Katie Porter Biography

Katie Moore Porter was born on January 3, 1974, in Fort Dodge, Iowa, United States, and grew up in a farming community in the state’s southern part where the family relocated when she was two.

She witnessed the farming crisis in the 1980s as her father Dan was a farmer-turned-banker, while her mother Liz later co-founded Fons & Porter's Love of Quilting, a magazine and television program focused on quilting.

She attended Phillips Academy for the last two years of school and after graduating, broke away from family tradition of going to Iowa State University by enrolling into Yale University. She was a member of Grace Hopper College and completed her major in American studies in 1996 with her undergraduate thesis titled The Effects of Corporate Farming on Rural Community.

She next went to Harvard Law School where she was a member of the Board of Student Advisers and served as the notes editor for the Harvard Women's Law Journal. After reading a Time magazine interview on bankruptcy by Harvard law professor and future Senator Elizabeth Warren, she decided to take bankruptcy class from her and graduated magna cum laude with Juris Doctor in 2001.

Katie Porter, who interned for Chuck Grassley while attending Yale, traveled the world for six months after graduation and taught English to eighth graders in Hong Kong at 22. She was a law clerk for Judge Richard S. Arnold of the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in Little Rock, Arkansas in 2001-02.

She then joined the law firm of Stoel Rives LLP in Portland, Oregon and was an associate attorney in bankruptcy and creditors’ rights practice group in 2002-04. She was the project director for the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges' Business Bankruptcy Project in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2004.

For some time between 2004 and 2005, she also served as associate professor of law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Law. She joined the faculty of the University of Iowa College of Law as an associate professor in 2005 and became a full professor there in 2011.

During this period, she was also a visiting associate professor at the William S. Boyd School of Law (2004-05), University of Illinois College of Law (2008), and University of California, Berkeley School of Law (2009-10). She further served as Robert Braucher Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School in 2010-11 and became a tenured professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law in 2011.

In March 2012, then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris appointed her as the state's independent monitor of banks in a nationwide $25 billion mortgage settlement. In that capacity, she oversaw the banks' implementation of $9.5 billion in settlement reforms for Californians.

Katie Porter had never considered a career in politics until Donald Trump became American president in 2016, and even then, she initially wanted to wait for someone else to take on him four years later. However, she was convinced by her boyfriend that she could be that someone and announced her candidacy for Congress in Orange County in early 2017 and was endorsed by Warren and Harris from day one.

Nevertheless, her democratic opponent David Min, another Harvard law graduate whom she had recruited to teach at the University of California, won the Democrat Party's endorsement by one vote. Min reportedly spread rumors that she was not fit for the job as a single mother of three, following which she opened up to HuffPost about her abusive marriage, which resonated with her voters.

She was able to win the primary and defeat Min even without the Democratic endorsement and challenged two-term incumbent, Republican Mimi Walters, a hardline Trump supporter, in California's 45th congressional district. In the 2018 elections for the United States House of Representatives, she made history by becoming the first Democrat to be elected to represent the district in the historically Republican county.

Her campaign did not accept corporate PAC money and was endorsed by End Citizens United, a political action committee seeking to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court 2010 decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. A day after her win, she announced that she would introduce a bill to overhaul campaign finance laws and to protect voting rights as legislative priorities.

Running for reelection in the 2020 United States House of Representatives elections, she secured first place in the top-two primary and faced Republican Mission Viejo Mayor Greg Raths in the general election. She retained her seat by defeating Raths by 53.5%-46.5% and became the first non-Hispanic Democrat in 38 years to win a second term in an Orange County-based district.

In the 2022 elections, she was reelected in California's 47th congressional district by defeating Republican nominee Scott Baugh by 51.6%-48.4% of the vote. Throughout her career so far, she has voted in line with President Joe Biden's stated position 98.2% of the time.

Katie Porter married Matthew Hoffman at the age of 29 in 2003 and has three children from him: sons Luke and Paul, and daughter Betsy, who was named after her mentor Elizabeth Warren. The couple separated in 2013, which she later mentioned was due to mental and physical abuse she was subjected to, and divorced the same year, following which she retained custody of their children.

After her opponents dug up her “shady” past and 911 call record during her campaign, she revealed that her husband had punched her, shoved her one-year-old daughter across the kitchen, and threatened to kill himself. She is currently in a relationship, possibly with a staffer, as she told the New York Times in early 2020 that her boyfriend brought her food as she quarantined with her children.