  The DAMPE experiment has recently reported strong indications for the
existence of an excess of high-energy electrons and positrons. If interpreted
in terms of the annihilation of dark matter, the DAMPE result restricts the
dark matter mass and possible annihilation channels to a few case. In this
paper we explain the DAMPE result with the electron-flavored $Z^\prime$-portal
fermionic dark matter. We show that the Dirac dark matter scenario is promising
to explain the excess via the process $\bar \chi \chi \to\mathbf{Z}'\to \bar e
e$. The reduced annihilation cross section is limited in a range of
$10^{-26}\sim 10^{-24}~{\rm cm^3 s^{-1}}$ to interpret the excess.
