The Big, Bold Moves of the California Democrats Have Become Something Unrecognizable

Update, March 6, 2024, at 1:00 a.m.: Republican former baseball star Steve Garvey and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff advanced to the general election in the California Senate race. Read on to learn how this Republican managed to make it through the primary.

The California race for U.S. Senate was supposed to be a clash of the titans. After Dianne Feinstein announced last February that she would not be seeking reelection, three able Democratic candidates leaped into the fray for 2024, each of them House reps, each of them representing different facets of the strength of the Democratic Party.

Oakland’s Barbara Lee was the longtime activist, a stalwart of grassroots Black radicalism who had volunteered with the Panthers and worked on Shirley Chisholm’s presidential run, the only member of Congress brave enough to vote against the congressional authorization that kicked off the calamitous war on terror after 9/11. Orange County’s Katie Porter was the minivan-mom technocrat, a law professor who had studied under Elizabeth Warren and who gained widespread recognition by grilling profit-hungry financiers. And Burbank’s Adam Schiff was the face of the anti-Trump resistance, a moderate big-money man and protégé of Nancy Pelosi who rose to national prominence as a Trump impeachment manager in 2020 and again through the televised Jan. 6 hearings in 2022.

Feinstein had held her seat for over 30 years, and in that time, the state of California changed a lot. Sworn in at the beginning of a decade when Democrats had barely sniffed the governor’s mansion in years, Feinstein died in office as a much more conservative Democrat in what had become a one-party state, with her party in total control—and much further to the left than when she took office. (The Golden State went from being won statewide by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger to being won statewide by Bernie Sanders during the back nine of Feinstein’s tenure alone.) So the battle for a replacement promised to be a proxy fight over the future of American liberalism, in a state that had earned a reputation for being a beacon of progressivism in the United States.

Sort of unnecessary, sure, for the picking of a junior senator who would head off to Washington with no real standing, but still consequential for the sparring of ideas, policy, and substance and the potential crowning of a new guard. Also, California holds jungle primaries, in which everybody runs in the same primary, regardless of party affiliation, and the top two vote-getters head to a runoff in the general. So there would be plenty of candidates to choose from, a true exercise of democracy.

But the grand battle of ideas and coalitions never materialized. Instead, the election has been swamped by huge money and effectively predetermined—or at least heavily influenced—by behind-the-curtain machinations from a moderate old guard. There has been no great frisson of ideas, no proud democratic exercise, no pathbreaking consensus. The biggest question going into Tuesday now is whether the airheaded Steve Garvey, a former Dodgers star and Republican running without any real platform, will skate through to the general; without his ever running a TV ad of his own, polling has him finishing, incomprehensibly, in first.

In other words, with Feinstein’s death, a new era has not dawned. What has happened instead is much stranger and far more cynical.

The contest for the open California Senate seat started while Feinstein was still alive. But because she died while in office, California Gov. Gavin Newsom was immediately under a ton of pressure to nominate the right replacement—and he had a lot of angry people to placate.

In 2021 he had had to fill junior Sen. Kamala Harris’ seat after Harris became vice president. Newsom’s decision at that time to nominate Alex Padilla angered both Black and female political groups, who were upset to see the country’s only Black female senator replaced with a man. (California also enjoyed a reputation for having two female senators, with the near-simultaneous elections of Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, a legacy continued by Harris and interrupted by Newsom.)

Hoping to atone for that maneuver, Newsom pledged that he would appoint a Black woman to replace Feinstein. Many unofficial shortlists were created and circulated, but none was complete without mention of Barbara Lee. A decorated progressive, Lee seemed to many to be the obvious choice. Sure, she hadn’t had to run a competitive race in years, but she had put in her time and had the credentials, running, at various times, the all-important Congressional Progressive and Black caucuses both.

But there was a much more powerful constituency that had designs on that Senate seat: Nancy Pelosi.

It was no secret that Pelosi had long wanted a bigger leadership role in the Democratic Party for Schiff, who had also become one of her most loyal soldiers. (She had lobbied hard for him to become California attorney general in 2021.) As Rebecca Traister put it in New York magazine, writing about the California Senate race, as soon as Schiff announced he’d run for the seat, “Pelosi came out fast and hard in her endorsement of him, detonating a political bombshell that has had a huge blast radius.” (That blast, along with “fundraising and ceaseless arm-twisting in California and Washington,” Traister wrote, “was key to how he has piled up his heap of political and union endorsements.”)

Publicly, Newsom pronounced that the optics of his having to appoint both California senators in the span of just a few years was not so good. (It was effectively kingmaking because California senators tend to serve for a long time.) His solution was to announce that he would be nominating a seat warmer, an “interim appointment” to the Senate.

That was too much for Lee and many others who lambasted the idea of a Black woman being called in only as a “caretaker.” As Lee put it in a tweet last September, “The idea that a Black woman should be appointed only as a caretaker to simply check a box is insulting to countless Black women across this country who have carried the Democratic Party to victory election after election.” (The antidemocratic optics of a senatorial appointment didn’t look so objectionable to Lee once it seemed as if she could be the beneficiary.)

The process became even more fractious from there. Newsom immediately reversed his decision, telling the Los Angeles Times that if anyone he appointed “wants to seek a full term in 2024, then she is free to do so.” (A San Francisco Chronicle columnist ridiculed Newsom for “issuing bold statements that crumble under the slightest pressure, and pursuing grand visions without much regard to details.”)

Meanwhile, the pressure on Newsom to pick Lee was mounting. The Congressional Black Caucus sent him a letter requesting it. Lee did a media blitz calling for it too. Three days after Feinstein died, Newsom found his replacement in a Democratic fundraiser who lived and was even registered to vote in Maryland: Laphonza Butler.

Then, just 18 days after her swearing-in, Butler let slip to the New York Times that she would not be seeking reelection.

This was all great news for Schiff, who, it should be said, also lives in Maryland. He could never have been appointed to the Senate seat outright, but with Lee passed over for the nomination, Schiff was free to pummel her in the primary.

On the campaign trail, Schiff has been busy trying to contort his rather conservative record into a progressive platform that would appeal more broadly to Californians. In two-plus decades in Congress, Schiff spent many years in the Blue Dog Coalition, the most right-wing of the Democratic caucuses, funded by oil companies, Big Pharma, and other Republican allies. He pushed for entitlement reform and spending cuts well into the Obama years; his tough-on-crime record as a prosecutor was so alarming to criminal justice reform groups that they ginned up a campaign to keep him from the California attorney general role in 2021.

Now, he insists, he’s a “progressive champion.” Since hitting the trail, he has, as though struck by lightning, become a Medicare for All supporter, become a Green New Deal endorser, and sworn off corporate PAC money. He applied to gain entrance to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, calling it his “natural home,” but according to multiple sources within the caucus who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to talk with the press, Schiff was denied entry.

On one hand, Schiff’s total about-face on the biggest policy issues shows the power of the progressive movement in California. On the other, none of his blatant rewriting of his own political record has mattered. And that’s because of the money accrued, in part, because of Pelosi’s support.

Schiff’s war chest is gargantuan. Just a few weeks ago, he was sitting on over $35 million, an amount of money that would be mind-boggling for an incumbent senator running a tight race in a swing state. Those funds came largely from Pelosi’s decision to appoint Schiff as the House impeachment manager in 2020. He spent months on TV, giving polished and resounding quotes about accountability to the Sunday shows and all the major networks. This not only allowed Schiff to style himself as the spear tip of the Trump resistance, but carried with it a near-permanent residency on MSNBC.

This fact has not gone unnoticed by Schiff’s competitors in the Senate race. “We all know the facts about how the impeachment managers were chosen,” Porter told Traister at New York magazine, in about as succinct an explanation as one can muster. “They were chosen by Speaker Pelosi. There was not an application process or a committee structure for that. I certainly would have been delighted to serve if asked.”

Behind the public persona was apparently a very different private disposition. Originally, Schiff was actually one of the strongest opponents of not just the first Trump impeachment hearing, but the second, according to Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump, a recent history by Politico’s Rachael Bade and the Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian.

No matter; the money was raining in. And Schiff, ever the operator, started using it to boost Garvey, one of the Republicans in the race—knowing full well that if Garvey made it to the general, he’d be very easy to beat.

It has been almost comical.

In early December, Politico reported that Garvey had still not made a single public appearance as a candidate. But all of a sudden, ads featuring Garvey were everywhere on TV (including in expensive ad slots during the Grammys and the NFL playoffs) and on glossy, expensive mailers sent out across the state—all paid for by Schiff.

Schiff, who famously said that “those who patronize and subsidize Fox News are culpable for the lies they tell and for the damage they do to our democracy,” has even spent lavishly on Garvey ads that appeared on Fox News.

Garvey couldn’t pay for this himself—and is likely surprised by these turns of events, considering he barely has a policy platform. (When asked, during a debate for the Senate seat, why he got into the race if he doesn’t know anything about the issues, Garvey responded: “I have said that I’m new, I needed to explore California, I needed to talk to the people.”) The list of people who believe that Garvey can win was basically zero going into this, and yet, California is littered right now with campaign literature saying that, indeed, he can.

It’s savvy, even if it’s profoundly cynical: Schiff has poured money into a name-building campaign for Garvey, targeting Republican voters and incorrectly tying the candidate to Trump, helping give the contest the appearance of a traditional two-person race. But the truth is that Garvey would just be a whole lot easier to beat than Porter and Lee if he made it to the general. Recent polling from the University of California, Berkeley and the Los Angeles Times shows just how effective Schiff has been. Garvey looks likely not only to book a top-two finish but to finish first.

Porter’s penchant for butting heads is her greatest strength and biggest liability. She has tussled with bank executives and defense industry flunkies in House hearings, churning out made-for-social-media clips that double as fundraising catnip. She also raised tens of millions for the Senate race, which is less than Schiff, but without the Pelosi assist—arguably an even more impressive war chest that she has used to sustain her purple seat.

And yet, she has also butted heads with her home state’s political establishment, including, ominously, Pelosi. She angered the California consultant class by endorsing Elizabeth Warren over Kamala Harris in 2020, an out-of-state betrayal that led to a falling-out with Bearstar Strategies, the consultancy that helped Porter run her lightning rod 2018 campaign. (Bearstar has since signed on with Schiff.)

Porter also angered the Israel lobby during the Senate campaign, despite mealy-mouthed attempts not to. In a flush of terrible timing, Porter sojourned to Israel in February for a conspicuously obeisant meetup with Bibi Netanyahu, who on paper is the portrait of the corrupt plutocrat that Porter made her reputation at home skewering. She praised their meetup as a “constructive exchange”; when pressured to call for a cease-fire in Gaza, she put out a statement so larded up with jargon it read like a corporate half-apology for alleged misconduct. It was pretty clearly an attempt to keep the deep-pocketed Israel lobby out of the race, and it didn’t work: Both the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, backed by the full force of their Republican donor network, threw in for Schiff anyway. (A cryptocurrency super PAC threw in against Porter even harder.)

Now Porter is trying to do with the Republican Eric Early—a long shot in the Senate race—what Schiff did with Garvey. Early has no campaign, no money, no chance. And yet, Porter has elevated him across the state using her campaign coffers, hoping he will peel votes away from Garvey. Same story, different Republican, smaller scale.

Lee doesn’t have a Republican to elevate, and she certainly doesn’t have the backing of the Israel lobbies. In a callback to her career-making vote in 2001, against the bill that kicked off the United States’ calamitous war on terror, Lee has boldly called for a cease-fire. She has also boldly called for things that verge on the impractical, like a $50 minimum wage.

But there’s not a lot of money in taking brave stances on foreign policy. The issue has helped her, but only enough to keep her polling high enough to peel off progressive vote share from Porter.

Also, despite helming large caucuses and chairing consequential task forces, Lee never quite cracked House leadership. She has bided her time and played nice for possibly a little too long, dutifully waiting until Feinstein announced she wouldn’t be running to put herself up for the Senate role. She waited years and years to run for meaningful leadership positions within the party.

And she’s not great at cutthroat politicking. For example, Lee put herself up for Democratic Caucus chair when it was vacated by Joe Crowley in 2018, after he lost to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The move involved no stepping on necks and no transgressing of hierarchies and Lee had plenty of support, but when it came time to vote on her promotion, she was outmaneuvered.

Hakeem Jeffries, an ambitious Pelosi understudy with just a few terms under his belt, made a move for the job. This was a clear cutting of the line, a clear abrogation of hierarchy, and yet, at tally time, a rumor, inaccurate, was circulated that Lee had helped AOC knock out Crowley. Some members were urged to reconsider their votes. Some did, Lee lost by 10, a minuscule margin, and Jeffries became the top Dem in the House. One Democratic operative described the events to me as such: “Pelosi held the knife, and Jeffries put it in.”

Also, Lee hasn’t run a competitive race in years and has rarely appeared on TV. Her fundraising prowess has paled in comparison to that of her Southern California rivals.

Schiff will probably glide to first or second place in Tuesday’s primary. Porter, who polls favorably in a head to head vs. Schiff, is hoping against hope to make it to the top two. Lee, if anything, has spent the final months of her congressional career splitting the progressive vote despite no real shot to win; in a terrible twist, she may bear some responsibility for progressives getting locked out in the country’s most progressive state.

In a state where Democrats have succeeded in functionally eliminating their opponent—the Republican Party—the result is that its top two leading lights, its most prodigious fundraisers, got to the finish line by running shadow campaigns for “barely there” GOPers, desperately hoping to boost right-wing turnout in a bid to help themselves.

Schiff’s big campaign move was to elevate a Republican; his closest progressive opponent’s strategy was the same.

In February 2023, Pelosi went on MSNBC and claimed that the country needed a strong Republican Party. I guess this is one way to get there.

For more on the strange, strategic race for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat in California, listen to Alexander Sammon on What Next, Slate’s daily news podcast.