The Once and Future Democratic Party

CALIFORNIA'S SENATE RACE is dominated by three candidates But the decision might have already been made for them. who each represent a distinct way forward for liberals.

- Rebecca Traister

LAST SPRING, Katie Porter wanted to trade recipes for the kinds of dishes that parents who travel for work sometimes make and leave for their families to eat while they're away. Porter, 50, is a divorced mother of three who every week commutes between Irvine, California, and Washington, D.C., where she represents Orange County in Congress. She sent me directions for how to make her Crock-Pot beef with beer and pickled peppers (very tasty); in turn, I sent her my recipe for chicken parm (also delicious).

I found the recipe thing slightly awkward. I am a political reporter; she was working me, and we both knew it. It was also just wackadoo enough to be endearing.

Until I realized that she was sending these recipes out in email blasts to her supporters, at which point I just felt like a fundraising crash-test dummy.

"Those recipe emails are one of our most successful fundraising emails," she told me in December over coffee a few blocks from her congressional office, where we could not meet because of the care candidates must take to keep their campaign effortsin Porter's case, running for the open Senate seat in California-separate from their day jobs in Congress. She also claimed that before she left home that week, the kids had requested my chicken parm.

Katie Porter is a character. And she plays one in Washington. She's the real-talk harried Instagram mom who puts greedy corporate executives on a rotisserie, basting them in their own juices. Often cuttingly funny, sometimes heavy on the coffee-mug aphorisms (her memoir is titled I Swear: Politics Is Messier Than My Minivan), Porter's whole shtick is brash, relatable, and frequently foulmouthed.