Katie Porter Should Drop ‘Rigged Election’ From Her Vocabulary

Porter needs to swallow her disappointment and move on. Photo: Damian Dovarganes/AP

As a matter of full disclosure, I voted for Congresswoman Katie Porter in this week’s California top-two Senate primary. A key reason for my choice of Porter over her colleague Adam Schiff (who made the general election and will almost certainly become a senator) is that I was deeply annoyed by a $10 million anti-Porter ad campaign, which was financed by the cryptocurrency-focused PAC Fairshake.

Porter didn’t really do anything to merit this attack other than signing on to a 2022 letter authored by her mentor, Elizabeth Warren, questioning the impact of bitcoin mining in Texas on the power grid and climate change. But it seems that cryptocurrency investors, knowing of Porter’s relationship to the unmistakably hostile Warren, wanted to fire a shot across the bow to let all the industry’s critics know that messing with them would have consequences. So Fairshake — which was backed by billionaires including Marc Andreessen, Brian Armstrong, and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss — decided to take Porter down via saturation ads, exhibiting the sort of arrogance that has undermined the crypto industry’s credibility.

As it happens, Porter ran so far behind second-place primary finisher, Steve Garvey — the bumbling Republican that Schiff lifted to the general election on a wave of attack ads designed to “box out” Porter — that the crypto financiers can’t really take credit for her demise. But she doesn’t see it that way and has now twice blamed Big Crypto for the outcome, using an extremely unfortunate phrase:

Of course, the idea of elections being “rigged” was the foundation of Donald Trump’s challenge to his 2020 defeat, culminating in the attempted insurrection on January 6. And vengeance for this alleged election rigging is the foundation of Trump’s comeback bid this year. If he loses again, we have every reason to assume he will again claim his opponents rigged the election, and another MAGA assault on democracy could be in the offing. A chorus of horrified critics pointed out to Porter that she was dignifying a disreputable concept, and unfortunately, she doubled down:

I’m glad she clarified her complaint, but still: Porter really needs to find another way to characterize it, or better yet, just swallow her disappointment and move on to what should be a valuable career even if it doesn’t involve the U.S. Senate.

This concern isn’t just superstition on my part. MAGA folk can and will weaponize Porter’s complaints, citing them in whataboutism responses to criticisms of Trump’s effort to undermine confidence in elections. I cannot count the number of times Republicans have played the same game with Stacey Abrams’s 2018 refusal to formally concede her defeat to Brian Kemp in order to protest his voter-suppression efforts as Georgia secretary of State. If one election is rigged, why not another? Why not all of them that my team doesn’t win?

It’s an argument that is both treacherous and entirely unnecessary. Until Trump and his allies stop spreading disinformation about U.S. elections being rigged, the term should not enter the vocabulary of anyone who would prefer to keep him from returning to the White House. There are a hundred other ways in which Katie Porter and other victims of questionable campaign tactics can express their ire. Challenging the validity of elections with the word rigged should be off the table.