The fact that California's bumptious gubernatorial race is flunking the estrogen test is causing flurries of word counts to erupt.
Last fall, Porter, a UC Irvine law professor, was one of the more recognizable names in the field, with national liberal accolades for refusing corporate donations, flipping a Republican congressional seat in the 2018 blue wave and for grilling CEOs in Congressional hearings.
But the progressive, who supports single-payer health care, free child care and college tuition and higher taxes on large corporations, has struggled to sustain a liberal base. Many coveted factions of the state’s Democratic establishment, including major labor unions, have coalesced around former U.S. Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, billionaire Tom Steyer, or at one point, now-disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell.
But as you've no doubt seen, including in this space, the woman appears to have a bit of a temper problem:
Now, we're told that men could get away with this sort of thing - that women are held to an insidious double standard:A strong case can be made that Katie Porter’s campaign to become California’s first female governor stumbled over a sexist double standard.
The former congresswoman and law professor was the front-runner until the fall, when videos emerged of her abrasive behind-the-scenes treatment of both a staff member and a news reporter. It is reasonable to assume that a man would never have faced such harsh public backlash for such words, let alone such a quick fall from grace.
Although it's just possible that, in the most aggressively, performatively "liberal" state in the union...
At the same time, California voters have a longer history of electing women to statewide office. It is not unreasonable to attribute Porter’s collapse in the polls to liabilities that have nothing to do with gender.
...it just might not be misogyny after all. It's the state that elected Kamala Harris to high office, after all, and probably will do it again.
And I'm not sure a male candidate would survive the standard that excludes this sort of thing:
The former husband of Rep. Katie Porter said the California Democrat frequently abused him verbally and threw “toys, books and other objects” at him during their marriage — even pouring scalding-hot mashed potatoes on his head during a fight, according to divorce records.
Matthew Hoffman, who filed for divorce from Porter in 2013, said in a request for a restraining order dated April 30 of that year that he was “routinely” called a “f—ing idiot” and “f—ing incompetent” by his rage-prone spouse, who also shattered a glass coffee pot on their kitchen counter in March 2012 when she felt their house wasn’t clean enough.
“She would not let me have a cell phone because she said, ‘You’re too f—ing dumb to operate it,’” Hoffman said of Porter, 49, who has also been accused of ridiculing former members of her staff.
As with all domestic allegations, there are two sides to the story:
In response to Hoffman’s allegations, Porter, then a professor of bankruptcy law at the University of California, Irvine, in Orange County, claimed in her own request for a restraining order that her ex ordered her out of the house on April 24, 2013, and called her a “dumb bitch,” a “despicable person” and “f—ing evil” before adding that she should “rot in hell.”
Treating ex-spouses' filings in the heat of a contentious divorce can have its ups and downs. At the very least, people will tend to pick the narrative they want.
Still, if it were a male, or a Republican woman for that matter, I doubt we'd see this kind of circumspection:
To experts, it shows voters and political insiders continue to hold female candidates to higher standards than men. https://t.co/At6nOAAVWL
— CalMatters (@CalMatters) May 10, 2026
📸 Ethan Swope, AP pic.twitter.com/4x3TgCIpRc
Still - as the saying goes: where there's smoke...
“Don’t pour a pot of boiling potatoes on your spouse’s head” is a single sex neutral standard of conduct that virtually all seekers of high office of both sexes manage to meet, and that no man would be able to continue running for governor having failed to meet https://t.co/jvtKCWkrFL
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) May 11, 2026
...there's boiling potatoes.
Or something like that.
