Katie Porter has built her image on grilling executives, but couldn’t face straight forward questions herself.
A California gubernatorial hopeful tried to storm out of an interview after a journalist asked her a relatively straightforward question about President Donald Trump.
Newly released footage showed former Democratic Rep. Katie Porter took umbrage at a seemingly innocuous question and tried to pull the plug on the interview with CBS News’ Julie Watts.
“How would I need them in order to win, Ma’am?” Porter replied curtly.
“Well, unless you think you’re gonna get 60 percent of the vote,” Watts responded. “Everybody who did not vote for Trump will vote for you? That’s what you’re saying?”
The conversation, held last month, then spiraled with Porter becoming increasingly irate. Porter said she reckons she will “win the people who did not vote for Trump.”
Watts then probed her further, asking: “What if it’s you versus another Democrat?”
“I don’t intend that to be the case,” Porter, who represented Orange County in the U.S. House for three terms, responded.
“So, how do you not intend that to be the case? Are you gonna ask them not to run?” Watts asked quizzically.
Porter gave a rambling answer about “building support” and said she had won over voters in purple areas in the past. In 2018, 2020, and 2022, she won difficult races in a purple Orange County district.
“That’s not something every candidate in this race can say…” she began, with Watts interjecting. “But you just said you don’t need those Trump voters,” the journalist remarked.
“You asked me if I needed them to win. I feel like this is unnecessarily argumentative. What is your question?” Porter then snapped, raising her hands up to the journalist’s face.
“Every other candidate has answered this question. This is not argumentative,” Watts reasoned.
“I don’t want to keep doing this. I’m gonna call it. Thank you,” Porter responded, pawing at her microphone in an attempt to remove it.
“You’re not gonna do the interview with us?” asked Watts. Porter responded, “Nope. Not like this, I’m not. Not with seven follow-ups to every single question you ask.”
As Watts reasoned, telling Porter that this was her blanket approach to all interviews with candidates, she interrupted, “I don’t care… I have never had to do this before. Ever.”
“You’ve never had to have a conversation with a reporter?” Watts questioned.
“To end an interview,” Porter replied.
Watts proposed starting afresh, and Porter simmered down slightly, but still seemed hesitant to continue. “I don’t want to have an unhappy experience with you, and I don’t want this all on camera,” she concluded.
Porter, a law professor, was shown the political ropes by Elizabeth Warren — and even named her child after the Massachusetts senator.
It is perhaps ironic that Porter, a staunch progressive who has made her career as an anti-corporate, looked so uncomfortable with straightforward questions, given her reputation for fearlessly grilling executives during congressional hearings. Some former staffers have claimed that her bullish approach sometimes spilled over into abuse.
In 2024, Harley Rouda, a former congressman from Orange County who served one term with Porter, called her “a bully with a whiteboard who is in this for power and her ego.”
That was when Porter was gunning for a seat in the Senate. In 2022, she faced similar accusations. “She has made multiple staffers cry and people are generally so anxious to even staff her because if ANYTHING goes wrong she flips out on whatever staffer is present,” an ex-staffer and Navy veteran said at the time.
