[ad_1]
For the thirteenth year running, data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation have shown Irvine, California, to be the safest large city in America. Carved from the Irvine Company’s lima-bean fields, in the nineteen-sixties, and designed by the Los Angeles-based architect William Pereira, the city is a master-planned vision of untroubled suburban prosperity. Its residential villages prescribe certain architectural styles (California Modern, Italian Riviera, Tuscan); its lakes are fake and fountain-fed; the public schools and universities are excellent; the malls are clean; people have jobs; the local Chamber of Commerce touts the city’s connections to Fortune 500 companies; and golf appears to be a community priority. It’s the kind of place that could have served as the backdrop for President Trump’s end-of-midterm-season violin ad—in which he, in his distinctive, portentous way, manages to make the slogan “Things Are Getting Better” sound like certain doom—and it is smack in the middle of the once reliably conservative Orange County, in California’s Forty-fifth Congressional District, which has voted Republican since it was created, in the early nineteen-eighties. (The district’s first representative in Congress was Duncan Lee Hunter, whose son, Duncan Duane Hunter, was indicted for campaign-finance fraud alongside his wife—both of them pleaded not guilty. The younger Hunter is hoping that he can keep his seat in California’s Fiftieth District by attacking his opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, a twenty-nine-year-old former Obama staffer of Palestinian-Mexican descent, as a “security risk.”)
This year, however, promises to upset Irvine’s placidity. The race for the Forty-fifth—a closely watched seat among #FlipItBlue taggers—is a tossup between two white suburban women, a supposedly significant voting pool in the midterms. But, as in the Twenty-fifth—a potentially convertible California district that I wrote about in June, where the election is a showdown between a young, female, liberal newcomer and a dynastic, Trumpophantic Republican man—the candidates couldn’t be more different.
In the Forty-fifth, Mimi Walters, the two-term Republican incumbent, who gave up a financial-services career for politics, has voted with Trump ninety-nine per cent of the time; before Trump became President, she co-sponsored a bill to weaken the Environmental Protection Agency and loosen emissions standards for carbon dioxide. (According to a study done by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, a majority of those in the Forty-fifth, a highly educated district, believe that climate scientists are correct about human-caused global warming and its potential hazards; close to three-quarters of those polled support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.) Alone among Orange County Republicans, Walters voted for Trump’s tax plan, which caps state and local deductions and could cost a number of people in her district thousands of dollars in April.
On the left is Katie Porter, a professor of consumer-protection and bankruptcy law, who had her intellectual awakening as a student in Elizabeth Warren’s class at Harvard Law School. During the foreclosure crisis, Porter documented banks’ malfeasance and testified before the TARP committee in Congress. In 2011, she was hired at the new law school at the University of California, Irvine; when she arrived, Californians were still reeling from the crash. Kamala Harris, the attorney general of California at the time, appointed Porter to monitor the banks in a post-collapse mortgage settlement. Porter’s old boss and her onetime professor—now two of Trump’s most potent critics in the Senate and both likely Presidential contenders in 2020—have teamed up to make a political ad for her. Porter is an unabashed liberal in a place where such a candidacy would have been a footnote a few years ago. A poll from September showed her with a five-point lead. What we have, in Porter, is a test of how far left some Republican and Independent voters may lean—Warren’s protégée! Harris’s hall monitor!—in order to avoid leaving Trump unimpeded for two more years.
In Orange County—which has grown and changed, and, in a break with its G.O.P. past, went for Hillary Clinton in 2016—the President himself is a wedge issue. When I visited Irvine on Tuesday to watch Porter cast her ballot at the university, as part of early voting, a middle-aged white woman was holding a sign that read “UCI 18-25 Year Olds Please save Us from Old White Men.” Porter, a native Iowan who has the kindly, unflappable expression of a picture-book mom (and is a divorced single mother of three), appeared with the Olympic ice skater Michelle Kwan, whose brother went to U.C.I. Kwan wanted to encourage political engagement among Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, an increasingly Democratic demographic that is well represented in Irvine but not necessarily at the polls. While Kwan took selfies with adoring members of the U.C.I. skating team, Porter, on a momlike campaign against procrastination, approached unsuspecting students and asked them if they had voted yet. They all promised that they would.
After she voted, Porter gave a walk-and-talk interview to an undergraduate reporter who held her laptop open before her like a cafeteria tray. Two opposition “trackers” filmed on handheld camcorders, hoping to catch her in a gaffe. A campaign volunteer tried to block their shots, gleefully dodging and parrying, while the reporter, seeking to avoid the trackers, almost walked into a stone bench. (A second later, trying to keep pace with the media amoeba, I took one in the shins.) Then Porter spotted her getaway car—a beaten-up silver Kia, which spirited her away to her headquarters, a shared work space near the Intel offices in the University Research Park, just past a road that Irvine’s master planners named Theory.
In an unassuming conference room, Porter took a seat at the head of a long table. She took a sip of water from a communal dispenser. Like other Orange County Democrats, she is more than happy to take in registered Republicans seeking shelter from a Trump tweetstorm. Her campaign, she said, is about inviting people to have a conversation about their values, and asking them to vote accordingly. “Whether they’ve been Republican in the past, however they’re registered, those are issues maybe of identity, but this is really about the voice they want to make heard at this moment in time,” she said “We’ve been talking about what Orange County families care about, and that’s the civility with which we treat each other. . . . The direction Donald Trump has moved us has been more and more extreme.”
On Election Night two years ago, Porter recalled, she was at a community center with neighbors, for what they all assumed would be a celebration of Clinton’s win. When it was clear that Trump had prevailed, she said, her friends began to fret about the country’s future. But, she said, “Nobody in the room was saying, ‘I can’t believe we just elected Mimi Walters.’ She has called gay marriage a travesty of family values, she voted twenty-four times against women’s right to choose. She’s beholden entirely to corporate special interests. Nobody in that room seemed to understand that if you’re concerned about Trump, it’s important to make sure that we have our counter-voice in Washington.” Next week, Porter plans to tell that story as part of her victory speech.
Source link
