- Capitalism is great at rewarding the winners.

It is great at incentivizing risk taking what it's not good at, what it doesn't tell us is what to do when those risks don't pan out.

What to do to help people start over.

And bankruptcy is really our legal systems answer to what to do when people do what capitalism tells them to do, which is take a risk, try to buy a house, go get a college degree, take on some student debt.

And then what happens when those things start a small business when they don't work out?

Bankruptcy is that safety net for people.

So I really spent my whole career in some ways working on issues relating to families, being able to afford things.

And so now that Democrats are all about affordability, I, I say welcome.

I'm really excited.

This has been my life's work and I'm so glad that all the candidates are talking about this, not just in California, but across the country.

- Hey everyone from KQED in San Francisco.

This is Political Breakdown.

I'm Marisa Lagos.

- And I'm Scott Shafer.

Today on the Breakdown, we continue our series of interviews with the many candidates running to be California's next governor.

Katie Porter was elected to the House of Representatives in 2018, flipping an Orange County seat that had long been held by Republicans.

A protege of Senator Elizabeth Warren Porter made waves in Congress with her incisive grilling of CEOs and other corporate leaders, - A consumer advocate in uc.

Irvine Law Professor Porter lost a bid two years ago to represent California in the US Senate.

Now the single mom of three is running for Governor Katie Porter.

Welcome back to Political Breakdown.

- Great to be here.

- We are happy to have you.

We have been opening all these interviews with the same question, which is just, who are you politically and what's your vision for the state?

- Yeah, my vision for the state is one that is better than it is today.

We have to have both optimism, but also determination.

So I wanna see a California that's growing in terms of the businesses that are here, but also in terms of the people that are here.

I'm a mom of three teenagers.

I want them to be able to afford to live here.

I want there to be jobs in the future that's gonna have different technologies coming at us.

So I think Democrats need to be optimistic, look, be forward thinking.

There's, it's very tempting with Trump throwing so many things at us right now to point to Trump as the cause of all problems, because he has the cause actually of so many problems.

But many of our longstanding challenges in California around cost of living, around housing, these are things that predated Donald Trump.

Right?

And so I think I'm really focused on not only standing up to Trump, but not ever letting Trump distract me from delivering a better California for the future.

- And we wanna dig into some of that more specifically in terms of policy.

But going back to when you were a kid, you were born in, is it Fort Dodge, Iowa?

- I was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

I grew up on a farm about a mile outside, outside of a little town called Lmer.

I was a nine.

A seven, no, a nine year, four acre.

- Okay.

- Was your family actually farming?

- Yes.

- What did they grow?

- They grew cow.

Cow grew cows.

They grew, they did grow cows.

They had corn, soybeans, cows and pigs.

Okay.

So kind of a diversified Midwest farm.

And my, I actually lived, after I lived in Fort Dodge, I lived in the house that my great-grandfather had built.

- Oh, wow.

- And my grandfather had been there as a child and my father had lived there as a child and I lived there as a child.

- So your mom's kind of famous though.

She is a legendary quilter.

She actually had a PBS show at one point.

Tell us a little bit about her and do you quilt?

Like have you carried this on?

- So I would say I used to quilt.

- Okay.

With all your time now?

- I haven't been quilting recently, but I do have quilts on my walls in my home that I made, as well as some that my mom made.

My mom was a, like a lot of parents, she was there at home with us.

We were isolated from a town.

It was long drive into a very small town that didn't have daycare.

So my mom wanted to find a way to, to earn some money and do some work without having to, to travel into town.

So she started her sort of what became a quilting empire, really, at our dining room table.

And she started out learning, teaching herself how to quilt and then writing books to teach other people how.

And then began to have a public TV show that did that, a magazine that did that.

And so she's a great example of an entrepreneur who was, you know, built her own business and is very successful with that.

- Did she have like a unique kind of quilt?

- No, my mom is more focused on helping people actually be able to do quilting.

So she would never thought of herself as an artist.

She thought of herself as more of a craftsperson and that what she wanted to do was be able to help people.

So she actually made her very first quilt for me, which I'm very proud of, and I like to remind my siblings of this.

But it was a traditional pattern called Sun Bonnet Sue.

And my sun bonnet sue.

It's a picture of a woman in profile with a sun bonnet and a dress, and my sun bonnet Sue doesn't have any arms because my mom thought the arms looked hard and it was her first quilt, so she left it off.

- Love that.

Well, I don't know how political your family was, but you have talked a lot in the past about how your kind of political awakening came as a kid watching the farming crisis in the 1980s really wreak havoc in the state you lived in.

And that whole region leading to mass bankruptcies.

I guess like, first of all, was your family personally affected and what did you kind of take away from seeing that as a child?

- Yeah.

My family was personally affected by the farm crisis.

I don't know any family in the Midwest that wasn't, this was in the mid eighties.

We were fortunate not to have to declare bankruptcy, but that was only because my father had a college degree, was able to go to work in town.

He actually went to work for the Farmer's Home Administration doing loan workouts on fellow farmers.

And a lot of what he had to tell people was, you can't keep doing this.

There's not a path forward.

And so we very slowly over time, were able to, we lost the farm, but it was sort of a controlled slow loss.

I recently was looking through some things that belonged to my grandfather, and I found a bill of sale for a farm sale he had had in the 1940s when he had been unable to afford farming even then.

But I think one of the things about being in Iowa, and it's just really different from California, is in Iowa, everybody thinks that it's their job to personally meet and evaluate the candidates for president.

- Right?

- Like you are very empowered as an Iowa voter.

So here in California, I think most people don't get a chance to meet candidates.

They're watching ads, they're reading things.

- Watching Political Breakdown.

- Watching Political Breakdown.

And I love retail campaigning.

I love shaking hands.

So I'm really, I think one of the things about Iowa is you really have a sense that voters should have that level of engagement with you.

How you scale that up to a state with 39 million people is a real challenge.

But growing up, I, you know, we heard all these candidates come, they all came to Iowa, they all made big promises.

Everybody wanted our vote.

You really had a sense that your, your policy choices, your political choices mattered.

And then when the farm crisis hit Democrats and Republicans forgot about us.

And I think when you look at a lot of where Iowa has gone politically, which is from a blue state to a purple state, to now a, a pretty deep red state, some of that is about feeling like people didn't keep their promises.

It's a more cynical vision of government.

- You were a very smart kid.

And then you went to Yale.

- I was a nerd.

Thank you, Scott.

Overachiever, or just not, maybe not overachieving, but you did well, - She achieved.

- You spent time in Hong Kong teaching English, then you started law school at Harvard.

What, what did you think you'd be doing with a law degree?

- Well, first I wanna say I actually taught math in.

- Oh, wow.

And so I was an eighth grade math teacher, which believe it or not.

- That helped with the whiteboard stuff?

- Yes.

But eighth grade math is actually like the greatest thing ever.

Oh, - Tell me.

I have an incoming eighth grader.

- I, I love it.

So I would do really fun things with my eighth graders, like musical monomials, where I would write a bunch of polynomials that could be simplified into monomials on the, on the playground.

And then you had to, when the music stopped, you had to simplify and find a monomial or you are out.

- Sounds like a blast, Katie.

- I did battleship with graphing.

Like I told you, I was a nerd when I got my law degree.

I think when I went to law school, I wasn't certain what I wanted to do.

But I think that was, I kind of decided between becoming an interesting, becoming an academic in another field and then becoming a lawyer and I ended up becoming a legal academic.

Right.

But it was transformative for me.

When I took Elizabeth Warren's bankruptcy class, she was known as a tough teacher.

It was supposed to be a hard class.

It was my last year of law school.

It met early in the morning.

And really, I'll never forget, I still have the notes from her first day lecture.

And what she said really anchors me today, which is capitalism is great at rewarding the winners.

It is great at incentivizing risk taking what it's not good at.

What it doesn't tell us is what to do when those risks don't pan out.

What to do to help people start over.

And bankruptcy is really our legal system's answer to what to do when people do what capitalism tells them to do.

Which is take a risk, try to buy a house, go get a college degree, take on some student debt.

And then what happens when those things start a small business when they don't work out Bankruptcy is that safety net for people.

So I've really spent my whole career in some ways working on issues relating to families, being able to afford things.

And so now that Democrats are all about affordability, I, I say welcome.

I'm really excited.

This has been my life's work and I'm so glad that all the candidates are talking about this.

Not just in California, but across the country.

Alright, well we were just talking before the break about you going to law school studying under now Senator Elizabeth Warren.

And you go on to become a professor.

I know before that you worked on this too, but University of Iowa, you started looking at bankruptcy and its relation to mortgage fraud.

This is before the mortgage meltdown of the late 2010s or of, you know, around 2010.

What were you looking at?

What did you find in that research?

'cause you were kind of swimming against the grain at the time.

- Absolutely.

At the time the housing market was booming.

It was powering our whole economy in many ways, really at that time.

And there were all these new kinds of mortgages being piloted.

We saw home ownership rates were growing.

But I have always been really interested in how things work in the real world.

And so my research was, was never academic in the sense that I studied families in bankruptcy.

And so I had a, a colleague who had done a case trying to help someone defend her house from foreclosure using the bankruptcy process.

And what she had learned was that the bank had no idea how much money this woman actually owed.

And so she was able to get the judge to order the bank to not try to collect, because there's like, you don't know what you, you don't know what the debt, you don't get to collect it.

And this question, this woman came to me with was, is this a fluke?

Right.

Is this just the un luckiest borrower in America, or is this where we really are?

So we started looking at the documents that mortgage companies filed in bankruptcy when they wanted to get paid.

And what we found was that the widespread flaunting the law.

So I wrote an article called Misbehavior and Mistake in Bankruptcy Mortgage Claims.

And there was a lot of discussion at the time.

I remember pushback from folks on my faculty who were tenured, and I was pre-tenure saying, you know, you really can't prove it's misbehavior.

And I think now about how we understand that period.

- Yeah.

- And so that research wound up on the front page of the New York Times.

It sparked a congressional hearing where I went and testified and really became the foundation for understanding just how systemic the problems were.

The foreclosure system was not ready.

The mortgage companies did not have the ability to keep track of what people owed when they didn't pay on time.

And in full, they were good at collecting your check if you paid on time and in full, but they, it was a mess.

And they didn't know who owned the note.

We know now all the paperwork problems.

And so that work really, I came to California during that period.

I taught a year at UC Berkeley, and then went to teach at Harvard for a year and then back to California to teach at UC Irvine.

And it was during that time that the Attorney Generals negotiated a big settlement and, and Kamala Harris came into my life.

- Yeah.

And tell, tell us about that, that that relationship and what you did while you were working with her for her.

- Yeah.

I'll never forget, actually the first time I spoke to the vice president, then our Attorney General, because I had just had my third child, Betsy, and I was a working mom.

And I had come into the office and I was desperately trying to finish something.

And I had put Betsy, like she was my third kid.

So I was pretty casual.

- Yeah.

- So I had just put a blanket on the floor and sat Betsy down and figured, how far can she roll?

Right.

And the phone rang and I answered it, and it was the attorney general.

And I remember thinking just like, please don't cry, Betsy.

Please don't cry.

And I actually, at one point, like Betsy started to fuss and I, I told Kamala, I'm like, I'm with my daughter.

She loves babies.

- She loves babies.

Yeah.

- And she loves babies, which is a well known thing.

So, but what she said to me, I think was such an important insight and really motivated a lot of what I went on to do in Congress, which is it's easy for people to make promises.

It's really hard for them to make changes.

- Hmm.

- And she had negotiated all of these promises from the banks to change how they did, how they foreclosed to follow the law, for example, to provide help to people who maybe couldn't pay their whole mortgage but could pay most of it and could save their homes.

And she was really concerned that they weren't, they made the promises, they signed the deal, but who was gonna make sure on the ground that Californians actually got help.

And that's what she tasked me with doing.

So we stood up a program, we worked across the state of California.

We operated in five languages, and we took phone calls from homeowners who were getting pay paperwork from the bank.

One of my favorite cases we worked on, somebody got a notice, a foreclosure, the house was foreclosed on, and the next day they got a letter for giving their mortgage loan.

Mm.

- But, - And so we forced the bank Yeah.

To cut a check to that family for, for six figures and, and to make it right.

And so one of the things I think I've thought a lot about is it's not about what you announce at a press conference.

Lawmakers do that.

We pass laws and we have press conferences.

Governors do that.

It's about what actually happens in people's lives.

And, and this is why fast forward, I drive a minivan with a license plate that spells out oversight.

Because I think it's really, really important that we try to close the gap between the goals of the law and what we're actually doing on the ground.

- You know, you've brought up your kids several times in this conversation.

They're all teenagers now.

- God help me.

- You've been single for over a decade.

And I, you know, I wonder how you think about the trade-offs of being a mom and bringing your kids into the public life.

I I'm thinking in particular about when you were kind of forced in your first campaign to talk about some domestic violence allegations that had come out in court against your ex-husband.

Like how do you weigh that trade off and think about it with your kids?

'cause this is, you know, running for governor of the biggest state is, is is pretty high profile.

- Yeah.

I mean, there's definitely challenges for it.

There's a loss of, of privacy.

People question things and say things to you often in the most helpful of spirits that are sometimes hard to hear.

But I, I also see what my, what my kids have absorbed.

One of the things they've absorbed is that it is a civic duty to be an active citizen.

What that looks like for them is gonna be different than me.

But I think they've absorbed that.

They've also seen that we can do hard things and that we can make choices in life and figure out ways to get it done.

When I first ran for Congress, there were, there were no single parents serving.

And the, you know, big discussion was, you just can't do it.

How are you gonna do it?

And we did it.

And as my daughter said, one of my favorite things my kids have ever said politically was my daughter gave a speech at one of my elections.

And she said, you think Katie Porter's favorite tool is a whiteboard?

But I know the truth.

It's a crockpot.

And that is so true.

I used to get up at 4:30, 5 o'clock in the morning, put a meal in a crockpot, get in a car, go to LAX, fly to DC and my, that was dinner that first night.

Right.

And then I had something prepared for dinner for that second night.

And then, you know, and so it was a lot of stringing things together.

But I, I talked with my kids about this run for governor.

We really talked about it because I, you know, we knew I was gonna be done with my time in Congress and really discussed, and to my surprise, in some ways, they were all in and they have stayed all in throughout this race.

It's been a long race.

It's been a while.

Race - Must be easier that they're a little older now.

It's a little easier that they're older.

I think they understand differently what's at stake.

- Yeah.

- But they also understand more.

Right.

You can't shelter it from them as much.

I mean, these people have Instagram accounts, so they, they see things.

But I have been surprised again and again, like, I remember talking to my son Paul about some of the policies I was rolling out near about a month ago.

And I, I talked with him about free tuition at UC and CSU and my plan for that.

And I, you know, he was 17, I want, you know, he plans to go to college.

So I was like, he's gonna love that.

And he was like, okay, that sounds good, mom.

And then I said, and free childcare.

And Paul was so excited by that policy, which I, I was like, you're 17, we're not, not - Don't get - Idea.

We're not going grandma style here yet, are we?

He said, no.

He said, but mom free childcare like that is thousands of dollars.

Like if I had that, I could stay in California and have a family.

Oh, interesting.

He's 17 years old.

He's thinking, thinking about and 15 years looking out at what life will be like in California.

So, you know, I think that forward looking perspective is really, as I said, it's what anchors me in this race.

- You know, so much of politics and getting things done is about relationships.

And you got elected in 2018 and if memory serves, you would not commit during that campaign to voting for Nancy Pelosi for speaker, you had a rather public dust up.

- Oh, I believe I did commit to it.

And I did actually vote to her for her.

- Okay.

I I, I, I take her back.

There were - People who didn't, but I, - I did.

And she was fine with that actually.

She said, just went, I voted - For her and committed to it.

- But you did have, there was a dust up over committee assignments, I think the oversight committee, when you ran for the US Senate, most of your colleagues in Congress from California supported your opponents.

And in this race for governor also, not a lot of your colleagues or former colleagues are supporting you.

And, you know, if you get to become governor, you're in Sacramento, you have to work with folks who are, you know, in the legislature.

How do you go about building those relationships given, you know, is there, is there any relevance to, you know, what's come before that that I, which I just described?

- Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of the reasons that I spent, I launched over a year ago.

So that I have had time to have conversations with people, get to know them, get to follow their legislation, see whether they got it passed, get to know their interests a little bit better.

The governor's relationship with the legislature's really important.

The governor's relationship with Congress and the congressional delegation is really important, especially as we think about how to stand up to Donald Trump.

But you're absolutely right.

Look, when I ran for Congress, I did things differently than they had been done before.

I made the decision not to take corporate PAC money.

And there were a handful of us who did that in 2018.

It was really, really, I think, jarring to a lot of established people who had done that.

It's corporate PAC money and corporate donations are a big part of the culture in Sacramento as well.

So the fact that I'm, I'm not taking corporate money, I think is, is always a little bit people question that's different than what I have always done.

But I really think that we need to kind of invigorate people's confidence in politics.

I want Californians to understand that when I make a decision, it's because it's what I think is best for California.

It is not about who my donors are.

So my average contribution in this race is $68.

The average contribution of, let's just take Eric Swalwell is 1,800.

I ran outta zeros to figure out Tom Steyer's average contribution.

Wow.

This is from himself of, so I think that is a, that was a difference.

I also think that the group of us who came in in 2018, we, most of us had never served in politics before.

And there's kind of an established path in California.

You, you do the assembly, you do the Senate, maybe you're a county, the ladder supervisor, somewhere in there.

And I was part of a group of people who had never been in office before.

And many of those folks are doing exactly what I'm doing.

So Mikey Cheryl's new governor of New New Jersey, Abigail Berger, new governor of Virginia, Deb Holland gonna be the next governor of New Mexico.

Those are my classmates, my colleagues and my friends.

And those inter governor relationships are gonna be really key in thinking about how do we Trump proof our state and the people of our state.

- I don't wanna spend a lot of time on this, but the other thing that happened in the fall was a video surfacing of you kind of snapping at a, a staff member several years ago.

And I just wonder like, coming out of that, how do you sort of view it with the benefit of a little bit of hindsight in terms of the outcomes?

Like, do you think it's affected your ability to connect with people or to, to build a team or that it would in the future?

And I guess I also wonder if you like, see any sort of genderedness in the way that some of the reaction to some of this stuff has played out?

- Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's caused people to ask me questions about both that video, but other questions about leadership, about how I work with others.

And those are good and appropriate questions that we should be asking every governor's candidate.

So I get those questions sometimes I welcome them and I think it's an important conversation to have.

You know, I apologized in that moment, as you know, and I'm really proud that staffer continues to work in politics.

We worked together for four years after that video.

Yeah.

So she's a friend.

She's someone I'm really proud to say is still fighting for her values.

What, I can't tell you what it's like to be a man in the world of politics.

It, it does appear to at least require less makeup and shorter heels.

But it, it, you know, we've never had a woman governor in California.

And really one of the things I, I sort of recently realized was the last time Democrats had a woman on the ballot, even for governor on the, the general election, the November ballot was 1994, Kathleen Brown and I was in college then.

And so that's, that's a whole generation plus that's 30 some years ago, my 30th reunion's coming up.

So it's a long time since Californians have really had the opportunity to break that glass ceiling to think about what women's leadership would look like and how we might emphasize different issues and how we might collaborate differently.

- You know, our colleague Guy Maserati did a story a couple weeks ago about how, you know, the typical ladder or path to becoming governor is your Lieutenant governor or attorney general, some other statewide office, an executive position.

You haven't done that.

And I'm wondering like, what challenges do you think that could present?

I mean, California's a big complicated state and you'd have to be running it, right?

- Yeah.

So having had time to meet with so many people across the state and having conversations with people who've served under different governors.

Our current governor, governor Brown, governor Schwarzenegger, governor Davis, these people are all to a person.

When I've called them up and I said, what do I need to think about?

What are the pitfalls?

What did you do?

Well, what do you, what would you advise me to think about?

Those have been invaluable conversations.

So one of the things is, you know, how are you gonna set that cooperative, productive relationship with a legislature?

That's an important thing to think about.

Thinking about how are you gonna work with boards of supervisors?

About half of our counties, give or take are Republican.

So when Sacramento says jump, they say no.

So coming out of Orange County I think is also a big benefit.

We are, big cities are really, really important.

But Orange County today is the sixth most populous county in the United States.

San Diego County is the fifth most populous county in the United States.

So thinking about how do we reach and, and serve and deliver for people across the state?

And having had those conversations incredibly valuable.

I'm really proud to be willing to kind of think hard about structures.

I won an award actually from, there's such a thing called the Congressional Management Foundation.

They actually look to see if you're doing a good job running your congressional office.

And we won an award for how we empowered younger and newer staffers to have substantive policy on day one in our office.

Interesting.

The program I set up for Attorney General, Kamala Harris won multiple awards for the innovation and how we delivered services to consumers.

- We're running short of time.

I do wanna ask about kind of a centerpiece of your policy platform, which is eliminating state income taxes for families making under a hundred thousand dollars, making the corporate tax structure, changing it to progressive.

It's now a flat rate regardless of, you know, revenue.

How would you pay for these changes?

And, and politically like the tax code is something I feel like is a bit of a third rail in California.

- Yeah, so look, we all are saying we're concerned about affordability as if somebody else is the only reason that life in California isn't affordable.

But of course the state takes a chunk of many people's paychecks.

So if we're talking, if we are, if we're honest about what it takes to make ends meet in many parts of California, we would say that it is a hundred thousand dollars.

Allows people to make ends meet, but also to do the things we need them to do to save for retirement.

To be able to get a house, to be able to say, put a little money away for college.

So we're really part of this is really acknowledging the state has a direct role to play in affordability as well as all the policy levers that we need to pull on things like housing, childcare, college costs, which are also things where I've ruled out policy.

I didn't really realize that California's tax was flat.

I don't think people know that California's corporations pay a fat flat rate.

So if you're a corporation and you earn $1 in profit, you pay 8.84%.

And that's a lot lower than California families pay, by the way.

But if you're a corporation and you have a great year and you earn a hundred billion dollars, you pay 8.84%.

So we want to make, my proposal is very gradually for the corporations in their most profitable years, asking them to pay just a little bit more.

Nine and a half, maybe 9.75, just in their best years, would generate enough revenue to make up what we take in today from people who pay a hundred thousand dollars and actually give me money left over to deliver on my promise of free college tuition.

So you heard me say I'm a nerd, I taught math.

I have whiteboarded this all out and bed deep in the bowels of the California Franchise Tax Board website, making sure that this is gonna pencil.

- Yeah.

All - Right.

- So we're almost at the end.

We've been asking all of our candidates for governor the same ender question, which is, where would you take an out-of-state visitor to get a taste of California?

And taste can be defined anyway you want to.

- Oh, so I would actually say the Central Valley and I just, because it's such an underappreciated part of California, many, many Californians have never really spent time in the Central Valley.

So I think, you know, going in the summer, being able to take them to orchards to get peaches and nectarines and love that part, love some of the dairies that we have there.

I think that whole part of California as an agricultural powerhouse is just lost on a lot of us who live closer to the coast.

That maybe is a little bit back to my, my - Agricultural roots.

Well, I'm gonna say though, also some excellent food in places like Bakersfield and Fresno, Mexican, Armenian.

- Delano?

I have a great Mexican restaurant in Delano that I like to go to.

I'm heading to Bakersfield actually next week.

I think this will be my fourth trip to Bakersfield.

So I think that is part of how do we make all Californians, including those who maybe are gonna vote Republican in this election, how do we make sure we have a governor who understands every part and pocket of California?

And so that's a piece of California that I think is just underappreciated.

We are known for our surf culture and our cities, but maybe we should be known for our peaches and almonds too.

- For for sure.

Katie Porter, UC Irvine Law professor, candidate for governor.

Thank you for being here today.

- Thank you.

- All right, that is gonna be a wrap for Thursday, April 2nd.

Political breakdown is a production of KQED.

- Our engineer today is Jim Bennett.

Our producers are Emiko Oda and Izzy Bloom.

Our video team includes Matt Morales, Alex Tran, Jim McKee and Vivian Morales.

I'm Scott Shafer.

- And I'm Marisa Lagos.

We'll see you next time.