Has Katie Porter just tanked her chances of becoming California governor?

How do you give an interview so bad that it tanks your chances of winning an election by nearly 40 points? Ask former California congresswoman Katie Porter, who until yesterday was the presumptive favorite to become the state’s next governor.  

In a sit-down with Porter that resembles an old-school satirical Daily Show segment – before TDS turned that show into another partisan screed-fest – CBS News California Investigates correspondent Julie Watts asks Porter, simply, how she plans on winning Republican votes. “How would I need them in order to win, ma’am?” Porter sneers. “I have stood on my own two feet and won Republican votes before.” That’s a fairly standard answer, but then Porter pitches a fit as Watts asks follow-ups, saying the interview has become “unnecessarily argumentative.” 

 “I don’t want to keep doing this, I’m going to call it,” Porter says.  

For anyone who’s followed the career of Porter, who showed up at a Trump impeachment vote in Congress in 2019 dressed as Batgirl, this exchange isn’t really a surprise. Her divorce filing from a few years ago, after all, revealed that she’d dumped boiling potatoes over her husband’s head and had berated him because he was bad at making Jell-O.  

Divorces, as Cockburn knows from experience, get messy, but the personal can also tip over into the political sphere. An infamous photo surfaced of Porter reading the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F**k in the halls of Congress; she appears to have taken that to heart, without the subtlety part. There was the time Porter publicly fired a staffer, a Wounded Warrior veteran, because he forgot to follow protocols and was accused of giving her Covid. The congressional gossip account “Dear White Staffers” posted in 2022 that it’s “widely known across the party/consultants that Katie Porter is abusive. Unable to cope with basic demands of being a member so she takes it out on staff.” Given the era, they said, the worst possible thing about Porter was that she made jokes about black people to try and seem “edgy.”  

Is this your next governor, California? Porter told Watts that she wanted to have a “pleasant positive conversation.” But that would be out of character. Watts is lucky there weren’t any hot potatoes in the studio. Now Porter’s career is the hot potato, as she’s suddenly trailing nondescript Senator Alex Padilla in betting markets. Cockburn has never been a fan of Porter’s, but he does enjoy a good political meltdown and hopes for a comeback. He wouldn’t bet against her just yet.