Katie Porter announces Senate run for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, now 89, has not said if she plans to seek reelection in 2024. There has been much speculation in California as well as on Capitol Hill that Feinstein will decide to retire from the U.S. Senate. And on Tuesday, January 10, Rep. Katie Porter officially announced that she plans to seek the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat that Feinstein has held since the early 1990s.

In a video posted on Twitter, Porter laid out some reasons for her decision to run for the Senate. And at the top of her list, she said in the video, is an urgent need to defend “democracy.”

“Especially in times like these,” Porter declared, “California needs a warrior in Washington. And that’s exactly why I’m announcing my candidacy for the United States Senate in 2024.”

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The liberal congresswoman vowed to continue “taking on Wall Street, the big banks and big oil and big pharma” and fight to ban “congressional stock trading.”

Many of Porter’s supporters on Twitter were quick to applaud the announcement, although some Twitter users argued that she should have waited for Feinstein to formally announce that she won’t be seeking reelection in 2024. @April_Sassy, for example, posted, “Dianne Feinstein deserves and earned the respect to announce her retirement fro the US Senate first. Not just for her work in the US Senate, but stabilizing SF as mayor after the awful 1978 events. You could have waited until after DF's retirement announcement.”

But @LeftyBesty described Feinstein as being “too stubborn to move along and pass the baton to people who will live in the world they are making.”

Feinstein has been a prominent figure in California politics since the 1970s, when she was a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors before serving as mayor of San Francisco during most of the 1980s. Feinstein was first elected to the U.S. Senate in the early 1990s and has chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Rules Committee.

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Porter was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as part of the blue wave of 2018 and was reelected in 2020 and 2022. Porter, now 49, comes from a different part of the state from Feinstein; her district is in Orange County south of Los Angeles and north of California. And her district includes areas that used to be much more GOP-friendly than they are now.

Before the 1990s, California was considered a red state. The San Francisco Bay Area was liberal and leaned Democratic, but many other areas of California leaned GOP — from Santa Barbara to San Diego to Bakersfield to Glendale. And Orange County was known being heavily Republican during the 1970s and 1980s.

When Porter ran on a decidedly liberal platform in 2018 and won, her victory underscored how Democratic Orange County had become. Porter’s Senate run will be her first time running a statewide campaign.

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