After Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., failed to advance to the general election for the U.S. Senate in California, her statement thanking her supporters on X included one particularly striking sentence: “Because of you, we had the establishment running scared — withstanding 3 to 1 in TV spending and an onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rig this election.” You might’ve spotted the word in there that caused a tsunami of controversy. Liberal commentators slammed Porter for using the word “rig,” a term former President Donald Trump commonly deploys to undermine trust in the U.S. election system.
But Porter then doubled down with another statement Thursday: “‘Rigged’ means manipulated by dishonest means.” She argued the word is warranted because she faced attack ads that made false accusations against her and because “big dark money” was sloshing around in her race. She said she wasn’t criticizing California’s election system, which she described as “beyond reproach.” Critics have swarmed her second statement, as well, and described it as sour grapes.
I’m of two minds about this.
Some of the criticism of Porter is fair. The common understanding of the word “rig” in the context of politics is that it means to illegally cheat, or, in this instance, to fix California’s Senate primary so Porter couldn’t win. But none of Porter’s grievances reach that threshold.
Sadly, Porter’s language implies that she was uniquely targeted by certain forces when, in reality, she faced the same forces that are involved in every major political race in America.
Porter’s complaint about being outspent on television ads is likely a veiled reference to ads from one of her Democratic competitors, Rep. Adam Schiff. Schiff’s ads raised the profile of Republican opponent Steve Garvey and may have helped box Porter out of the runoff. California has a nonpartisan primary system in which all candidates vie to garner the most votes…
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