Katie Porter is seated at Starbucks, nursing an iced coffee and discussing might-have-beens as a stream of customers in seasonal uniform — shorts, flip-flops — flows steadily past.

This is not how she hoped to spend her summer.

The Orange County congresswoman had gone from unknown to political celebrity virtually overnight, wielding a whiteboard and marking pen to skewer lobbyists, torment chief executives and harry various corporate heavies — to the utter rapture of the online, cable-TV-consuming wing of the Democratic Party.

She transformed herself from UC law professor into a fundraising dynamo, a progressive heroine and oft-discussed prospect for higher office. Then it all came crashing down as Porter lost, badly, in a fractious Senate primary to fellow Rep. Adam B. Schiff. Now he’s the one cruising to election and potential lifetime tenure in Washington, as Porter confronts the end of her congressional career a few short months from now.

She has, Porter says, no regrets.

Not for how she waged her Senate campaign. Not for yielding the national political platform she built. Not for walking away from a House seat — which Republicans are eagerly eyeing — after three terms and six years in Washington, a point when many in her line of work are just getting started.

“What in the universe do I wish was different?” Porter asked, before answering herself. “A lot. A lot.”

The war in Gaza, for instance, which activated a peace movement in the Democratic Party and bolstered the candidacy of Rep. Barbara Lee, Porter’s main competition for liberal support against the more centrist Schiff.

“Do I think I underestimated some factors and overestimated some others? Sure. Do I think that there were calculations and calculuses that I made? Yes,” Porter went on. “But when I look at that campaign, I don’t think there was … a particular moment or a particular decision that shaped it either way.”

The morning rush had petered out. An egg-and-spinach wrap sat before Porter, untouched.

She’s still smarting over the millions of dollars in negative advertising the crypto industry and tech bros dumped on her head to help Schiff. But, she says, her endorsement of her erstwhile rival is wholehearted and sincere.

“Adam and Barbara and I remained very cordial throughout the race,” Porter said. “We saw each other every day at work. People forget that. We’re sitting in delegation meetings together; we’re on the airplane together. One of the first people I saw after I lost was Barbara Lee’s son, who was like, ‘You ran a great race.’ We understand that when you run, someone wins and someone loses.”

Her one hope for Schiff is that he uses the fall campaign (such as it is against his handpicked opponent, the hapless Republican Steve Garvey) to talk about some of the many issues facing California.

“We need a real policy debate in California,” Porter said. “We have a narrative about California being [Gov. Gavin Newsom’s] golden California dreaming, but also people who are like, ‘This is a failed state; people are leaving’ — that whole narrative. … This race was a chance to have a real policy debate about our state, and I don’t think that happened.”

Blame the short attention span of voters. Blame a diminished political press corps. Blame a contest that managed to captivate very few Californians. Blame hairsplitting among generally like-minded Democrats and the lack of any real GOP competition to spur a deep and meaningful discussion.

Even as Schiff coasts to election, Porter said: “I hope Adam will go back to some of the policies that were really important in the Senate race — whether that was housing, whether that was the environment, energy, whether that was taxes — and try to have some of those conversations and arrive in the Senate really willing to think about ‘What does California need from Washington?’”

A customer approached Porter, wide-eyed, to offer good wishes. The 47th Congressional District, which runs along the Orange County coast, is home to one of the most competitive House races in the country, a fight pitting Democrat Dave Min against Republican Scott Baugh to replace Porter on Capitol Hill.

She has few illusions about the institution she’s leaving behind.

Congress is a lumbering beast of a place, deeply polarized and highly antagonistic, and Porter said there’s little desire by leaders of either major party to fix that.

“My colleagues want to talk — and you will hear them talk this fall, whether it’s Congressman Schiff running for the Senate, or a House candidate or Vice President Harris — they want to talk endlessly about the crisis of confidence in the Supreme Court,” Porter said. “What about the crisis of confidence in us, in Congress, and who we work for and how effective we are? That’s a conversation worth having, too.”

(There’s a reason Porter was no favorite of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who threw her considerable clout behind Schiff in the Senate primary.)

For now, Porter is looking forward to returning to the classroom in January — her face lit up at the mention of standing in front of students again — taking up her old position at UC Irvine. She’ll teach a first-year law class and courses on commercial law and legislation.

She has a new Burmese kitten, Dino, and a basset hound puppy, Poppy. As a single mom of three children, she’ll gladly forsake the arduous cross-country commute to Washington, and also looks forward to being around when her kids get home from school.

A sip of coffee. Another passerby — a woman in a neon-green safety vest — bids Porter well.

She hasn’t ruled out a future run for statewide office — Porter could be a formidable candidate for attorney general or governor — but feels no haste to decide. (By contrast, she was the first to jump in to the Senate race, even before the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein had stated her intention to step aside.)

Porter reprimanded the nearly half dozen gubernatorial hopefuls who’ve already launched their campaigns.

“Between now and election day, in my opinion, nobody should be campaigning for governor,” Porter said. Democrats, quite rightly, insist that Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy and that the party must do all it can to stop him.

“If you believe that” — here Porter brandished a fist — “then that’s what we should all be working on right now.” Not jockeying in an election still more than two years off.

At 50, still in the blush of youth by today’s silvered political standards, Porter has plenty of highway ahead of her.

She remains committed, she said, to public service of some sort.

“I’m not tired at all of being a candidate. I’m not tired of campaigning,” she said, finally turning attention to her neglected spinach wrap. “But I just don’t know what that looks like, and I’m not gonna be rushed.

“I’m going to look for the thing that feels right, whether that’s elective office — I don’t know at what level — whether that’s administration, whether that’s some kind of civil service board position in California,” or possibly a role in a Kamala Harris administration.

Her brief, ascendant House career may be nearly over. But, Porter suggested, she’s not through yet.

Until Katie Porter won her congressional seat in 2018, being a Democrat in Orange County was like rooting for the Angels: Someone has to do it, amirite?

Republicans had held a majority of my home county’s legislative, congressional and supervisorial seats for decades. They maintained a robust ecosystem of candidates, funneling activists onto school boards and party committees to learn how politics works before moving on to higher offices. The GOP way took Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to the White House, the latter infamously saying, “Orange County is where the good Republicans go before they die.”

Democrats did hold power in Santa Ana, Irvine and other smaller cities but otherwise mostly went through elections like the butt of a joke in a Monty Python skit. Their luck began to shift in 2016, when Hillary Clinton won Orange County in the presidential election — the first Democrat to do so since FDR during the Great Depression.

But there was no firebrand leader to make local liberals dream of a bluer Orange County. The quintessential Democrat remained Loretta Sanchez, a Republican-turned-Democrat who made O.C. history in 1996 as the first Latino to win a congressional race, then went on to squander that moment with an undistinguished 20-year career that ended in embarrassment when Kamala Harris obliterated her in a 2016 U.S. Senate race.

The idea that Democrats could rule Orange County was so unlikely that I joked during a speech at the Laguna Woods Democratic Club just before the 2018 midterm elections that I would register with the party for the first time if they were able to get a majority of the congressional seats that year. Things weren’t looking good for them. Of the Democratic congressmembers whose seats were mostly in O.C., only incumbents Lou Correa and Alan Lowenthal had won their primaries.

I was proved wrong — and remain a Democrat today. All of O.C.’s congressional seats went Democrat in 2018 for the first time ever. Leading this charge was Porter, the type of Dem that O.C. had rarely seen.

The Iowa native and UC Irvine law professor was dynamic, funny, knew how to fight and never apologized for her progressive beliefs. Orange County hadn’t seen a Democrat like her since Nativo Lopez, a Chicano activist turned Santa Ana Unified school board member who delighted in antagonizing Democrats and Republicans alike in the early 2000s. Porter, who beat incumbent Mimi Walters in an upset, quickly earned a national reputation for her fierce interrogations of bad hombres during congressional hearings, frequently using a whiteboard to explain arcane concepts in a way we plebes could understand.

She represented a new, purple Orange County where Democrats were something no one could’ve foreseen: They were cool.

Democratic party registration surpassed that of Republicans in 2019 — a once-unthinkable achievement. That same year, UNITE HERE Local 11 co-president Ada Briceño took over the Democratic Party of Orange County and brought in the people power organizing and radicalism that local party leaders had long shunned. Porter was a loyal soldier — she helped local candidates win through endorsements and made progressives in the redder parts of O.C. believe they could run and win. Democratic majorities bloomed where it once seemed impossible: Costa Mesa. Huntington Beach. The Board of Supervisors.

Porter was a transformational figure I thought would hold her seat for years and push Orange County even further to the left. That’s why I was disappointed when she announced last year that she would not seek reelection and would instead run for U.S. Senate. Porter figured that deep blue California would embrace her far easier than purple Orange County.

It didn’t.

Early returns from Super Tuesday show Porter in third place, far behind fellow Democrat Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey. Lefties long fretted that she and her fellow traveler, Rep. Barbara Lee, would cancel each other out, but their combined vote total wouldn’t even have put them into the general election.

Porter’s expected loss comes at a bad time for Democrats in Orange County. Since Porter and her congressional class swept O.C., Republicans have yearned for a comeback. In 2020, Young Kim and Michelle Steel — the first Korean American women in Congress along with Washington state’s Marilyn Strickland — won back two seats for the Republicans. In Huntington Beach, a MAGA-majority city council is showing that conspiratorial, retrograde politics can still win in the county that made it an art form.

The grand prize for O.C. conservatives, though, is Porter’s seat. Former county GOP chair Scott Baugh nearly beat her in 2022, and he’s in first place by a wide margin in the race to replace her. Democratic state senator Dave Min stands in second in early returns, and third-place finisher Joanna Weiss has already conceded defeat. If Baugh beats Min in November, Republicans will have clawed back their congressional majority and at least partially deflated the narrative of an ascendant O.C. Democratic Party.

If that happens, Porter should bear some of the blame.

I get why she ran. A U.S. Senate seat doesn’t come onto the electoral market often. She owed it to no one to wait. While she served her constituents well, Porter always struck me as the type of talent who didn’t want to spend their entire career in the proverbial minor leagues.

But sometimes, the big fish should stay in the small pond to defend the minnows from the sharks. And out of all the years Porter should’ve remained in place, it was 2024.

On X this week, she thanked “every person who supported us over the past six years,” writing, “It’s clear Californians are hungry for leaders who break the mold, can’t be bought, and push for accountability in government and across our economy.” Porter otherwise hasn’t made any public announcements about what’s next.

Her future is bright. She can always run for another office or even go after Baugh if he wins. The Newsom administration would be smart to hire her, or the Biden administration if the president returns to the White House. At the very least, Porter would make a great spokesperson for Toyota, whose Sienna minivan she turned into an unlikely symbol of suburban revolt.

Her legacy as a GOP slayer is permanent. Her position in the Orange County history books is secure. I think Porter is awesome. But I’ll always remember her as a what-if. What if, when Orange County needed her most, Porter had run for reelection instead of leaving us for the big time?

What if.