English-only poll puts Scott Wiener, Saikat Chakrabarti far ahead of Connie Chan
by Yujie Zhou April 13, 2026 (MissionLocal.org)
Saikat Chakrabarti is just five percentage points behind frontrunner Sen. Scott Wiener, according to a new poll commissioned and shared by Chakrabarti’s campaign and conducted by Data For Progress.
The poll, which surveyed 537 likely primary voters in California 11th congressional district in English only, found Wiener leading Chakrabarti 33-to-28 heading into June’s primary. The margin of error is four percent. Connie Chan, the District 1 supervisor, polled at 13 percent.
San Francisco political observers have long expected that Wiener will win the June primary election, where only two top candidates can advance to the November general election, regardless of party affiliation. That would leave Chan and Chakrabarti to battle for second place.
Chakrabarti, a former tech engineer and centimillionaire, joined the race to succeed Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi with little to no name recognition in San Francisco, compared to the other two leading candidates, Wiener and Chan, both longtime politicians in the city.
But he has quickly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and is self-funding his campaign to the tune of $1.5 million, seeking to buy that visibility.https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/cFj9y/1/
The poll, if accurate, shows that strategy is working. Still, there are limitations for Chakrabarti: Wiener holds a commanding lead among Democratic voters — 47 percent of those respondents chose him during a hypothetical primary vs. 26 percent for Chakrabarti. About 63.4 percent of voters in this race are registered as Democrats.
The polling was conducted from April 3 to April 8, 2026 by Data for Progress, a progressive pollster often used by left-of-center campaigns. Nate Silver, the statistician and founder of FiveThirtyEight, gave the pollster a C+ and ranked it as having a slight Democratic bias.
The pollster asked 537 likely voters (who were almost entirely Democrats and Independents) for their views on the congressional race. It surveyed them using online forms and text messaging.
Non-English-speaking voters were excluded from the poll. Those include at least 4.5 percent of the district’s voters who request ballots in Chinese. Monolingual Chinese voters are likely to be part of Chan’s base, though Chakrabarti is spending big to make inroads into that population.
The poll also asked about favorability, and found Chakrabarti had the highest net ratings.
Among the 537 likely voters, 52 percent said they had a favorable opinion of Wiener and 46 percent unfavorable, a difference of six percent. Some 48 percent have favorable opinions of Chakrabarti and 34 percent unfavorable, a 14 percent difference. A full 97 percent of respondents have already heard of Wiener, however, while 18 percent said they “haven’t heard enough to say” about Chakrabarti.
For Chan, 36 percent had a favorable view and 37 percent unfavorable, a negative 1 percent rating, though 27 percent said they hadn’t heard enough to say.
Chakrabarti is an Indian American who made a fortune as an early employee of the payments platform Stripe. He joined Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign before launching Justice Democrats to recruit new leaders to run for Congress.
Justice Democrats’ greatest success was helping then-unknown Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez overtake longtime congressman Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th Congressional District in 2018. Chakrabarti joined her on Capitol Hill as her chief of staff, but left a few months later, after being criticized on the Hill for publicly disparaging more moderate Democratic lawmakers online.
Chakrabarti’s resignation occurred shortly after a private meeting between Ocasio-Cortez and Pelosi, and was widely perceived at the time as a peace offering between the two lawmakers.
A decade later, Chakrabarti is running to succeed Pelosi.
His campaign has raised $1.77 million as of Dec. 31, 2025, with $1.47 million of that coming from his personal fortune. The next campaign finance filing deadline is April 15.
So far, Chakrabarti’s campaign is running one of the largest paid canvasser operations in San Francisco’s history — well over 250 people — and spending tens of thousands of dollars on ads alone every week.
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Yujie ZhouStaff reporter
Yujie is a staff reporter covering city hall with a focus on the Asian community. She came on as an intern after graduating from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and became a full-time staff reporter as a Report for America corps member and has stayed on. Before falling in love with San Francisco, Yujie covered New York City, studied politics through the “street clashes” in Hong Kong, and earned a wine-tasting certificate in two days. She’s proud to be a bilingual journalist. Find her on Signal @Yujie_ZZ.01More by Yujie Zhou
