Even before Dianne Feinstein announced her coming retirement from representing California in the U.S. Senate, Democratic challengers to her seat were champing at the bit to replace her.

Katie Porter, a two-term member of Congress representing portions of Orange County, declared her candidacy more than a month before Feinstein announced she was stepping down, in a move that drew criticism from fellow Democrats.

Fellow congressional Californians Barbara Lee — representing Oakland since 1998 — and Adam Schiff — Burbank’s representative since 2001 — joined Porter in competition to become the Golden State’s next Senator.

”Each one of them has their own huge profile, each of these members of Congress are quite well known throughout the state — better with some constituencies than others — but each one certainly has a national profile and, unfortunately, there’s only one Senate seat,” Sara Sadhwani, assistant professor of politics at Pomona College, told Spectrum News.

Moreover, their competition leaves a vacuum in their own districts — and one that they themselves can’t fill.

Lee and Schiff haven’t yet endorsed potential successors, though Democrats are likely to retain their seats. The race for Porter’s Orange County district, however, is expected to be a tight contest between two candidates who have sought to represent that area in recent years -- and could result in a flip to the GOP.

Chasing Lee's legacy

Barbara Lee has all but owned California's 12th district (and its previous incarnations, the 9th and 13th) since assuming office in winning a special election to replace Ron Dellums in April 1998. Her lifetime before entering Congress included 8 years in California’s legislature, and decades working on progressive causes in the Bay Area. According to the Cook Partisan Voting Index, a measure calculating how competitive a given election contest might get, Lee’s 12th Congressional District is D+40, the most Democrat-friendly district in the country.

Lateefah Simon, a longtime Bay Area organizer, seems to have the early edge in the race. Simon has the early fundraising lead — as of the most recent Federal Elections Commission filing period, she was shown to have nearly $300,000 in cash on hand — as well as endorsements from across the state, including California Attorney General Rob Bonta, and the East Bay community. She’s directed more than a handful of anti-recidivism and development programs advocating for young people, served on the Bay Area Rapid Transit Board of Directors, and served on the California State University Board of Trustees.

Simon’s closest fundraising competition, Jennifer Tran, only announced her candidacy in May, putting her at a fundraising reporting disadvantage. She’s a professor at California State University East Bay, a proclaimed “lifelong Oaklander” and stands atop a platform of progressive policies. A community organizer as well as an educator, Tran’s causes have sought to build bridges and power for marginalized groups in the East Bah, and she is the president of the Oakland Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce.

Other candidates for the seat include Alameda Vice Mayor Tony Daysog, who announced his candidacy in June; Denard Ingram, a social worker and chair of Oakland’s Rent Board; and Tim Sanchez, a military veteran and former small business owner who scored the endorsement of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s BOLD PAC.

As of the most recent FEC filings, no Republicans have entered the race.

Replacing Schiff: Lots of hopefuls, only one seat

Schiff, like Lee, has been a stalwart of his district for more than two decades. He began representing California’s 30th Congressional District in 2001 (back when it was the 27th district).

He was a successful federal prosecutor well before he began his political career, and he leaned back on those chops in recent years as an investigator, then a lead manager of former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment. Schiff was also a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

His zeal for combat with Trump led him to be censured by a GOP-controlled House of Representatives — which may have backfired for the GOP, as he announced $8.1 million for the Senate contest in the period during which his censure took place.

California's 30th District, which includes the cities of Burbank, West Hollywood, Pasadena, Glendale and a handful of well-known (and well-heeled) Los Angeles neighborhoods is comfortably Democratic — according to the Cook index, it stands at D+23, expected to be comfortably safe for Democratic control.

The race for his old seat is quite a bit more crowded. Sixteen Democrats and five Republicans have filed for his seat, though only a baker’s dozen of the field have raised any money — and, as of the most recent data, only one Republican, physician Alex Balekian, has more than $550 on hand as of the last fundraising period.

On the Democratic side, California State Senator Anthony Portantino, former Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer and Los Angeles Unified School District Board Member Nick Melvoin are the lead fundraisers, each having raised more than $790,000, and Portantino topping the $1 million mark.

Actor Ben Savage — best known for his starring role in the sitcom “Boy Meets World” — is also taking a crack at the Congressional seat. In 2022, Savage ran for the West Hollywood City Council, though he did not place among the top of the 12 candidate field for one of the city’s three open at-large seats. 

Progressive advocate and drag queen Maebe A. Girl — known in FEC filings as Maebe Pudlo — is no stranger to races against Schiff. Girl is an elected member of the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council, a local-level position that is believed to have made her the first drag queen ever elected to public office in the U.S. She’s twice run against Schiff in primaries, losing out on challenging him for the CA-28 seat in 2020 by fewer than 1,200 votes, and made it to the 2022 general election against Schiff, where she lost handily.

“It’s a crowded field, with some veteran politicians as well as some notables — Ben Savage, Maebe [A. Girl] — slowly building out their own constituencies,” Sadhwani said, adding that Girl’s growing profile, owing to her repeated contests against Schiff, might help.

Porter's district: Baugh uses GOP playbook, Min works to make up for legal problems

Unlike the districts represented by Lee and Schiff, Porter’s 47th District is only D+3 on the Cook index, just this side of a toss-up.

In last year's midterms, Porter won against Republican candidate Scott Baugh by a 3.4% voting margin. That’s not a small margin on this scale, but with her departure, the National Republican Congressional Committee — a body that raises and spends money to support Republican House candidates — named California’s 47th District as a key target for the 2024 election.

”This is going to be a highly competitive race, presumably between a Democrat and a Republican," Sadhwani said. 

Baugh, the most likely Republican challenger in the race, was a member of the California Assembly from 1995 to 2000, and the body’s Republican leader in his final year on the job. 

Baugh is leaning heavily into current Republican culture war talking points. Over the weekend, a video emerged of a speech in which he said that “wokeism” is more threatening to America than the Civil War, both World Wars and the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center.

“We survived civil wars, World War II, World War I, a lot of wars — 9/11. None of those were that threatening to our country, compared to the war that we’re fighting now: that war is about wokeism, and the lack of common sense,” Baugh said before the International Christian Ambassadors Association in June.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the candidate said that Baugh was only referring to the threat that "wokeism" poses to organized religion, adding: "The loss of life in any traditional war is tragic and should be honored and respected."

A spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the NRCC's Democratic counterpart, said that the Republican candidate's "disgusting culture war nonsense has gone too far."

"Service members and veterans deserve better than this offensive propagandist, and so does California’s 47th District," said DCCC spokesperson Dan Gottlieb.

Sadhwani suggested that tact may not pay off for Baugh.

“No doubt, in a presidential election year where a whole lot is on the line … a lot will be streaming down from people’s thoughts about the optics at the national level,” she said. “And one of the things we’ve seen in orange county in the last several election cycles is a push back against Trump and the MAGA Trump playbook.”

Porter has already endorsed a potential successor in this race: State Senator Dave Min, whose California legislative district overlaps with the 47th Congressional District.

But a recent arrest may complicate Min’s calculus for the seat. On Aug. 30, Min was sentenced to three years probation after pleading no contest to a misdemeanor DUI charge stemming from a May arrest in Sacramento. Though a poll released by Min's campaign appears to show that it may not have much of an impact on the race.

In a Facebook post released immediately after he was discharged from jail, Min apologized for the incident. Weeks later, he added a follow-up describing his recovery process. While other Democrats have expressed concerns, only Rep. Harley Rouda — who was in competition for the 47th before dropping out due to an injury — has publicly called for Min to leave the race.

Amid his call for Min to step away, Rouda endorsed Joanna Weiss, an attorney and founder of a progressive voter education group. As of the most recent FEC data, Weiss trails Min in fundraising by less than $100,000.

The demographics of the community may end up paying off in Min’s electoral favor. Census data reports that Asian residents make up about 25% of the 47th Congressional District. Sadhwani’s own research suggests that Asian American voter turnout bumps up when an Asian candidate is on the ballot, lending a boost to that candidate.

“We see this in a number of minoritized groups — not just 'we want one of our own,' but that an Asian American candidate can speak to voters and identify in a very authentic way with the experiences they have faced,” Sadhwani said. “In a survey of Indian Americans, when asked if they would like to see more Indian Americans in office, 60 peercent would vote for an Indian American regardless of party identification, which speaks volumes to the third of Asian American voters who identify was independents. What will swing them one way or another is trust in an candidate who really understands them.”

NOTE: This article has been updated to reflect additional details.