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Katie Porter got in a lot of trouble at the end of her 2024 Senate campaign for using the word “rigged” to describe the statewide primary race she lost. She was referring to a coordinated campaign by big money, particularly crypto interests, to drive up her negatives and hand California’s Senate seat to Adam Schiff. Those interests got their return on investment this year when Schiff supported the GENIUS Act.
But underneath that was another kind of rigging, one that experienced observers of the political scene here have long witnessed. Schiff was anointed the front-runner by a class of influential politicians and consultants who have long played kingmaker in California. Contested elections between Democrats for major statewide offices in this one-party state have been nonexistent during the past 20 years, as establishment-chosen politicians have divvied up the spoils.
But two bombshell announcements in the last week have left the establishment without a candidate for next year’s governor’s race. First, Kamala Harris decided against running, and then, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, the expected beneficiary of that decision, dropped out. As a result, Porter has become the unlikely beneficiary of a fractured field, and Democrats in the Golden State may experience something they haven’t seen in a while: democracy, minus the establishment putting its finger on the scale.
At the end of July, the field in the governor’s race was large but frozen, with everyone waiting to see whether Harris would end the speculation and jump in. If she did, it was likely that several candidates would immediately drop out, including Porter, the former congressmember who credits Harris with appointing her to her first job in politics, monitoring the 2012 foreclosure fraud settlement. But Harris decided she didn’t want the job, breaking a cycle where the consultants and donors who shape state politics identify their favorite and clear the field.
Harris and Gavin Newsom share the same political consultants and Bay Area donor base, and though they’ve long denied it, there was an informal nonaggression pact to split up the state’s two grand-prize positions. Harris took retiring Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat in 2016 and Newsom went for governor in 2018, Jerry Brown being termed out, winning the post fairly easily over Antonio Villaraigosa and a few others.
Villaraigosa also shared those same consultants, led by Ace Smith and Sean Clegg, who’d been a deputy mayor under Villaraigosa in Los Angeles. But they shifted to Newsom in that 2018 gubernatorial primary. Smith’s Bearstar Strategies has connections to every major California politician of the current generation and its predecessor: Harris, Newsom, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Jerry Brown, and more. Another Bearstar Strategies partner, Juan Rodriguez, was a senior adviser to Harris when she was California attorney general and her campaign manager for Senate; he also was lead consultant for Alex Padilla, Harris’s Senate replacement, who was a Feinstein staffer before running for office himself.
The other pillar of the California establishment is Nancy Pelosi. In Congress, she forged a close relationship with fellow San Franciscans Feinstein and Boxer, and she was actually once related to Newsom by family marriage; the informal connections go much deeper. One of Pelosi’s top allies in Congress was Adam Schiff, whom she worked hard for to beat Porter in last year’s Senate campaign.
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