The hidden hand behind Adam Schiff: Donald Trump

SACRAMENTO, California — The Senate race in one of the biggest and bluest states was billed as a generational clash that pitted against each other nationally known Democrats with differing genders, ideologies and regional bases.

In the end, Donald Trump trumped it all.

Rep. Adam Schiff, the candidate with the highest profile in the Trump resistance, is now in a commanding position entering Tuesday’s primary because he dragged the former president into the center of the campaign. Urgency and fear surrounding Trump dominated California’s Senate contest between Schiff, Democratic Reps. Katie Porter and Barbara Lee, and Republican Steve Garvey.

Schiff is the one whom Trump allies censured over the summer, and Trump blasted the GOP holdouts as well as Schiff. Then, Trump played right into Schiff’s hands again with a mid-February Truth Social post name-calling the congressmember — recalling for Democrats their long-simmering feud. Once he pulled into the lead, Schiff used MAGA politics as a battering ram to promote Garvey, hoping to clear an easy path for himself in November.

“Trump’s shadow has loomed large over this Senate race,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican Never Trump strategist based in Sacramento. “Trump determined the Democrat to emerge from the primary when he attacked Schiff. At that moment, Schiff became the tip of the spear in Trump opposition and more than anything else that’s what Democratic primary voters are looking for.”

Schiff, a former assistant U.S. attorney whose first big national splash came in ousting a Republican member of Congress in suburban Los Angeles against the backdrop of the Clinton impeachment, rode a late-career boomlet out of the first Trump impeachment as the House’s lead prosecutor. Originally a fiscal moderate with Blue Dog Coalition credentials, Schiff created a new persona as a progressive mainstay and cable news’ sentinel for democracy while standing up his own army of small-dollar donors.

None of it would have happened without Trump.

With his dossier of Trump-bestowed insults like “Shifty,” “watermelon head” and “little pencil-neck,” Schiff raised nearly $32 million for the Senate run — a staggering sum that’s nearly two times the number of any other Senate candidate in the country this cycle.

He blew out Porter and Lee and built such a financial lead that he was able to afford millions of dollars in ads promoting Garvey, a major league ballplayer from the 1970s and '80s, with little aptitude for politics and scant policy command. Schiff did it by casting Garvey as a Trump Republican, and if both men advance to November, as late polls show they are poised to do, Trump will have been instrumental in deciding California’s next U.S. senator.

Schiff also consolidated the support of the state’s preeminent Democrats, led by House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, who had selected him for the impeachment assignment, and then locked down dozens of other House colleagues and Democrats in Los Angeles, San Francisco and at the Capitol in Sacramento.

In doing so, Schiff cracked the code for a white, straight and frustratingly mellow man in his early 60s running in one of America’s most liberal and diverse states: blending old-school courtship of powerful officeholders, establishment labor unions and Hollywood celebrities with a bottomless reserve of anti-Trump campaign cash that allowed him to dominate the airwaves.

Nowhere was that more evident than Schiff’s record-breaking spring quarter in 2023, which came as Schiff and Porter were still bunched up and leading in public polls.

The target of a House Republican censure for allegedly abusing his office during the Trump probe, Schiff parlayed the GOP’s scorn into raising more than $8 million last spring. The number was all the more impressive considering California is a deep-blue state and the race to permanently fill the seat of the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein will almost certainly have no bearing on which party holds control of the Senate in 2024.

He continued pulling huge numbers, quarter after quarter. While he incorporated messages about delivering for California, Schiff never strayed too far from the Trump bashing. Trump was central to his launch and first policy rollout; and the former president’s name was among the top three most-mentioned categories in Schiff TV ads.

Sean Clegg, a Democratic strategist who worked on Schiff’s super PAC, said he stood alone in pitching himself as one of America’s premier Trump fighters. It was a sharp contrast with Porter, a protege of Elizabeth Warren who has focused her campaign on shaking up the Senate, rooting out corruption and countering corporate power.

“With democracy on the ballot, his message struck a more resonant — and relevant — note for voters,” Clegg said. “The race started out as a jump ball. He earned his front-runner status by outhustling and outperforming the field.”

In recent weeks, Schiff has reveled in mixing it up with Garvey, so much so that one prominent Republican strategist likened the highly scripted show to World Wrestling Entertainment.

Porter, who has raised $17 million, is trying to elbow her way past Garvey on Tuesday. Under the state’s election rules, the top-two candidates regardless of party advance to the runoff in the fall. But she’s up against an avalanche of spending on Garvey’s behalf — nearly all of it from Schiff and his super PAC. Meanwhile, she’s fending off more than $10 million in attacks from a super PAC funded by cryptocurrency billionaires out for a 2024 pelt of their own.

At recent campaign stops, Porter has defended her decision not to center on Trump and said she was proud of her record, including coming out for impeachment “99 days” before Schiff did — among the first officeholders in a tough House district to do so.

“We have too many people traditionally running and doing this work from D.C., from Maryland, who were thinking about only things that happened within D.C.,” Porter said at an event in Long Beach. “I think we need someone who’s focusing on California and what’s really happening in Californians’ lives.”

Schiff maintains a home in Maryland.

Porter said she was sober about the threat of Trump.

“But to be clear, corruption in government, distrust in government — this was a problem before Trump came along,” she said. “Like everything that man touches, he made it worse, but it is not going to go away. The challenges for the Democratic Party, we need to win this time against Trump. But we need to win again in 2026, 2028 and 2030 when he’s no longer a factor.”

If the race demonstrates the enduring power of a Trump resistance hero, it also could spell the decline of Warrenism in California. Porter settled on her outsider, corporate crusader message and rarely deviated. When she wasn’t running TV ads focusing on it, she was responding to attacks against her, albeit with far less ammunition.

That all coincided with kid-glove treatment of Schiff by Porter and even Lee. Porter didn’t directly target Schiff in her TV ads, and was cautious in her attacks on him in the contest’s three TV debates. After early rumblings from Porter’s camp that Schiff was falsely trying to carry the mantle of progressives, she pulled back and redirected. Lee didn’t have the money, and even when she was served up opportunities by reporters, she often declined. Lee has lagged several points behind Schiff, Porter and Garvey in polls and has raised far less money than the two leading Democrats.

“Schiff’s leadership during the impeachment of Trump, and Trump constantly hitting Schiff over the head with a frying pan in very vitriolic terms, kind of immunized him from attacks about not being progressive enough,” said Garry South, a veteran Democratic consultant in California. “Those are the kind of things people just don't pay a lot of attention to.”

“To lots of Democrats, the feeling was, if Trump hates him, he must not be all bad.”

Instead of turning her focus to Schiff, especially after Garvey started rising in polls, Porter spent modestly to boost another Republican in the race, Eric Early, in an effort to pull conservative votes his way. She also continued to flash her famous whiteboard and outsider message, banking on the idea that Californians would see her as different from her colleagues.

It’s a big bet, and one close observers said may have been too cute by half.

“To have a politician — an elected official — who is sitting in a government position trying to contrast herself with other elected officials by saying, ‘they are politicians and I’m not,’ is not intelligible to the typical voter,” South said. “They look at that and say, ‘What is she talking about? She’s a member of Congress.’”

Madrid concluded that Porter needed an offensive strategy. Instead, she spent the final months of the race responding.

“She needed to define the race. She still hasn’t,” Madrid said. “Trump gave Schiff the upper hand. The day he was censured was the day he locked it up.”

Melanie Mason contributed to this report.