Nancy Pelosi’s Challenger Saikat Chakrabarti
Progressive Candidate Makes Case for Congressional Seat
Editor’s Note:The opinions of its authors and reporters are their own, not the Westside Observer.
• • • • • May 2025 • • • • •
Saikat Chakrabarti formally debuted at Manny’s as Nancy Pelosi’s 2026 challenger for the District 11 congressional seat. In a one-hour interview conducted by KQED senior editor Scott Shafer, Chakrabarti laid out the foundation of his approach to politics and some of his legislative goals should he unseat Rep. Pelosi two Novembers from now.
For those familiar with the last decade of progressive politics, Saikat Chakrabarti is a familiar name and face – a Texan-born child of hard-working immigrants, he graduated from Harvard with a degree in computer science (before it was cool!) and made his fortune at various Silicon Valley tech start-ups (when Silicon Valley was still cool!) like Stripe. Chakrabarti left the Valley in 2015 to join Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.
He later went on to become one of the co-founders of Justice Democrats, a grassroots organization committed to finding, promoting, and electing young progressive congressional candidates. It was through this organization that he met and campaigned with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, becoming her campaign chair, then chief-of-staff; he worked with her until 2019, collaborating with her team to write well-known bills like the Green New Deal, when he went on to co-found and build New Consensus, an economic and political think-tank based on incorporating the principles of the Green New Deal into a new economic, social, and political structure.
His biggest inspiration for this belief and approach is FDR’s 1933 New Deal, and the roughly 40-year period of prosperity, innovation, construction, and progressive societal evolution that followed.”
Shafer’s first question of the night was straightforward: “How’d you get to be sitting in this chair at Manny’s?” In other words, why now? Chakrabarti answered with his own question, asking the room, “Who here thinks the Democrats in D.C. are not doing enough?” The audience answered with laughter and ironic applause. “That right there is why I’m running.”
“But why run for Congress? You decided you were going… to challenge one of the most powerful historic women in Congressional history…why you, and why now?” countered Shafer. Besides the reason he just gave – Democratic leaders aren’t doing enough to “stop the coup that’s taking place in the White House” – Chakrabarti spoke about the need for the Democratic party to present a vision of real, sweeping action for the forthcoming post-Trump economic hellscape versus maintaining the status quo of incremental change.
His biggest inspiration for this belief and approach is FDR’s 1933 New Deal, and the roughly 40-year period of prosperity, innovation, construction, and progressive societal evolution that followed. He detailed how the New Deal created decades of work, so much so that there were US immigration offices around the world that actively recruited people from other countries to go and work in America. (That’s how his father first came to the US from India – he was recruited to work at NASA.) For Chakrabarti, it will take fearless execution of a bold agenda to make the level of economic change (at least) so desperately needed in the present and future.
One of the points that Chakrabarti stressed was the importance of essentially rebranding the Democratic party as the party of anti-corruption, and one of the first steps towards making that claim plausible should be to “ban [members of congress’] stock trading… It’s a lay-up, it’s the most salient issue for most Americans when they get polled on it.” He went on to recite the percentage of Americans in favor of such a move (86% countrywide, including 87% of Republicans), calling it “something we just gotta do.”
Shafer then asked Chakrabarti if there were any votes or actions taken by Pelosi that he disagreed with, to which he replied that her voting record is less telling than her overall record as Speaker of the House, and what she and the Democrats failed to achieve even while holding a majority (and at one point, a super majority in both House and Senate). He pointed to anti-corruption measures and banning congressional stock trading as particular failures before adding that Pelosi “comes from an era of politics where she really believes her Republican colleagues will come around… I think those days are gone. I think we need something new, and we need to be shooting for an actual transformative economic agenda.”
There was one other point that Chakrabarti stressed throughout the evening – that he’s reluctant to don a political label and put himself in either category of left or right (although his policies would be considered “progressive” by any standard in this country). This seemed to surprise Shafer, who pushed him on it. “I think we need to change how we approach this question,” he said, and once again referenced FDR, who ran and governed according to a political agenda that was sometimes progressive and sometimes centrist: he didn’t try to adhere to a single rigid philosophy, an approach that Chakrabarti wants to emulate.
It’s also the way he plans on approaching voters of other parties in other states. “I don’t think it’s a left versus right thing, I think people want action.”
Chakrabarti stressed that he’s an audacious fighter who demands sweeping change that would benefit the 99% instead of just the 1%. He would take this approach should he be elected to Congress in 2026: Chakrabarti said he would be a“brawler for everyone, not just a few.”
Maura Corkery lives and works in West Portal.
May 2025
