Democratic California Reps. Katie Porter and Adam Schiff didn’t exactly shove Sen. Dianne Feinstein off her re-election bid. They did give her more than a gentle nudge when they declared their candidacies for her seat before she revealed her intentions for 2024. On Tuesday, Feinstein finally announced she will step down after her current term ends in January 2025.
Feinstein was San Francisco’s first female mayor when she won a special election to the Senate in 1992 and is a traditional liberal Democrat who bridges the party’s young progressives with older centrists.
Porter, who announced her candidacy for the seat in mid-January, was first elected to California’s 45th District in 2018, taking much of the traditional Republican stronghold of Orange County. She was redistricted last year into California’s 47th, which she won in November.
Schiff was first elected to the House in 2000 to represent California’s 30th District covering the San Gabriel valley east of Los Angeles. He was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee from 2019 to 2022, and now serves as its ranking Democratic member. He announced his candidacy for Feinstein’s seat in late January.
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Biden's Big SOTU
SOTU WEEK 2023
It’s time for President Biden to declare victory and go home, our right-column pundit, Stephen Macaulay wrote after the State of the Union address. But Democrats from both wings of the party have renewed enthusiasm for Biden in the 2024 presidential race after last Tuesday’s speech.
“I have to say, the speech was very good. As far as Biden can be pulled to the left and signal what his priorities are … I thought it was masterful,” Angelo Greco, a Democratic analyst who worked on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) 2020 presidential campaign, told The Hill.
The address “proved that the center of gravity has shifted in American politics,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, in the same report.
On the other side of the left-of-center spectrum, pundit E.J. Dionne writes in his Washington Post column that Biden is instead tracking to the middle to challenge Republican for the blue-collar vote.
“Biden’s bet – and it’s a wager many successful governors made last year – is that Democrats can wing back blue-collar voters,” Dionne says.
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