Congressional candidate Saikat Chakrabarti is an outsider to San Francisco politics who has not been welcomed by the city’s political establishment, progressives and moderates alike.
But instead of seeking their vote of confidence, he’s bringing other outsiders in.
On Thursday evening, Chakrabarti’s “Change the Party” rally drew many hundreds of attendees who packed City Nights, a nightclub in SoMa, to the brim. Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” blasted from the speakers while attendees waved “Fight Trump” and “Lower costs” signs in the air.
Jamaal Bowman, former representative for New York’s 16th District, flew in for the event, as did Darializa Avila Chevalier, Angela Gonzales-Torres, and Melat Kiros, who are running for seats in the House of Representatives for New York City, Los Angeles and Denver, respectively.
“We have to completely change the direction of leadership of the Democratic party. We need a Democratic party that knows how to fight to stop authoritarian rule,” said Chakrabarti.
But the biggest draw, and most controversial aspect, of the night was ostensibly not Chakrabarti, but Hasan Piker, a popular left-wing commentator who has over three million followers on Twitch, and according to Wired, streams for seven to eight hours a day. When Mission Local waited to speak with Chakrabarti before the rally, the candidate was backstage, in the middle of streaming with Piker.
At the rally, Piker’s comments echoed Chakrabarti’s. “We deserve a better party that will put your interests first,” he said. He likened Chakrabarti to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who was elected mayor of New York City last year, and reappropriated a popular Maoist slogan: “We can let a thousand Zohrans bloom,” Piker said.
Chakrabarti, both as a candidate and in his previous role as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, has positioned himself as a combative foil for mainstream Democrats. While his campaign is staunchly anti-Trump, he has taken particular aim at the Democratic Party and what he calls its failure to stop Trump’s authoritarianism.
“We ruffled some feathers with the Democratic establishment,” said Chakrabarti to the roaring crowd. “And I’m glad we did.”
Unlike his opponents, State Senator Scott Wiener and Supervisor Connie Chan, Chakrabarti has not held office in San Francisco and, before putting his hat in the ring and spending $4.8 million on his own campaign, had little name recognition here.
When asked how he plans to build trust with voters who may not know him, Chakrabarti said he is focused on getting as much face time with voters as possible.
“I’m not part of the local political establishment,” Chakrabarti said. “The way that we’ve been running this campaign from the start is to be as physically available as possible. We’ve done more public events, more direct voter contact, more conversations with real people in San Francisco than any of my opponents — I think all my opponents combined at this point.”
The centimillionaire former Stripe engineer, who is likely worth more than $100 million and has paid out gobs to hire an army of door-knockers to get his name out, is also turning to social media and its influencers: On Thursday night, Chakrabarti took interviews with both members of the press and members of what his campaign dubbed “new media,” content creators and internet personalities with millions in combined followers.
The content creators filed in line waiting to speak to Chakrabarti backstage to get a few dedicated minutes with the candidate.
But Piker is the most popular (he is sometimes stylized the “Joe Rogan of the Left”) and has subsequently drawn the most ire from moderate Democrats here. Supervisor Matt Dorsey authored a resolution the same day as the rally asking the San Francisco Democratic Party to condemn Piker and reject any attempt to “change” the Democratic Party to align with Piker’s views.
Dorsey has taken issue with Piker’s outspoken criticism of Israel — Dorsey is, in his own words, a “self-proclaimed Zionist” — and Piker’s comments saying that “Americans deserved 9/11,” plus a bizarre rant in which the streamer called a Vietnamese refugee a “fucking idiotic old lady” for opposing communism and supporting President Donald Trump.
Dorsey and others have sought to paint the online tirade as anti-Asian, though Piker has said that “while my sentiment is vulgar,” his statements have been taken out of context — he is streaming for much of the day, after all.
And on Thursday, no one in the hot and crowded room seemed to pay much attention to Dorsey’s flogging. The crowd was more focused on stump chants like “Abolish ICE,” “Tax the Rich” and “Medicare for All.” While flyers posted around the city had advertised a planned counter-protest outside the rally, no one showed up.
“There’s a lot of people who didn’t want me to be here today from the San Francisco Democratic Party, from numerous astroturf organizations that put fliers all around San Francisco,” Piker said on stage. But, he added, “not a single person showed up to protest. They have the money and interest, but we have the people.”