Listen to the full interview below, and check out our profiles on Adam Schiff, Barbara Lee, and Steve Garvey.
Rep. Katie Porter may not have the highest polling numbers in California’s U.S. Senate race, the longest tenure in Congress, or the most RBIs. But she says she's the only elected official running for the seat who’s never taken money from corporate PACs or federal lobbyists.
“I'm running very clearly on a platform that is willing to say that we need to shake up the Senate and do Washington differently,” she told KNX News’ Charles Feldman. “Washington needs to change. Special interests have too much power, and we as Californians don't have enough.”
Porter pointed to her campaign’s detailed plan to change how the Senate does business, including getting rid of the filibuster and banning contributions from corporate PACs and lobbyists. She also prides herself on centering affordable housing, which she says wasn’t a major issue candidates discussed during her first campaign in 2018.
“One of the things I think I've already successfully done in this race is move the needle from everyone talking about – as Democrats need to be – homelessness, which is a huge problem in our state, to talking about housing,” she said.
Porter said one of the reasons L.A. Mayor Karen Bass has had difficulty meeting the goals she campaigned on for addressing the homelessness crisis is because “she has helped people get off the street and into housing, but there's another person coming down the pike.” She said the government, at the federal level, needs to put more resources into building housing at the right price points.
“We are allowing Wall Street to write and control our housing policy,” she said. “We are not willing to put our resources behind incentivizing the market to build the housing we need rather than the housing that they profit from.”
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A former bankruptcy law professor, Porter said Washington also needs to step in to help people with medical debt, which her research found was the top driver of bankruptcy.
“It was not just medical debt. It was also the income interruption that came with being sick,” she said.
In Congress, Porter has put forward legislation to stop medical debt from being reported on credit scores. She also said that New York City’s recently-announced plan to relieve over $2 billion in medical debt “really illustrates what a big business health care has become, and how every aspect of health care has really become infected with profit motive.”
When it comes to former President Donald Trump, Porter, who represents a swing district in purple Orange County, said she understands why some voters are drawn to him – and she thinks Democrats have something to learn from it.
“Donald Trump has been willing to call out institutional, traditional Washington for failing America, and I think people appreciate that honesty about it,” she said. “Instead of patting ourselves on the back for what we've done, we need to show people we understand what we need to do in the future. And I think that's something that Democrats can do in a successful way in saying we know we haven't gotten there and here's how we're going to change how we do business.”
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