Progressives Trade Blame Ahead Of Likely Defeat In California Senate Primary

Barring a significant upset, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey, a former Major League Baseball star, are set to emerge from California’s top two “jungle” primaries on Tuesday as the finalists for the open U.S. Senate seat previously held by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

The situation has left progressives nationally and in California frustrated, wondering how they will end up on the outside looking in at a Senate race in one of the nation’s bluest states. And the answer, to many, comes down to a long-standing failure of the left to consolidate around a single candidate in contested primaries.

“In race after race after race, the left is penalized for lack of consolidation while more moderate Democrats end up having a lane all to themselves,” said Morris Katz, a progressive Democratic ad maker who is neutral in the California primary.

The die is not cast yet: Some polling has Rep. Katie Porter, one of the two progressive candidates, within striking distance of Garvey. Rep. Barbara Lee, the other candidate, trails Porter by a wide margin.

Schiff, an antagonist to former President Donald Trump and frequent presence on MSNBC, has taken advantage of the division to his left. He’s spent millions of dollars on advertisements elevating Garvey with attack ads aiming to improve Garvey’s standing among GOP voters. (Porter responded with a much smaller ad blitz of her own bolstering Eric Early, another Republican contender.)

In heavily Democratic California, Schiff wanted to face a Republican in the general election over either of his more progressive rivals. Schiff’s placement as one of the top two vote getters in the Golden State’s unusual nonpartisan primary system virtually assures him Feinstein’s old seat.

But the ideological implications of Schiff’s impending triumph ― a defeat for the progressive wing of the party ― have gotten less attention than Schiff’s tactics themselves. Although Schiff is a hardened partisan gladiator whose credentials with the Democratic faithful only got stronger when House Republicans censured him, he is not one of California’s many progressive champions.

While Porter, a consumer attorney and protégée of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), has developed a national following for her white-board presentations exposing corporate malfeasance, Schiff is a member of the business-friendly New Democrat Coalition for whom economic policy has always been less of a concern than national security.

And while Lee, a former Black Panther famous for casting the sole vote against the blanket authorization of war shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks, has campaigned loudly for a cease-fire to end Israel’s war in Gaza, Schiff is a staunch defender of Israel’s policies. Both the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC have endorsed him; DMFI PAC has also spent a modest sum promoting his bid in Jewish news outlets in California.

“It would be a shame to not have two progressive senators represent us in the U.S. Senate ― someone that is very clear eyed about corporate greed, someone that also understands the housing crisis,” said state Assembly member Alex Lee, who is backing Porter. “That’s what’s at stake here.”

After Schiff’s massive fundraising edge and decision to bolster Garvey, a familiar culprit emerges: Progressives’ failure to consolidate behind a single candidate, even as Schiff had the moderate Democratic lane all to himself. A similar dynamic played out in the crowded Democratic primaries in New York’s 10th Congressional District in August 2022, New York City’s mayoral race in June 2021, and Massachusetts’ 4th Congressional District in September 2020.

But if progressives agree that they would be better off parrying Schiff’s Machiavellian maneuvers with one strong candidate, they disagree deeply on which of the two candidates deserves the support of a unified left.

To some of Porter’s backers, the three-term Orange County Democrat would have been the obvious beneficiary of consolidation. These progressives argue that Porter simply had a better chance of making it to a runoff with Schiff.

Porter has led Lee in polls from the start of the race, though not always by her current nine-point margin. And she has also far outpaced Lee in fundraising, bringing in more than $28 million to Lee’s $5 million (though still far short of the nearly $39 million that Schiff has spent). In California, a 39 million-person state with some of the most expensive media markets in the country, flush campaign coffers are a prerequisite for competing.

The fundraising gap was predictable: Porter had built a dedicated online fan base with 1.2 million followers on her official side account on X and 635,000 followers on her campaign account, compared with Lee’s 322,000 followers on her official side account on X and 72,000 followers on her campaign account. Having always run in a safe Democratic seat over decades in Congress, Lee was a relatively weak fundraiser, bringing in $2.2 million in the 2022 election cycle, compared to the $26 million Porter raised in her swing seat.

“Porter is one of the best chances we have to get a Warren/Sanders-caliber figure into the Senate for decades to come,” said a national progressive strategist, who requested anonymity to protect professional relationships. “Lee deserves great credit for much of her work, and took that extraordinarily courageous vote in 2001, but it is clear that she isn’t going to make the top two.”

“The left is now broad enough that it can win elections, but as it has grown, it hasn’t shrugged off its tendency to self-cannibalize,” the national progressive strategist added.

What’s more, Porter’s allies believe that the combination of her brand of pro-consumer populism, and Schiff’s status as a hardened Democratic partisan, could make her appealing to enough independents and even Republicans to defeat Schiff in November.

“It has been true since the very beginning that Porter is the most viable progressive against both Schiff and Garvey,” Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has endorsed Porter.

But Assembly member Lee, a Porter ally, declined to call for Rep. Lee to withdraw from the race and endorse Porter. Among other reasons, he is not sure that Lee’s supporters are natural pickups for Porter.

The idea of Porter and Lee splitting the progressive vote is “a very convenient and reductive narrative that I don’t see bearing out in the data,” Assembly member Lee said.

Indeed, polling data do not definitively demonstrate that Rep. Lee’s voters would break for Porter enough to propel Porter into the top two. A late January poll conducted by the University of Southern California found that Schiff was the second choice candidate of 51% of Lee’s voters, compared with 23% for Porter. Meanwhile, 66% of Porter’s voters cited Schiff as their second choice, compared with 12% who would vote for Lee.

In addition, many Black voters are supporting Lee, a Black woman, out of affinity for her as a person, rather than because of their progressive ideology. Lee was getting the support of 28% of Black voters, compared to 19% for Schiff and 12% for Porter, according to a Morning Consult/Politico poll in December.

At the same time, Porter and Lee do have stronger appeal than Schiff among progressives, according to a Berkeley/LA Times poll out on Friday. Two-thirds of Lee supporters and 58% of Porter supporters said it was “very important” to vote for a candidate who is “progressive in politics,” compared to 44% of Schiff voters who felt the same, the survey found. And California’s progressive attorney general, Rob Bonta, issued a dual endorsement of Lee and Porter.

“Do I think Katie Porter has a better chance to make the runoff if Barbara Lee drops out? Yes,” Katz said. “Do I think Barbara Lee, who’s been a loyal advocate for the left for decades, should be pressured to drop out? No.”

Katz’s response exemplifies a challenge for Porter proponents: Lee’s status as a progressive icon makes many Democrats reluctant to cast doubts on her viability. To make matters more complicated, Lee’s supporters believe that she has had a harder time fundraising because of her identity as a Black woman and her representation of a lower-earning constituency in the East Bay Area.

“It’s hard as an African-American woman representing Oakland to fundraise,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, a Silicon Valley Democrat backing Lee. “This is why we have so few African-American senators and so few African-American women in statewide office.”

“There was hope that more progressives would rally around her,” he added.

Asked to respond to the idea that she might drop out and endorse Porter, Lee’s campaign pointed to the support she has received from every constitutional statewide official in California to weigh in the race, the mayors of Los Angeles and San Francisco, Democratic clubs and grassroots activists across California, and a diverse array of outside groups that includes the Congressional Black Caucus and the progressive organization, Our Revolution.

“She is the proven progressive candidate ― the first one to call for a cease-fire, the first one to call for Donald Trump’s impeachment, and the only woman of color in the race,” Isabel Naturman, a spokesperson for the Lee campaign, said in a statement. “Her lived experience is shared by multi-ethnic, cross-cultural coalition of Californians, including young voters, the LGBTQ+ community, and Latino and Black communities, who back her unparalleled record of advocating for and delivering on behalf of their needs.”

Karen Bernal, a Lee supporter and former chair of the California Democratic Party’s progressive caucus, argued that, if anything, Porter should have dropped out of the race and endorsed Lee.

Porter’s decision to vacate California’s 47th Congressional District, which Porter carried by three percentage points in 2022, also puts a key House swing seat at risk, Bernal maintained.

“We’re going to lose that seat on top of it all,” she predicted.

Porter’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about the demand that she drop out and endorse Lee.

Progressive outrage over Israel’s war in Gaza has fueled the passion of Lee supporters like Bernal. She supported Lee from the moment she entered the race, but now more than anything, she is inspired by Lee’s support for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. “Currently, it is the primary issue,” she said.

Lee came out for a permanent cease-fire in mid-October and has since made it a central focus of her campaign.

For his part, Schiff has echoed the Israeli government’s insistence that calls for a cease-fire undermine its right to defend itself against Hamas, following the group’s massacre of nearly 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7. “I don’t see how people can call on Israel to permanently cease-fire while a terrorist organization is controlling Gaza and threatening to attack them in the manner of Oct. 7 over and over and over again,” he told the Jewish News Syndicate in late February.

Porter has landed somewhere in between Lee and Schiff on Israel-Palestine policy. She came out in favor of a “lasting bilateral cease-fire” in December that included the Palestinian militant group Hamas’s release of all Israeli hostages.

J Street PAC, a liberal pro-Israel group that has had its own difficulty balancing concerns about Israel’s security with the Jewish state’s failure to protect Palestinian civilians, has endorsed all three Democratic Senate candidates. But tellingly, only Porter advertises the group’s endorsement on her campaign website.

“Not voting for Porter in the first round means that the general election in the biggest state won’t include anybody who’s remotely concerned about the suffering of Gazans,” said the national progressive strategist.

Of course, progressives might have been more apt to unify behind either Porter or Lee, if a deep-pocketed and influential outside group had stepped in for one of the two contenders.

“If this ends up being a Schiff-Garvey general election, it will both be true that progressives should have consolidated and women’s groups should have done more to prevent that outcome,” Green said.

The absence of EMILY’s List, which provides critical funding and campaign infrastructure for pro-choice Democratic women candidates, from the race is especially notable.

The group suggested to HuffPost that it simply could not pick favorites in a race between Porter and Lee.

“Both women are strong reproductive rights champions who have incredible records serving their communities and state,” Danni Wang, a spokesperson for EMILY’s List, said in a statement. “With Republicans threatening to ban IVF and pass a national abortion ban, we are committed to defending our Senate majority.”