Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the villain twins of the Facebook saga, who seemed to have it in for Porter on a personal level. Another Republican-backed influence operation, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, threw in $5 million for Schiff, possibly because Porter got tangled up in her messaging on the war in Gaza.

Again, is that rigging? Maybe not, but it’s certainly putting a finger on the scale. And that was only a small part of the dealings that helped decide the race. As you can read here—tweet my piece, Katie!—Pelosi worked tirelessly in the background of the Senate race to secure the position for Schiff. She hammered fellow California House reps and orgs for endorsements and elevated him with her personal backing.

Rigged? OK, maybe that’s a little harsh. Or maybe Democrats can’t bear to hear that term anymore. But you won’t find a member of the party who doesn’t believe the basic fact that money influences elections, and that that should be reeled in.

In fact, as commonplace as it is today to hear Democrats calling to overturn Dobbs, it has been equally commonplace in the last decade to hear Democrats call for action on a different Supreme Court decision: Citizens United, the ruling that led to the creation of super PACs and ushered in the modern era of unlimited political spending. The abolition of big money in politics has been a clarion call for elected Democrats for a long time; if anything, the dogpile on Porter is indicative of the sad fact that getting money out of politics has lost its priority status for Democrats—especially in the vaunted effort to defend democracy. (Since the Trump years began, Democrats have not infrequently enjoyed major fundraising advantages, perhaps blunting the urgency of that core principle in their minds.)

One of Porter’s few defenders online was Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who put it about as succinctly as one can. “Sure, it wasn’t ‘rigged’ in the sense that Trump means. But when did Trump-speak become obligatory?” posted Lessig. “What she said was true and fair, given her (correct) values about how this democracy is broken.”