• Katie Porter is the Democratic representative for Orange County, California.
  • After growing up on a farm in Iowa, she went to Yale and Harvard, and decided she would pursue teaching and bankruptcy law after taking a class from former law professor Elizabeth Warren.
  • Until Donald Trump became president, she had never considered running for office.
  • Since she was elected in the 2018 midterms, she’s shown how effective she can be with her no-nonsense questioning of bank chief executives, elected officials, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Democrat Rep. Katie Porter is a fighter.

The professor-turned-congresswoman isn’t a typical politician. She’s a minivan-driving mother of three, inspired by consumer protections, housing fairness, and women’s rights.

She’s a bankruptcy expert and law professor, who never thought she’d run for office. But the night President Donald Trump was elected, she changed her mind.

And while it was no easy victory, in a county that had never been won by a Democrat, she had the backing of two powerful Democrats – Elizabeth Warren, her former teacher, and Kamala Harris, her former boss.

Since entering Congress, Porter's been using skills she picked up from her years as a professor and researcher to hold some of the most powerful people in the country to account. American Banker called her the "fiercest disruptor in Congress" since Warren.

Here's a look at Porter's life so far, in photos.


Katie Moore Porter was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in 1974. When she was two, her family moved to a farm in the southern part of the state. Her family lived through a farming crisis in the 1980s, when commodity prices plunged. She saw bankruptcies and reeling communities that never fully recovered. It was the worst depression in the Midwest, since the Great Depression.

Foto: Katie Porter in 2018.sourceLeonard Ortiz/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty

Sources: Elle, Orange County Lawyer, Mother Jones


For the last two years of high school, she ended up at Phillips Academy, a prestigious boarding school in Massachusetts, which she said was a "huge culture shock."

Foto: Phillips Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts.sourceWikimedia

She didn't get in in the typical fashion. She ended up in a class of gifted students, being studied by a psychologist at Iowa State University, after acing the SATs in seventh grade. The psychologists did experiments about careers and social skills on her class. One career test said she should be a vending machine repair person.

Regardless of that, she loved the experience and applied for Phillips, thinking it would be a similar summer school experience, not realizing she had applied for an entire year of tuition. But she got in, on scholarship, and stayed on the following year.


After high school, Porter broke away from a family tradition of going to Iowa State University, instead attending Yale University, where she majored in American Studies. But even then the focus on her studies was understanding economic hardships. Her thesis was called "The Effects of Corporate Farming on Rural Community."

Foto: sourceAP Photo/Beth J. Harpaz

Sources: VOA News, UCI Law, Orange County Lawyer, NBC News, Iowa Informer


In 1997, after graduating from Yale, she traveled the world for six months and taught English to eighth graders in Hong Kong. She was 22.

Foto: sourceGetty Images

Source: NBC News


She returned to the US and studied law at Harvard University. Porter had an "inkling" she might want to be a teacher. But during those years she didn't know what sort of law she wanted to do, even after working for a US attorney one summer, and for several firms in another. While she was at Harvard, Alan Dershowitz gave her a B, and she's still bitter about it.

Foto: Harvard Law School's Langdell Hall.sourceDarren McCollester/Stringer/Getty Images

Sources: VOA News, UCI Law, Orange County Lawyer, NBC News


In 2000, in her third year of law school, Porter had a pivotal moment when she read an article in Time magazine about bankruptcy legislation. The article quoted Elizabeth Warren, who said the law would be a "death by a thousand paper cuts." She thought Warren "sounded interesting," so she dropped tax law and took her 8 a.m. bankruptcy class instead. It took one class for Porter to realize the subject was for her.

Foto: sourceReuters

Sources: VOA News, UCI Law, Orange County Lawyer, Mother Jones, NBC News


But she wasn't a perfect student right away. Early on in the semester, Warren asked Porter a question, which Porter failed to answer. After class she sought Warren out. Warren expected Porter to plead with her to not ask her anymore questions, as other students had in the past. But Porter didn't. "I didn't give a great answer today," she said, adding, "So please call on me again."

Foto: Katie Porter in 2018.sourceBill Clark /CQ Roll Call / Getty

Source: Mother Jones


After graduating magna cum laude in 2001, Porter got a job as a project director at a collaboration between several universities, called the Consumer Bankruptcy Project. Her role was to study and document bankruptcy's causes and outcomes. She flew around the country and gathered data, which Warren would later use to write about bankruptcies.

Foto: Katie Porter in 2018.sourcePaul Bersebach/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty

Sources: Mother Jones, NBC News, UCI Law


In 2005, she got a job at Iowa College of Law teaching bankruptcy and commercial law. In the first bankruptcy class she taught each semester, she gave a version of the first class Warren taught her. Warren has been a big part of her life, and it's no coincidence that Porter's daughter is named Elizabeth.

Foto: Katie Porter in 2018.sourceLeonard Ortiz/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty

Sources: Mother Jones, NBC News


In 2006, a year into her job, she started looking into mortgage fraud. Porter wanted to know if banks were following the law, so she and a colleague studied 1,733 bankruptcy cases across 24 states. What they found was "systematic fraud," she told Mother Jones.

Foto: Katie Porter in 2018.sourceMario Tama / Getty

Sources: The Sacramento Bee, Mother Jones


Years later, when she was running for Congress, she told The Sacramento Bee that she was one of the first people to "sound the alarm" about the Wall Street housing market crisis. "It was tough to get people to listen when I started that, but when the housing market crashed, everyone kind of took notice and realized the banks had been engaging in widespread fraud," she said.

Foto: Katie Porter in 2018.sourceMario Tama/Getty

Sources: The Sacramento Bee


In 2011, Porter was hired as a professor at the University of California Irvine. She taught business and consumer law and bankruptcy.

Foto: Katie Porter in 2019.sourceAndre Chung for The Washington Post / Getty

Sources: The New Yorker, UCI


Kamala Harris, who was then California's attorney general, appointed Porter as a watchdog to oversee how banks distributed a $25 billion mortgage settlement. She performed the role from 2012 to 2014, and continued teaching law at the same time.

Foto: U.S. Senator Kamala Harris launches her campaign for President of the United States at a rally at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza in her hometown of Oakland, California, U.S., January 27, 2019.sourceREUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage

Sources: The New Republic, American Banker, Katherine Porter


Through that work, Porter saw firsthand the damage FHA loans had done to families. "We were still trying to help some families save their homes, but to be frank, by 2013, 2014, especially 2014, a lot of the damage was done," she told The New Republic.

Foto: Katie Porter, who is running against Mimi Walters for the state congressional seat in the 45th district, greets a supporter at the University of California, Irvine on Tuesday, October 30, 2018.sourcePaul Bersebach/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty

Source: The New Republic


Her life changed the day Trump became president. Before that she had never considered a career in politics. After he won, she thought to herself she'd wait another four years for someone like Warren or Harris to take Trump on. Then she could work for them, and make a difference.

Foto: sourceMike Segar/Reuters

Source: NBC News


But her boyfriend wasn't having it. He asked why she had to wait for someone else, before she could make a difference. She realized he was right. And at that point she started to Google her potential competitor.

Foto: Katie Porter in 2018.sourceTom Williams/CQ Roll Call / Getty

Source: NBC News


In early 2017, Porter announced she was running for Congress in Orange County. "When I launched my campaign, I set out to win," she told Elle. "I knew it would be a tough race, but as a consumer protection advocate, I'd taken on tough things before, like standing up to the big banks and calling them out for cheating people."

Foto: Katie Porter in 2018.sourceJae C. Hong / AP

But she wasn't entirely comfortable with it, at least at first.

She told NBC: "It wasn't that I didn't think I was good or talented or hadn't worked hard, it was just that there's a kind of declarative aspect of being a candidate that I think can be kind of culturally uncomfortable for women. And I think we're pushing back at that a lot or understanding more. But we know for women that most women don't run unless they're asked to run, unless they're told to run."


Her main Democrat competitor was Dave Min, another Harvard law graduate who also taught at the University of California, after Porter had recruited him. Things didn't get any easier for Porter when Min won the Democrat Party's endorsement by one vote.

Foto: Dave Min and Katie Porter, both Democrats running for California's 45th Congressional district seat in Congress, participate in the DEMOC PAC's candidate forum at the University Synagogue in Irvine, Calif., on Tuesday, May 22, 2018.sourceBill Clark/CQ Roll Call / Getty

Source: HuffPost


During her run for congress, several insiders thought Min was spreading rumors that Porter was not up to the job, because of her divorce with her abusive ex-husband.

Foto: Katie Porter in 2019.sourceTom Williams/CQ Roll Call / Getty

In 2013, she had taken out a protective order against her husband, alleging he'd smashed a window and threatened to kill himself if she left him. Porter said people were describing her as "shady", so she took her story to HuffPost and explained the situation.

"I'm the most boring person in America. I'm a mom of three kids, I protected my family, I ended a marriage that was troubled," she told HuffPost.


And even without the Democratic endorsement, "the most boring person in America" won. It was one of two improbable victories. She was also the first Democrat to ever win the district since it was created in 1983.

Foto: Katie Porter, the Democratic candidate for the 45th Congressional District, waves to supporters after speaking on election night at the Hilton Irvine in Irvine on Tuesday, November 6, 2018.sourceKevin Sullivan/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty

Sources: Los Angeles Times, NBC News


On her 45th birthday, she was sworn in as California's 45th district's US Representative. The "minivan driving" mother swore to serve her country beside her two sons and daughter.

Foto: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., administers the House oath of office to Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., during ceremonial swearing-in on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 3, 2019,sourceJose Luis Magana / AP

Sources: VOA News, Elle, HuffPost, Twitter


She told Elle that what she brings to Congress is the understanding and perspective of a single mother of three, with kids in public schools. She knows how it feels "to be of a middle class family trying to save for retirement, thinking about paying for college."

Foto: Katie Porter, left, U.S. Representative for California's 45th congressional district, speaks to eighth grade students at Jeffrey Trail Middle School in Irvine on Thursday morning, April 18, 2019.sourceMark Rightmire/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty

Source: Elle


And she's hit the ground running. The New Republic described her approach as "the languid menace of a coiled python." Using her allotted five minutes of speaking time, she's already called out heads of banks and the government, including the chief executives of JPMorgan Chase, Equifax, and Wells Fargo.

Foto: Katie Porter in 2018.sourceMario Tama / Getty

Sources: CNN, The New Republic, American Banker


Her style is professorial — she often uses whiteboards and textbooks to get her point across. She's also very good at breaking down complex financial concepts and connecting the dots.

Foto: Katie Porter wields her whiteboard.sourceWashington Post / Youtube

Sources: CNN, The New Republic, American Banker


In March, she used her own law text book, "Modern Consumer Law," to quiz Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief Kathy Kraninger. She asked her to do some math and when Kraninger couldn't, she said it highlighted the fact that calculations on loans can be difficult. She offered to send Kraninger a copy of her book, too.

Foto: Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif. in 2019.sourceTom Williams / CQ Roll Call

Sources: CNN, Huff Post


In March, she grilled then-Wells Fargo chief executive Tim Sloan at a financial committee. She asked why the public should trust his company, when his lawyers were saying a rebranding campaign was "hyperbolic marketing", and he was telling Congress to trust him. Two weeks later Sloan was out of a job.

Foto: Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif.sourceTom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty

Sources: CNN, NBC News


In May, Housing Secretary Ben Carson took the brunt of it as she asked him about REOs, a term used in real estate, which he confused for Oreo cookies. She told The New Republic it was like a student in one of her law classes "who just cannot get it."

Foto: Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif. in 2019.sourceTom Williams/CQ Roll Call / Getty

Source: The New Republic


She wasn't impressed when he later laughed it off by sending her a note and a packet of the cookies. She said he could eat all the Oreos he wanted, but then he needed to learn his material, because she needed answers.

Foto: Oreos and note to Rep. Katie PortersourceTwitter

Source: The New Republic


On June 17, she announced her support for Trump's impeachment. She was the first Democrat in a formerly Republican area to do so.

Foto: Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., center, is seen in the House Chamber before President Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union address on Tuesday, February 5, 2019.sourceTom Williams/CQ Roll Call / Getty

Source: Santa Barbara Independent


In October, Porter held Mark Zuckerberg to the fire. She asked him whether he'd be willing to spend an hour a day for the next year as a Facebook content monitor, watching graphic videos of murders and stabbings, and only have access to the same benefits that his employees get. He tried to answer in a roundabout way, and finally she answered for him: "Okay, then you're saying you're not willing to do it."

Foto: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.sourceGetty

Source: Business Insider


It's too early to know whether Porter will get reelected if she runs again. But she'll definitely have competition. By April, eight Republicans had already launched campaigns to take the Orange County seat back from her. But if she keeps up her measured and probing questions, which she thinks "the American people would want," she'll not be unseated easily.

Foto: Katie Porter in 2018.sourceLeonard Ortiz/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty

Sources: The Orange County Register, Huff Post