- By Adam Shanks | Examiner staff writer
- Aug 6, 2025 Updated Aug 6, 2025 (SFExamner.com)
Saikat Chakrabarti’s bid for Congress is setting down roots in San Francisco.
The progressive Democrat, who opened a new campaign headquarters last week, said he’s hoping to build a movement.
‘“We do need to do a huge voter-contact operation, and a big part of our strength is going to be our grassroots volunteer army,” Chakrabarti said.
An early engineer at San Francisco-based financial-technology company Stripe, Chakrabarti is hoping to win the seat held for more than 30 years by Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who twice held the role of speaker of the House of Representatives during that time.
Though he got his professional start in tech, Chakrabarti is no stranger to politics. He joined Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ upstart 2016 presidential campaign, then managed New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s shocking 2018 bid for Congress before serving as her first chief of staff.
Since then, he has co-founded New Consensus, a think tank that develops and promotes progressive public-policy ideas.
Despite years in and around politics, Chakrabarti never imagined himself as a candidate until relatively recently. Chakbrarti said he was motivated to run by Democrats’ failure to “reckon with the fact that they lost so many working-class voters to [President] Donald Trump.”
He pointed to a New York Times podcast interview with Pelosi shortly after the November election in which she said she did not see Trump’s victory and other election results “as an outright rejection of the Democratic Party.”
“I do have a discomfort level with some Democrats [who] right now are saying, ‘Oh, we abandoned the working class,’” Pelosi said at the time. “No we didn’t. That’s who we are — we are the kitchen table, working-class party of America.”
Chakrabarti said he believes his policy positions — such as embracing Medicare for All, congressional term limits and a Green New Deal — are more popular than Pelosi’s with voters across the nation and in San Francisco.
Though he came to San Francisco to work in tech amid its boom in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Chakrabarti said he grew disillusioned with the industry, even if not all of its ideas.
“I still think there’s of course a role for tech and I think a lot of innovation that comes out of the tech world has led to incredible improvements in our lives,” Chakrabarti said. “I just don’t think tech is the answer for sort of the big structural problems that are facing most Americans.”
Coincidentally, Chakrabarti’s new Inner Sunset campaign headquarters is in the former office of Mayor Daniel Lurie, the last candidate to run a successful outsider campaign in The City. The campaign was thrilled by the solid turnout at a celebration of the new headquarters’ opening last week.
Despite years of speculation about her retirement, Pelosi has not indicated whether or not she has any plans to do so in the near future. She has set up a campaign account to run for reelection in 2026, though she could change course.
Now serving her 20th term in office, Pelosi has not faced a competitive challenge since she first won election in 1987. Chakrabarti is looking to change that, and he’s already counting small victories.
Last week, Pelosi endorsed the concept of banning members of Congress from trading stocks.
“If legislation is advanced to help restore trust in government and ensure that those in power are held to the highest ethical standards, then I am proud to support it,” she said.
Chakrabarti took credit for pushing Pelosi on the issue, which he supported from the start, and said he sees it as fundamental to the democratic process for incumbents to face challengers. (Pelosi has publicly embraced the concept since at least 2022, when party leaders faced pressure from members to do so.)
“It doesn’t work very well unless there are constant challenges, and people in power have to actually reckon with their positions and update them,” Chakrabarti said.
The Democratic Party has also started to shift when it comes to Israel and Palestine. Chakrabarti has openly referred to Israel’s prosecution of the conflict as a genocide, marking a clear distinction from Pelosi. Chakrabarti said that if elected, he would not vote for funding of military aid to Israel.
“It’s one of the worst things happening in the world right now, and it’s completely unconscionable it’s happening with our taxpayer money,” Chakrabarti said.
Though she has not used the word “genocide,” Pelosi recently called for a ceasefire that allows for aid delivery to Palestinians and called the starvation in Gaza a “catastrophic moral emergency.”
It’s time for the Democrats to embrace major, structural reforms, Chakrabarti said, and the Democratic Party will have to change in order for that to happen. He pointed to a recent poll that showed the party’s approval rating is below that of President Trump.
If it doesn’t address pressing issues like the rising cost of living, Chakrabarti said, the Democratic Party risks entering a period similiar to the one that existed after it failed to rein in inflation during the 1970s, which ushered in Republican President Ronald Reagan’s rise.
“He created the next 40 years of politics because Democrats failed to respond to that correctly, and so that’s where I think we’re at right now,” Chakrabarti said. “I don’t want to have a 40-year era of MAGA authoritarianism where every Democrat has to govern in that frame.”
Chakbrabarti said the country needs the universal health care of a “Medicare for All” system, calling it the rational option that will actually be cheaper in the long run given what people pay now in insurance premiums. Chakrabarti also endorses universal child care on similar grounds.
The country should be proactively investing in its economy, particularly in the transition to green energy, he said.
“There’s this global green transition happening right now that’s this huge opportunity for the U.S. to build broad-based wealth for a whole lot of people, and we’re just kind of missing the boat,” Chakrabarti said.
As for revenue streams that would help fund his ambitious agenda, Chakrabarti endorses a wealth tax on assets over $50 million.
Chakrabarti wants to make housing more affordable by using the federal government — and its purse strings — to incentivize local and state governments to cut red tape and allow for more housing.
The country also needs a robust social-housing program at the federal level, he said. Though not prescriptive in how it should be addressed, Chakrabarti wants to limit the role of private equity and speculation in raising housing prices.
Trump — and the power of his veto — would almost certainly stymie most of Chakrabarti’s agenda even if Democrats were to regain control of congress in 2026. He said that’s why he’d focus in his initial term on establishing strong constituent services in his district.
In the early days of Ocasio-Cortez’s office, during the first Trump administration, Chakrabarti said he learned that “you can kind of use the bureaucratic morass to your benefit by just having the gumption wherewithal to do it.”
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, to parents who had immigrated from India, Chakrabarti moved to San Francisco in 2009 and is now raising a child here. He said he has ridden almost every Muni bus line and lived in several neighborhoods.
“A big motivation for me for running on this stuff is that I do think San Francisco is sort of like a canary in the coal mine for the rest of the country,” Chakrabarti said. “All these problems I’m talking about — affordability, inequality — they’re happening across the country, but they are happening worst in our city. We’re at a place where unless we solve it for the nation, San Francisco’s in trouble.”
