Two representatives from neighboring Orange County House districts plan to hit the campaign trail this weekend to promote different Democratic presidential candidates, with Reps. Lou Correa and Katie Porter scheduled to stump in Iowa, where the nation’s first primary election will be held on Feb. 3.
Correa, D-Anaheim, will campaign for former Vice President Joe Biden, who he endorsed in August. Correa, who has not previously campaigned for Biden, is slated to make four appearances across Iowa during “We Know Joe” community events alongside former Secretary of State John Kerry and Reps. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., and Ami Bera, D-Elk Grove.
Porter, D-Irvine, who was born in Iowa, will be in Mason City on Saturday to attend a town hall alongside Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Porter has been stumping for Warren since late fall, just before the senator invited Porter to serve as co-chair of her presidential campaign along with Reps. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.
Those efforts are drawing criticism from a Republican opponent in Porter’s 45th District race, with Chapman University dean Lisa Sparks noting Porter has missed votes on the House floor while campaigning for Warren.
“Orange County elected Katie Porter to do a job and she has decided to increase her celebrity status rather than do that job,” Sparks said.
Porter has missed five House votes while campaigning for Warren. All five were on Nov. 20, when votes expected to take place in the morning got bumped to the afternoon and Porter left for a scheduled Warren campaign appearance.
Though Sparks claimed Porter also missed three Dec. 6 votes because she was in Iowa, Porter’s campaign insisted she had to be home in Orange County that day and didn’t hit the trail for Warren until the weekend.
Overall, Porter has missed 2.6% of House votes this session, according to records tracked by ProPublica. The national average is 3.65%. That puts her in the middle third of the pack, as the 154th most absent House member out of 437 members.
Several of Porter’s 18 missed votes were due to issues outside of her control, per records, such as a weather-related flight delay in May and a broken House voting machine in July and December. She also missed two votes because she returned to Irvine during her first month in office to host a town hall.
Porter’s keen support for Warren is hardly a surprise. They have been close since Warren was Porter’s professor at Harvard Law School in 2000. They also have similar ideologies, focusing their legal and political careers on issues such as protecting consumers and workers from big corporations. Porter even named her daughter Elizabeth and has been dubbed the “next Elizabeth Warren.”
Warren is decidedly left of center, while Porter represents an Orange County district that still leans red by 3.1 percentage points, or nearly 14,000 voters. But Scott Spitzer, a political science professor at Cal State Fullerton, said he believes Porter’s support for Warren could give Porter’s campaign a helpful boost of enthusiasm.
“Porter knows that the energy behind her 2018 primary win came primarily from women activists within the party,” he said. So by endorsing Warren, Spitzer said Porter “can excite left women activists to beat the campaign drum all the way to next November.”
Correa, on the other hand, is in a solidly blue district, with more than twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans. But he’s backing one of the most centrist Democrats in the presidential race.
Correa has said he believes Biden has the best chance of defeating President Donald Trump, and he praised Biden’s plan to promote stability in Latin America.
“Correa is possibly already imagining a Biden presidency and his role as a senior House Dem,” Spitzer said.
There’s also no real risk for Correa to support Biden, Spitzer said, since Correa doesn’t need a larger-than-usual turnout to win the general election.
Correa has said he won’t let his campaign work prevent him from casting any votes in the House, according to his spokesman, Andrew Scibetta.
The other five local House representatives haven’t endorsed anyone in the presidential primaries.
“I support whoever can beat President Trump,” Democratic Rep. Harley Rouda of Laguna Beach said Tuesday.
