Connie Chan has taken a commanding lead over her opponent, Saikat Chakrabarti, to grab the No. 2 spot and advance in San Francisco’s congressional contest. Only the top-two candidates will advance to November’s general election to succeed Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
Sen. Scott Wiener, as expected, is leading the pack at 42.7 percent as of 9:45 p.m. election results. But the contest to watch was Chan vs. Chakrabarti — and the District 1 supervisor pulled out on top: She led the centimillionaire 28.2 percent to 14 percent, a tad over double.
“San Franciscans! How does it feel to beat $10 million?!” Chan said to a thronging crowd of over 100 people gathered at El Rio in the Mission District. Chakrabarti, her rival, spent about $10 million of his own money on his campaign.
Chan then all but declared victory.
“This, this tonight, is a start for many, many people to see the billionaires, all not just in San Francisco, but across the nation. We’re coming for you,” Chan said. And, she added, “We will win on November 3rd!”
“Yes we Chan!” the crowd returned.
If Chan advances and sizable portions of Chakrabarti’s base flock to her as the progressive standard-bearer, strategists said she would be very competitive.
David Ho, who ran an independent expenditure committee backing Chan, expressed optimism: “If you add up Saikat’s votes and Connie’s it might be more than Scott’s at the end of the day, and I think this will grow,” he said.
Chakrabarti continued his crusade at his election night party.
When he first started his campaign, he said, “it was just a couple of us who had the crazy idea of challenging Nancy Pelosi. Who does that?” The crowd at the Chapel on Valencia Street cheered loudly.
“We need a new generation of candidates powered by people and go to D.C. and not just fight Trump but build a society that works for everybody, not just the richest few.”
The low number of votes received, he said, were “expected,” and his team will continue monitoring the results.
Wiener, for his part, stood before his own crowd on election night and said simply: “We’re going to Washington.”
Chan, he said, is “best known for what she opposed,” but San Francisco voters want a “forward-thinking vision.”
As he finished his speech, the crowd broke into chants of “Scott, Scott, Scott!”
Chakrabarti turned the race into a broader challenge to the Democratic establishment and, as a Bernie Sanders veteran and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff, embraced national progressive issues.
He ran an insurgent campaign and was likened by his supporters to New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani — “We can let a thousand Zohrans bloom” was a Mao-infused slogan at Chakrabarti’s May rally. Younger voters saw hope in Chakrabaiti.
Younger voters, however, didn’t show up to vote. And San Francisco doesn’t have a good track record of electing insurgent candidates like New York; its contributions to higher-level politics are typically establishment figures like Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom and former senator, vice president and presidential also-ran Kamala Harris.
And Chan, a homegrown politico who has served years on the Board of Supervisors — and in mid-May was endorsed by Pelosi as her hand-picked successor — had a far longer track record within city limits.
Chan consolidated the city’s progressive political coalition and was neck-and-neck in the polls with Chakrabarti for several weeks, despite a lack of funds: Her own campaign raised less than $1 million, while Chakrabarti poured some $10 million of his own funds — he is worth more than $100 million from his early days at Stripe.
Chakrabarti hired some of the same personnel as prior major citywide campaigns, and ran one of the biggest field operations in the city’s history, with more than 200 paid canvassers paid up to $45 an hour.
But his lack of ties to local political circles was hard to make up. His two rivals each took away the moderate and progressive side of endorsements.
Chakrabarti was never an elected official in San Francisco and ran his campaign to replace Pelosi before the latter announced retirement. He found himself struggling in a city where every aspiring politico is either on Team Pelosi or wants to join Team Pelosi.
The attacks on his scant record in San Francisco — mostly from Wiener supporters — effectively set a narrative early on that he was a carpetbagger. The messaging was so effective that, in the final days leading to June 2, Chakrabarti ran an ad featuring his family sitting at a city park to prove his local connection.
Neither Wiener nor Chan would ever need to do that.
Chan and Chakrabarti long avoided directly attacking each other — both targeted Wiener instead — because poll numbers suggest that whoever advances in June will need to win over all or most of the other’s supporters to ultimately beat Wiener in November.
But both started attacking each other fiercely in the last two weeks, seemingly to Wiener’s favor.
“The way [the fighting] played out in this last election cycle is really ugly,” said Wendy Aragon, a longtime organizer and Chan supporter. What, she asked, will Chakrabarti “do to repair it?”
Additional reporting by Io Yeh Gilman and Eleni Balakrishnan.
