Saikat Chakrabarti, who aims to unseat 20-term incumbent Rep. Nancy Pelosi in 2026, kicked off his campaign Wednesday night in San Francisco’s Mission District before a hundreds-strong crowd.
The theme for the night? The Democratic Party has failed to confront Trump, and “transformational change” is needed to right fundamental wrongs in the U.S. economy.
“It is clear as daylight: We are living in the middle of a fascist coup,” Chakrabarti told a crowd of many hundreds packed into The Chapel at 777 Valencia St.
But, he said, it would not be enough to “return to a pre-Trump status quo.” Democrats, Chakrabarti said, should reshape the economy that “made Donald Trump possible” in a radical way.
Chakrabarti, a 39-year-old former tech worker and multi-millionaire, is best known as the former chief of staff to New York City Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who drew national attention after defeating 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in 2018.
Chakrabarti aspires to chart a similar path. He’s back in the city where he spent most of his adult life, hoping that the frustration built up since last year’s presidential election can help him defeat Speaker Emeritus Pelosi, 85, who would be running for her 21st term in California’s 11th Congressional District.
She’s proven a tough challenge. In November 2024, Pelosi won reelection with 81 percent of the vote.
Sen. Scot Wiener, who has filed paperwork to run for the same seat in 2028, has also left open the possibility that he will run in 2026, but only if Pelosi withdraws.
Though Chakrabarti’s campaign is widely viewed as a long shot, a recent internal poll released by the campaign suggests it may not be futile. Among the 600 voters polled, 51 percent said they once supported Pelosi but now think it’s time for a change.
“I know this is not just about me,” Chakrabarti told more than 600 people cramped into the concert venue (more than 1,100 RSVPed online). “This is about an overwhelming demand for change right now.”
It was a raucous opening party for a man who remains an outsider in San Francisco politics. More than eight months before the June CA-11 primary, he was still unsure how to pronounce his Chinese name, which is printed on every campaign logo.
For many in the mostly 20s and 30s crowd, Pelosi has always been their representative, and seniority carries a negative connotation. They erupted in waves of cheers and screams whenever Chakrabarti mentioned Ocasio-Cortez or New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
Leftist helped unseat a democratic socialist
Chakrabarti gained national prominence as the campaign manager and chief of staff of Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman who openly identifies as a democratic socialist. The Democratic Socialists of America have been a major factor in Mamdani’s rise in New York City, and are a pillar of Ocasio-Cortez’s support.
In San Francisco, however, Chakrabarti has a problem: He has alienated some natural allies by supporting Bilal Mahmood last year in his successful bid to oust Dean Preston, who was then the lone democratic socialist on the Board of Supervisors.
Shanti Singh, former co-chair of San Francisco’s Democratic Socialists of America, said, “I don’t know if he wants the DSA [SF] endorsement. He seems to not be interested in that right now.”
“I actually like both Bilal and Dean in that election,” Chakrabarti countered in an interview, repeating his original response to the controversy.
“But Bilal really had done a lot of work and a lot of research on how to make it easier and cheaper to build housing in the city … We have a real housing crisis here, and that’s why ultimately I supported him,” he said.
In the November 2024 election, Chakrabarti donated $500 to Mahmood’s supervisorial campaign, and another $500 to Michael Lai, the more moderate-leaning candidate in District 11. Earlier last year, he donated $10,000 to Mahmood’s campaign for a seat on the county Democratic Party.
His endorsement of Mahmood dates back to 2021, during Mahmood’s unsuccessful campaign for the state Assembly, when Chakrabarti praised him as arriving “without existing political baggage,” open to radical ideas and backed by a detailed action plan.
Asked how he plans to build a voter base, given his role in helping unseat a democratic socialist, Chakrabarti said he began his campaign assuming that his base would be young people or progressives.
But during doorknocking, he found that “the voter base is much larger” than expected; seniors, residents in “more moderate or conservative parts of the city” and even some Republicans have expressed support.
And, he appears to be reaching out to socialists in San Francisco: Last month, he was at the campaign kickoff for Frank Lara, a teachers’ union vice president who is running for state superintendent, speaking to the head of the union and watching over a crowd of committed leftists.
Policy platform
Like Ocasio-Cortez, often described as “one of Israel’s sharpest critics in Congress,” Chakrabarti is a vocal critic of what he called the “genocide in Gaza.”
“If I am elected, I will vote to end all military funding to Israel,” he said.
Among other priorities, Chakrabarti supports guaranteeing health care for all, making public colleges and trade schools tuition-free, taxing billionaires, banning the revolving door between Congress and the lobbying industry, prohibiting Congress members from trading stocks, and turning PG&E into a public utility to lower people’s utility bills.
He worked on a Justice Democrats platform — a group he co-founded — that included abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a goal. At last night’s rally, he decried ICE agents “zip-tying kids as if they’re prisoners of war.”
As a key figure in pushing the Green New Deal — he said his task under Ocasio-Cortez was leading the legislative effort — Chakrabarti frames climate change not only as a crisis, but as “the greatest opportunity in our lifetime to build a new, clean, high-wage economy and reverse decades of economic devastation.”
“Even though everything I just said is overwhelmingly popular, Nancy Pelosi doesn’t support any of it,” said Chakrabarti. He characterized himself and Pelosi as “the transformational change” versus “the status quo.”
Chakrabarti also advocates “building millions of units of affordable housing and social housing,” and he’s a staunch supporter of California’s high-speed rail project. It’s a test of, “Can your country do something right?” he said. “We have to use it as this opportunity to actually do that kind of planning again in this country.”
Becoming centi-millionaire a ‘radicalizing’ experience
Born in Texas to Indian immigrant parents, Chakrabarti moved to San Francisco in 2009, shortly after graduating from Harvard with a degree in computer science.
He then had a successful stint in tech, worked at top hedge fund Bridgewater and several startups, and became a founding engineer of digital payment company Stripe. His net worth has been pegged at nearly $200 million, exceeding Pelosi, and he has pledged to self-fund.
“I ended up making a lot of money, and that was a profoundly weird and radicalizing experience,” he said at the rally. He worked hard, he said, but “I did not work harder than my teacher or a nurse or the people cleaning our offices.”
“I just won the startup lottery,” he said.
After some high-profile years on the national stage, Chakrabarti moved back to San Francisco in 2021 to lead the policy think tank New Consensus.
Now Chakrabarti drew a distinction between tech workers versus VCs and the tech-owner class.
Most people working in tech, he said, “are absolutely disgusted by what they’re seeing people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel or David Sachs and those folks doing,” which he called “pure opportunism.”
An audience member asked Chakrabarti whether he had spoken with Mayor Daniel Lurie yet. He had not. Mission Local could not identify any San Francisco politicians in the crowd Wednesday.
“When you run against Nancy Pelosi,” he said, “there are not too many politicians that want to talk to you.”
No more rich people please
So you hate success and prosperity? And love failure and poverty?
That’s your American Dream?
A progressive challenge to Pelosi is welcome, but I don’t know if Chakrabarti is the person to do it. A poor relationship with the DSA while claiming much of their ethos is an awkward position to be in. He’s saying some of the right things, but my Fetterman-radar is blaring.
He is a carpet bagger.
How is this a “campaign launch”? He’s been running for months, including fundraising and tabling at a bunch of events I’ve been at.
I’m incredibly skeptical of this guy, but would probably support him as the only left challenger to Pelosi or, ew even worse, Scott Weiner. But I’m not sure he’d keep his promises. I get big time faux-gressive vibes from this dude. The support of Bilal over Dean Preston is a pretty huge dealbreaker, and doesn’t make a lot of sense for someone who claims to be a progressive.
That’s just it. Why would he support a proven Democratic Socialist over a lying, billionaire-backed YIMBY like Mahmood?
Preston had really bad PR. Simple as that.
Slogans galore, back to write-in candidate for me.
Hedge fund, Harvard and YIMBY? Hard pass.
Great idea! Let’s replace the most effective Democratic member of Congress with some novice tech bro! That will help with the resistance to Trump!
(That’s sarcasm, by the way. It’s actually a terrible idea, and I know I have to explicitly spell that out for progressives if I want them to understand it.)
Pseudo-leftists claim that they are key to transformation, but mark my words: all they have ever been good for is to lead left-leaning voters into a bag from which there is no way out.
For those willing to dig deeper into the facts the evidence is irrefutable.
With President Trump poised to invoke the Insurrection Act and attack all of his political opponents, a fascist dictatorship is coming to America.
A united working class is inordinately more powerful than the dark forces leading us all toward World War Three. It needs to unite on the basis of its shared class interests and with its class brothers and sisters across all artificial borders.
Pseudo-leftist politicians strive to ensure having a seat for themselves among other capitalists. They divide the working class and sap its strength.
Genuine socialists fearlessly and reverently invoke the names of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky.
Does Saikat Chakrabarti do that?
Historically, democratic socialists are a world apart from socialists. Not that it matters, I’m not under the impression like Chakrabarti has ever put in a full day’s worth of honest work anyway.
Here’s the part where somebody winds em up with a basic question about Trotsky vs Lenin vs Stalin vs god knows what *sheviks and watch the mouth RUN.
21st century here, lots of other writers to discuss that won’t terrify anyone who lived in Ussr/china/cambodia/vietnam in the 20th century among many other places.
You ever talk to an immigrant from these places about Lenin and shit? What did they say?
I was there. In fact the picture of “an attendee grabs a “Saikat for SF” sign” is my arm/hand.
I noticed that when you are quoting him, unless I misremembered, I see you are changing the words ever so slightly. For example, I know he said “fascist” but I don’t remember him saying “fascist coup.” I also don’t remember him saying “pre-Trump status quo” but I do remember making it clear that he does not want to return to that era. I believe he also said end funding Israeli “weapons” not Israeli “military.”
otherwise I think this is a fabulous article, summarizing the night/speech very well.
It’s interesting that he helped AOC get into office but it’s also interesting that Pelosi appears to have been the reason AOC cut ties with him after he wrote some tweets attacking centrist democrats. Is he just overly emotional about not cooperating with fascist even if it means alienating centrist or is he falling victim to the tech bro/ rich people are correct even if they try to appear humble in public. the fallacy of thinking that since others cannot understand their skills with IT, they must be smarter than people who have other skills that are not as valued by the current society. perhaps he is better assisting others to be in elected positions by being a bridge to tech, funding and AI but is not himself the best to be an effective politician?
It remains galling to me that he supported Bilal over Dean, and continues to defend this position. Dean was not just any progressive, he was at the forefront of pushing for universal tenant protections, social housing, and taxing the wealthy. Bilal has been little more than a rubber stamp for the Mayor’s agenda. While I may still end up voting for Saikat over Pelosi or Wiener, I’m deeply skeptical of his politics and level of understanding of the local landscape.
He has no chance of winning of course. So why not have a little fun with this? After all he doesn’t ever need to work again and so will be fine either way.
Of course he has a chance.
Scott Wiener certainly doesn’t need to work either and people loathe him.
Scott Wiener hasn’t worked in years.
I have an idea for you guys and your campaign – t-shirts that read
I AM NO LONGER A NANCY BOY. I would buy several.
—anthony.
Campers,
He’s a phony baloney of the Devil in disguise.
Wiener is the Devil without a disguise.
Let’s see if Matt Gonzalez is still interested in the seat ?
Niners are proof of the genius of John Lynch and Shanahan’s deep bench !
h.
A first-rate snake oil salesman. He is Mr.Haney writ large trying to code his way to office. Go pedal your goods in San Jose and leave Nancy alone. She has done more for SF than anyone on the history of SF politics.