Former Congressperson and defeated gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter recently announced her retirement from politics, adding that she “does not foresee the path back”. She will instead become a book “influencer” on Instagram, competing with that rising breed of know-nothings who dominate the online world.

Not that anyone will miss her much. Porter was once a capable politician — a kind of West Coast version of her heroine, Senator Elizabeth Warren. She began her political career promisingly in 2018, when she defeated GOP stalwart Mimi Walters. Walters, a member of the fading breed of low-energy “robo-Republicans” who once ran Orange County politics, managed one of the most lacklustre and invisible campaigns in recent memory.

Porter’s problem was that she was a proto DSA-style candidate. Indeed, her victory owed more to affluent, university-dominated Irvine than to working-class or minority voters. She railed against big business and followed the familiar progressive playbook, hoping to harness the energy of Left-populism.

That strategy might have worked in this year’s gubernatorial race had Porter projected the image of a more graceful, relatable politician. She did not. During her campaign, she bristled when asked in a television interview how she planned to appeal to Trump voters. She was also caught berating an aide for “blocking my shot”. Besides her personal gaffes, Porter was simply overwhelmed on her Left by Tom Steyer’s self-financed drive while the party establishment preferred Xavier Becerra. There was simply no lane for her to occupy.

As a result, Porter went from being a serious contender to a laughing stock. Even after Rep. Eric Swalwell’s campaign collapsed, Porter failed to keep pace with Becerra or Steyer, the billionaire environmentalist whose hundreds of millions of dollars helped make him the choice of California’s most fervent progressive activists. In the end, Porter won barely 4% of the vote, finishing behind Steyer, Republican Steve Hilton, and another GOP challenger.

As a political force, Porter appears spent: too established to capture California’s rising DSA Left, yet unable to build a broader coalition beyond the affluent suburban progressives who first propelled her to office. She has become a politician without an obvious constituency.

Thanks to her tenured position as a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, she will hardly be left scrambling. Instead, she is turning her attention towards the increasingly crowded world of influencers with her new platform, Katie Porter Turns the Page. According to the Sacramento Bee, the podcast will “focus on discussions and recommendations of books”, but there is little to suggest that her unlikeability as a politician will suddenly change once she gets into podcasting. Reinventing herself as a serious figure with serious thoughts won’t relaunch her political career.

Maybe Porter will surprise us all with this gambit. But a more likely outcome is that it is simply another step in her long drift from political frontrunner to forgotten figure.

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Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, the University of Texas at Austin.

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