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Elizabeth Warren’s Candidate
……Inland from Laguna Beach and Carona Del Mar, the big town in District 45 is Irvine. Republican Mimi Walters, former investment banker, is the current Member of Congress. This district has been Republican for a while. One analyst described the area as a place that Republican middle class Midwestern white people moved to.
……Not so much anymore. While Walters was winning in 2016, Hillary Clinton carried the district by five points. Even with a Republican incumbent, most pundits see the 2018 election as a toss up. ……Mimi Walters has voted like a Republican — against the Affordable Care Act, for the tax cut that was designed to support the rich and to particularly harm California and the northeastern states.……Democrats think this is a toss up in their favor. Several Democrats entered the contest. The incumbent, Mimi Walters, was the only Republican running. The contest in the non-partisan primary was for second place, for a spot in the two person run off. Katie Porter https://katieporter.com/ survived the scramble. She is the one running against Mimi Walter.
……Katie Porter has big deal credentials. A graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School, she is a protegee of two of the most powerful women in the country — Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Senator Kamala Harris of California. At Harvard Law School, she was Elizabeth Warren’s student.
……While at the University of Iowa, where she was teaching, Katie Porter and a colleague from Stanford studied over 1700 bankruptcy cases. The conventional worry was that debtors game the system. Katie Porter and her colleague found systematic fraud by the banks. Wells Fargo, she asks? These days if you say they follow the law, people laugh.
……She went to work for Kamala Harris when Harris was California’s Attorney General. Katie Porter‘s job was to make sure that banks paid defrauded California homeowners and former homeowners what they were required to pay after the federal settlement. She helped make Attorney General Harris a success. Harris and Warren have made advertisements on Katie Porter‘s behalf together.
……Katie Porter‘s primary victory was not easy. Her principal opponent was a fellow law professor at the University of California-Irvine. She had recruited him to the law school. He won the state convention nomination by a single vote, but lost to her by three percentage points in the primary.……During the primary a new set of tensions developed, more personal than two colleagues running against each other. Paula Basset writes movingly in Huff Post about talking with Katie Porterin a hotel basement space just before the Emily’s List gala. Katie Porter, the first 2018 Congressional candidate to be endorsed by Emily’s List, was about to be recognized. The gala would be filled with celebrities and leading political figures. Katie Porter was talking emotionally and movingly to Basset about her abusive husband, about the abuse that immediately preceded their divorce.
……That Katie Porter had obtained a restraining order against her husband before their divorce was becoming a campaign issue. Rumors treated her need for a restraining order as a sign of personal weakness. Katie Porter needed to make the discussion public. She needed to be the one talking about abuse and how combating abuse was a necessity. She had to take control of the personal conversation and the political conversation. The Bassett interview was Katie Porter‘s first step in taking that control.
……Katie Porter is tough enough to fight Wells Fargo and the other banks. She is tough enough to run a campaign against a politically experienced colleague. She is tough enough to have stood up to her husband. She is tough enough to take her central issues to Congress: Medicare for All, Women’s Health, Common Sense Gun Reform (as the Democrats now call it), Reversing the Republican Tax Bill.
……Is Katie Porter https://katieporter.com/ tough enough to get herself elected against a savvy Republican incumbent, a former investment banker. Katie Porter will need every bit of help she can get in a district that will be both competitive and expensive. Give some thought to providing her some support.
A special election coming up on August 7. Pay attention to it. Franklin County (Columbus, Ohio) Recorder Danny O’Connorhttps://dannyoconnorforcongress.com/is running in a special election for the open 12th Congressional seat. The most recent poll shows him behind by two points. He has come up with a distinctive appeal for the resources he needs to close out this race and get to 50% plus 1. He suggests that Senators (He may mean especially mid-western Senators) are watching what is happening in this special election. He suggests that a Democratic victory would make Democratic defections in the battle over confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court less likely. Whether that reasoning is persuasive or not, O’Connor’s race is very close. Money sent directly to his campaign can make a difference in getting out the vote and other late efforts. Consider providing some support.…
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