Oh frabjous day! Calloo, callay! An internecine Democratic battle for the 2026 California governor’s race is shaping up, and — because my timing in such things is becoming proverbially snakebitten — it’s happening exactly when I predicted it likely wouldn’t. In a stroke of serendipity, this morning I chanced to write about Kamala Harris’s prospective return to politics. She has been teasing a potential California gubernatorial run since late November of last year, when she was still licking her wounds from her loss as a replacement candidate for Joe Biden. I concluded that, no matter how much you or I may dislike her, the future was bright for her and thus accordingly dim for the Golden State:
But here’s the thing: However inevitable Harris may be once she gets into the race, she hasn’t done that yet. And “the end of summer” (Harris’s announced decision deadline) sits many long months away at this point. That’s why, mere hours after this piece went to press, we got news that Kamala had not, as it turns out, preemptively cleared the field: Former Democratic Representative Katie Porter has decided to pip the entire field and announce her candidacy to replace Gavin Newsom in office as governor. Porter, for those unaware, is a thoroughly unpleasant “moderate” Democrat from Orange County, an emblematic representative of how that once-bulwark Republican stronghold demographically shifted into Democratic-leaning territory as educated elites shifted left nationwide. She left office in 2024 to run for Dianne Feinstein’s vacant Senate seat, and was unsurprisingly trounced among Democratic voters in California’s open primary by rival Representative Adam Schiff, who now simpers uselessly in the seat with his “Resistance” brand.
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