Former Rep. Katie Porter certainly didn’t wait for former Vice President Kamala Harris to decide whether she, too, wants to run for California governor in 2026.
But Porter, in recently declaring her candidacy to replace term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom, has put a bit of an asterisk next to her campaign.
Should Harris decide to enter the race, Porter would bow out, her spokesperson has said.
Porter is laying out her cards.
“If Kamala comes into this race — especially if she comes in tomorrow, she comes in now — it’s going to have a near field-clearing effect,” Porter said on a recent episode of the “Pod Save America” podcast.
It would be “disrespectful,” Porter said when pressed on why she’s willing to defer to Harris rather than run a campaign regardless, not to acknowledge that the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee “would be an incredibly strong candidate.”
Meanwhile, other candidates are ignoring the Harris-of-it-all shadow cast on the already-crowded field for governor.
Former Assembly Speaker and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, for instance, said a theoretical Harris entry doesn’t matter. He’s in it to win it, he said during a recent event at the UC Student and Policy Center in Sacramento.
So what’s the better campaign strategy for the field of Democrats, a group that, as of now, includes legislative leaders, members of the state’s executive branch and a former congressional representative?
Defer to the person who led your party in the recent presential election?
Or fight for pole position, convince voters that no matter who else runs, you’re the best one for the job?
It’s politics, so predicting just which approach is the most politically savvy strategy may be a fool’s errand this early in the race.
Still, it could prove to be a defining moment for Democrats, said Matt Lesenyie, who teaches political science at Cal State Long Beach, with a focus on political psychology and messaging.
Likening it to an actual horse race, Lesenyie said the Democratic Party — and to some extent, Republicans, too — have struggled because they have not had their top candidates really go toe-to-toe with one another.
“Their thoroughbreds haven’t actually had to run a race until it was too late,” he said. “(Former President) Joe Biden is a quality candidate but probably should have had another runner-up against him in the primary to show he still has it or he doesn’t.”
But certainly when you have a race oversaturated with quality candidates, most of them are going to take a foreseeable loss, Lesenyie said.
So some candidates may need to decide if they’d gain more by going up against a candidate like Harris — or if they can afford another loss on their record.
“There’s an unwritten rule: You can only lose two races and continue on with your political career,” Lesenyie said. “Voters can sour on you because you’re a two-time loser. You may be a winner other times, but you’ve picked the wrong fights.”
And then there’s the fundraising aspect. Lose too many races and donors may keep their wallets closed.
In that sense, “it may end up looking like either getting all the way in or staying out until Harris should decide might have been more plausible strategies,” said Dan Schnur, who teaches political messaging at USC and UC Berkeley.
Schnur said a defer-to-Harris strategy is “a puzzling approach.”
“The message is essentially, ‘I’m the second-best person in California to be governor. Give me money just in case the person who is better than me doesn’t run.’ It’s hard to see how a lot of donors would contribute to a candidate who might not be in the race later this year,” Schnur said.
Harris reportedly said she would decide by the end of summer whether she’s entering the race.
In the meantime, other Democratic candidates have been a bit less vocal about their plans.
A spokesperson for Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis has said she remains committed on her gubernatorial bid. But Politico reported that Kounalakis, who is close to Harris, is also quietly considering running for state treasurer instead.
State Superintendent Tony Thurmond told Politico “we’ll see” about his campaign’s future should Harris run, but also said he was not running for anything else.
Businessman Steven Cloobeck is not one of those candidates. He unequivocally said he does not care who else is running; he’s in the race because he believes “California is worth fighting for.” He accused the other Democratic candidates of being too focused on their own resumes and wanting to “force each other into the race” to see if they’d have a better chance of running elsewhere.
“Those in office now have failed us,” he said. “They have not done the job or the work.”
While Porter has taken that defer-to-Harris approach, she’s balancing it with still casting herself as the No. 1 person for the job.
Porter’s campaign, in a recent fundraising email, of course, makes no mention of Harris. Instead, it acknowledged “this race won’t be a walk in the park” with so many contenders and propped the former congresswoman up as “a leader who is ready to go toe to toe with extremists.”
And when pressed on the “Pod Save America” podcast if she thought she’d be a better chief executive for California than Harris, Porter said, “If I didn’t think I would be the best governor that California could have, I wouldn’t be in this race.”
But Schnur, at least, isn’t necessarily convinced it’s the right approach.
“‘I’m in the race for now,’ is not a particularly compelling bumper sticker,” he said.
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