Saikat Chakrabarti, 39, has announced that he is running for US Congress against veteran Democrat leader and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to represent San Francisco, California’s 11th Congressional district; because he thinks that ‘Democratic party leaders in [Washington] DC are unfit to lead in the world as it is today’. In an announcement on social media, Chakrabarti said: “I’ve decided to run against Nancy Pelosi to represent San Francisco in Congress. I know some of you might be surprised that Speaker Emeritus Pelosi is running again, but she is — for her 21st term! Watching Trump and Elon freely unleash chaos in their illegal seizure of government, it’s become clear to me that the Democratic Party needs new leadership.’ Pelosi’s current term in the US House of Representatives ends in January 2027; elections for the seat will be held in November 2026 and the Democratic primary earlier next year.
“I don’t understand how DC’s Democratic leaders are so paralyzed and unprepared for this moment after living through President Trump’s first term — and after Trump and Elon warned us exactly what they planned to do. I respect what Nancy Pelosi has accomplished in her career, but we are living in a totally different America than the one she knew when she entered politics 45 years ago.”
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, to Bengali immigrants from India; Chakrabarti moved to San Francisco after graduating from Harvard University and launched his own start-up before joining financial services company Stripe, as its second engineer. He left the tech industry to work for Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. “I left Stripe to join Bernie’s campaign where I travelled the country building tools that powered Bernie’s unprecedented grassroots movement. On that campaign, I met an incredible group of leaders and together we launched an effort to recruit a new generation of leaders to Congress called Justice Democrats,” he says in his newly launched campaign website. He served as campaign manager in 2018 and first chief of staff for Democrat Representative from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I launched a project to elect a new generation of leaders, and one of them was Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” Chakrabarti says.
Later he returned to San Francisco, where, for five years, he has been leading a policy think tank that develops comprehensive solutions to the problems that both America and San Francisco face through economic mobilization to build a clean economy for the US and the world. “Now, I want to bring those solutions to Congress,” he says.
In his campaign website Chakrabarti says: “When Nancy Pelosi was first elected to Congress, you could buy a home on a single income. A summer job could pay for college. Republicans believed in climate change and respected election results. Now, the things that defined the American Dream — being able to afford health care, education, a home, and raise a family — are impossible for most people. And the Republican Party is overtly conspiratorial and anti-democracy.” He adds that today, even highly-paid professionals struggle to afford decent housing, healthcare, and education; MAGA Republicans are tearing apart virtually every public institution. And the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to allow states to totally ban abortion without exception for rape, incest, or age.
Chakrabarti feels that the Democratic Party needs to stop acting like it’s competing against a normal political party that plays by the rules, and it needs a bold vision for how to raise living standards, quality of life and security for all Americans. “America is stuck, and Americans want real solutions that are as big as the problems we face. They don’t have the strength to stop Trump and MAGA — and they don’t have the vision or the voice to convince voters they can fix our biggest problems.”
He plans to run a campaign spending time every day talking with voters rather than engaging with big donors. “In this campaign, I’ll be talking about the problems we need to solve for San Francisco, for America, and also about the future of the Democratic Party — and how it can provide an alternative vision of change from Trump and MAGA,” he says. He also plans to talk about national issues and the future of the Democratic Party. While he feels that it might seem a little early to start running; he has launched his campaign early because “it’s almost impossible to defeat incumbents in our system — even at a time when both Congress and the Democratic Party stand at record-low approval ratings. Winning this campaign will require months of organising — online and on the street — to connect with every single voter in San Francisco.”
