Career Democrats are facing a problem.
They may be good at raising cash—but they’re not putting that money where their mouth is, according to congressional candidate Saikat Chakrabarti.
He believes there are Democrats who are “doing stuff” and those who are “doing nothing.”
“I think what we’ve got is a Democratic establishment and a leadership right now that finds security in doing as little as possible,” he said in an interview with Daily Kos.
“Their approach to Trump has been, ‘Let’s do as little as possible and win off the backlash.’”
As for House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, who has represented her San Francisco district for 38 years, Chakrabarti and a growing amount of supporters believe she has fallen into the “doing nothing” category.
And her lack of action has earned the 85-year-old a feisty challenger.
The 39-year-old Chakrabarti said that he wouldn’t call himself a “spring chicken” and he definitely isn’t the new guy on the block.
The former tech bro hopped on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016 as a “lowly programmer” who had already struck gold from a previous role at Stripe, the multibillion dollar payment system.
Soon after, he co-founded the political action committee Justice Democrats and helped boost progressive darlings Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the spotlight and, ultimately, to seats in Congress. He went on to serve as AOC’s chief of staff.
Now he’s coming out from behind the scenes and throwing his hat into the ring.
Chakrabarti talked with Daily Kos at his San Francisco campaign office about his congressional bid ahead of the 2026 primaries.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Daily Kos: I’m here with Saikat Chakrabarti, who is running for Congress against Nancy Pelosi. And you’re not new to the scene here. You’ve been around for a while. You were the guy who really brought Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the scene, and now you’re running for Congress. Why now?
Saikat Chakrabarti: Yeah, and I would say I wasn’t the guy. It was a team effort. A bunch of us worked on that. But yeah, I worked on Justice Democrats. I helped start that group after I worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 and I was recruiting a bunch of people to run for Congress at the time, with the idea being we should actually have people running who aren’t bought out by the corporations, who have grassroots energy and who would be running on an actual plan to make life better for people.
Our thesis, really, with Justice Democrats, was, if the Democrats don’t have a real way to improve people’s material conditions, we might defeat the fascists once, but then they’re going to come back. I didn’t think it’d be Trump, exactly, but we thought somebody was going to come back in 2024, and that’s basically what happened, right? Like Trump just won again. And I’d say he won largely because he was running on sort of this message of economic change and a bunch of hateful stuff. But I think that was a big reason, the big thing that got him to win.
And then I saw the Democrats’ reaction to it, and it did not inspire much confidence. I don’t think they’re taking this moment seriously. I think we are living in the middle of an authoritarian coup, and the Democrats seem sort of satisfied to be treating this as politics as usual.
They’re kind of acting like we’ll just wait for the backlash of Trump to build up, and then we’ll run off of that backlash and we’ll win in the next election cycle. And I just couldn’t stand that, you know, I just got madder and madder watching their sort of positioning and the way they’re responding to Trump.
And then I heard Nancy Pelosi in an interview soon after Trump won the second time, and she was asked straight up, like, “What did the Democrats do wrong? How could they change?”
And her answer was nothing. She was like, “We did our best. Sometimes it goes their way, sometimes it goes our way.”
And I feel like that sort of helplessness just can’t be what our message is going forward.
We need to actually have a plan to dramatically improve people’s lives. That’s the only way we’re going to defeat authoritarianism for good in this country. That’s how FDR did it when we had rising authoritarianism in the ‘30s. You know, he built a whole new economy in society. That proved democracy can work. So I decided to jump in the race, because this is what I’ve been working on for 10 years. And I feel like if I’m gonna be calling on people to run around the country with me, I should be willing to put my skin in the game.
You’ve talked about this before: Nancy Pelosi has been in Congress almost as long as you’ve been alive.
Yeah, I think she got elected in 1987. So, I was 1 back then. I’m 39 now, I have a 6-year-old kid, so I’m no spring chicken.
You guys did an internal poll in regards to this race, and 51% said they supported her previously, but it was “time for a change.” And 84% agreed that we need new Democratic leaders. That speaks pretty loudly. But what did you really take away from this poll?
Well, from the start of this campaign, we knew the only way this would be possible was if we were in this moment of a deep appetite for change, and there’s sort of this bet that that’s where we’re at.
When I ran AOC’s race in 2018 it was a similar moment. Trump had just won. Democrats were really upset at their own party, and they’re looking for candidates who had some real vision of what comes next. That was really why AOC could win, because she was the right candidate with the right message in the right moment.
And when I look at the moment right now, I felt like it was dwarfing what the sort of appetite for change I saw back in 2018, and that’s what I was seeing when I was knocking on doors. That’s what I see on these voter calls I do every day. And this poll really bore that out. And the other piece of this poll is it showed that right now, if you test Nancy Pelosi versus myself in a head-to-head matchup, we’re down 13. But if you tell people just my bio, just what I’ve done, and we tell people a positive bio about Nancy Pelosi—we say, you know, she won the Medal of Freedom, she’s one of the greatest speakers of all time—our campaign ends up winning by 6 points.
So that really proves the theory of the campaign, which is, if we just do the work of getting our message in front of every voter in San Francisco, we’re gonna win this race.
You have a rally on Oct. 8? At the same time as Pelosi’s dinner?
It’s right after. So, Pelosi is doing a lunch on Oct. 3, where you can pay $50,000. I think there’s a cheap, discounted price for $500 per plate. We’re doing a rally on Oct. 8, completely free. Anybody can show up. We’ve got over 300 people signed up so far. And that’s really what this campaign is. Because ultimately, you know, I think the Democratic Party establishment, they believe political power comes through money, right? It comes through fundraising. And that’s ultimately why the Democrats in power right now, they can never give up the donor class, right?
If you’re going to challenge that and you want to show the proof of a new kind of politics, it has to be people-driven. It has to be people knocking on doors, volunteers coming out, mass rallies, a mass movement style of politics that I think can win races like this. And I think I can win nationally.
I really do think that’s sort of the model that people like Bernie and AOC are proving out. And I think that’s going to be the real challenge within the Democratic Party over the next several years is, “Which politics are we going to choose?”
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Are we going to choose the politics of a donor class-driven Democratic Party that can’t actually move on issues, and is sclerotic on how we actually react to fascism? But, also, it’s keeping us from fully embracing the kind of very popular issues that the country wants: banning congressional stock trading, banning the revolving door between Congress and lobbying industry, universal health care, universal child care, tuition, free public colleges, building millions of units of affordable housing, a wealth tax on billionaires and centimillionaires. These are all issues that actually poll at like 70-80%, but Democrats won’t embrace them because of the donor class. So I’m saying we need to have a politics and a Democratic Party that is full of people who will reject the donor class, run on the stuff that’s actually popular, build a mass movement, and win that way. And I think we can do it.
If you were elected to Congress, you yourself would probably be one of the wealthiest people to join, and there is a bit of a bad taste that the public has in their mouth when it comes to the wealthier class. So what is it that sets you apart from the people who look down on the bad billionaires and bad millionaires?
Yeah, when that article came out, I think I tweeted: “Oh, I’ve been exposed as a class traitor.”
The way I ended up making money was that I was an early employee at a company called Stripe, and I basically won the lottery. Which was crazy, because I grew up middle class. I mean, my parents grew up extremely poor. My dad grew up as essentially a refugee in post-partition India, and I grew up going to public schools.
And I never thought I’d make a bunch of money, but I ended up working just in the right place at the right time. And yeah, I worked hard, but I worked hard for a few years, and I ended up hitting the lottery and making a bunch of money, whereas, you know, at the same time, you’ve got nurses and teachers and firefighters and police work, people who are actually running the city every day, who work way harder than I ever did.
And most of them are never going to afford a home in the city. They’re not going to be able to afford a secure retirement. And I think an economy that’s set up like this is absolutely batshit crazy. I really do. I think if we keep doing this, where we’re just squeezing the middle class out and having all the money go to this top, tiny group of people, while most people can’t afford just the bare essentials, that will lead to America’s demise.
I’m not trying to be overly dramatic. I really think that’s how countries fail, and that’s why, because I went through that experience, I spent the last 10 years working on progressive politics.
I think the system is completely rigged against working people, and has to change.
You have been a very progressive guy for a long time. And we’re at a time where we have an administration saying that these people on the left, these far-left progressives are violent, they’re terrorists. You’re trying to come into Congress staying true to these policies. How do you feel about going up against that kind of rhetoric?
You have to call the rhetoric for what it is. Right? They are absolutely using this rhetoric as just a way to crush any dissent to this authoritarian government. They’re starting by attacking trans people, by attacking undocumented immigrants. They’re building up a paramilitary police force, and they’re just doing the normal authoritarian playbook that people like Erdoğan in Turkey and Orbán in Hungary have done to completely crush all their opposition. So, of course, they’re going to do that.
But ultimately, I am progressive, but I actually don’t run on that label. You know, what I talk about are what policies I’m running on, because it is popular.
I think that’s really the big strength we have going our way, is the stuff I’m talking about. At the end of the day, it’s all very popular, and it’s popular because most Americans in this country, for decades now, have been seeing their wages completely flatten, while the cost of health care, child care, housing, and education has been skyrocketing.
These are the essentials. This is how you build a life. And if that trend doesn’t reverse, I think we are going to keep seeing the pendulum swinging left and right, and usually it’s going to go farther right every time, and authoritarians are going to win.
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So, we have to actually stop the authoritarianism that’s right in front of us. And I think that happens by going at it head on, by trying to keep them from making the abnormal normal, which is what they do, and that’s a daily fight, right? That’s calling out all the abuses they’re doing and sticking to it. But after we do that, we have to actually deliver a better life for people. That’s the only way we’re going to defeat this.
On that note, like you’ve previously said, “We need to tack to the hypothetical middle.”
You’ve also said, more recently, “Our Democratic Party leaders are unfit to lead in this world as it is today.” You’ve been pretty strong for years now on these unproductive, more moderate Democrats. Do you feel like there’s going to be an opposition if you were in Congress going up against that?
It’s not just the moderate Democrats. Because, you know, whenever we talk about as progressive versus moderate, it makes it sound like there’s these policies where we disagree.
I really think it’s “doing stuff” versus “doing nothing” Democrats. I think what we’ve got is a Democratic establishment and a leadership right now that finds security in doing as little as possible. That’s what we’re seeing right now. Their approach to Trump has been, “Let’s do as little as possible and win off the backlash.”
And my approach would be, we actually have to do something, right? The stuff I’m calling to do is popular, right? Therefore, the stuff I’m calling to do is, just by definition, is centrist if it’s popular.
If most people support it, that’s what most people want. That’s the center position.
But I do think that the current leadership we have, they’re completely ill-equipped to deal with the kind of politics that Republicans are doing right now, and they’re not interested in coming up with how we actually fundamentally change the system.
And part of that comes from, I think, a lack of imagination, but part of it comes from, you know, they are ultimately beholden to a donor and corporate class that doesn’t want the system to change. They’re doing well in the system.
You were part of the Green New Deal as well. That’s been used as a boogeyman for the GOP. I think it was even [EPA chief] Lee Zeldin who used the term, we’re going to “drive a dagger” through the heart of the Green New Deal, which doesn’t exist currently, right? So it’s funny for them to say that. But is that something that you would want to revive and push forward today?
Well, I’d say the thing I’ve been working on for the last five years is a plan we’ve been calling the Mission for America, which is basically a Green New Deal with the details filled in.
I wouldn’t say this is a campaign strategy, but it’s a very detailed policy proposal and a political strategy. It’s kind of like our version of Project 2025 if Democrats win. We have this chance to actually not just solve climate change, but actually build up wealth for the vast majority of Americans, build the factories and the highways jobs that a lot of people who voted for Trump thought they were going to be getting with him.
How do we do that? So that’s really what I’ve been focusing on. And I think, ultimately, the only way we win this is going to be not just expanding the social safety net, but building back people’s means of making a living. And I think that’s what’s been decimated.
You know, if you look at the de-industrialized Midwest, it’s gone from this place where people used to be able to graduate high school and get, like, a $50 an hour job at Ford, and that’s all gotten replaced with minimum wage work at Walmart.
Of course, people are angry.
And of course, when they hear someone like Trump show up and say, you know, the politician shipped away your means of making a living to China, and that he’s going to bring it back, people are going to say, “Okay, let’s try that out.”
But Trump’s going to fail at that. In fact, he’s destroying manufacturing jobs right now. So how are Democrats gonna respond? What’s our version of actually building up wealth? And I think that is right now. You know, when I talk about the Green New Deal or the Mission for America, it’s not just about climate change. It’s the fact that we have a $100 trillion global green transition happening with or without us.
And right now, we’re just saying, “Let China have all the wealth. Let Europe have all the wealth. We’re gonna be Kodak while the digital camera revolution is happening.” That’s kind of what this is like. I don’t want to live in a country that’s getting left behind.
I am curious. You spent a lot of time with Bernie, with AOC. Did they have any reaction to you announcing that you were running?
Not publicly, no. I mean, I think even for them, like, it’s difficult. I’m going up against Nancy Pelosi, right? And Bernie’s friends with Nancy Pelosi.
And I get it.
This is a race where I think my job is to make the race competitive and to actually build up traction and show I’ve got grassroots momentum. And before I go to someone like Bernie or AOC and say, “Hey, do you want to get involved?”
They’re busy also. I mean, they’re trying to do their Fighting Oligarchy tour, and I’d say they’re being successful as some of the only Democrats actually showing some fight right now.
Is there anything that I haven’t brought up that you want to talk about?
Well, I will say at the end of the day, something I’m really trying to talk about with this campaign is how the issues we face in San Francisco are not problems San Francisco created on its own.
They really are downstream from the fact that we’ve just been ignoring these big structural issues nationally for decades. If you look at health care, it’s one of the major reasons our city budget keeps exploding. The city of San Francisco is not gonna be able to solve that, right?
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We have to solve that at the national level. Otherwise, the only answer San Francisco has is that we just gotta keep cutting services. And that’s happening not just in San Francisco, but in cities all across the country.
We can’t just retreat into our cities, into our states and hope for safety and hope for freedom. We actually have to solve it nationally. Otherwise, these problems are coming for all of us. And the problems that San Francisco faces, you see them everywhere. Whether it’s homelessness, cost of living—it’s really bad in San Francisco because of how bad our inequality is—but you see versions of it in every city across the country. So I really do think that to solve these problems for San Francisco, we have to solve them for the whole country.
