- By Patrick Hoge | Examiner staff writer
- 4 hrs ago (SFExaminer.com)
Shortly after being knocked out of the race to succeed U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi in Congress in the June 2 primary, centimillionaire and progressive activist Saikat Chakrabarti gathered campaign staffers for a bonfire on Ocean Beach. Attendees at the event said he talked about the idea of working to support former opponent Connie Chan as an alternative to state Sen. Scott Wiener.
While not all took the offer, a core group of organizers — largely in their 20s and new to politics — jumped at the chance. Ultimately, more than 100 workers joined Chakrabarti’s new independent SF Solidarity PAC effort, mostly as door-to-door canvassers.
Six days per week, the operation has been phone-banking and running canvassing crews in support of Chan, who represents District 1 on the Board of Supervisors, across Pelosi’s 11th Congressional district, which covers all but a southern chunk of The City.
The committee also provided support to Melat Kiros, a progressive Democratic candidate for Congress who just won an upset primary victory in Colorado.
“This is my first campaign — it was my first job in politics at all, but I’m hooked now,” said Mel Halem, a 25-year-old former cafe barista who worked her way up over the past year from volunteer to senior field organizer for Chakrabarti’s campaign and is now deputy campaign manager for the SF Solidarity operation. “I really feel like I want to stay involved in this.”
Like her co-workers, Halem — a transplant from Orlando, Fla. — said she was inspired by Chakrabarti’s talk about matters such as wealth inequality, affordable housing and healthcare and believed Chan would have similar priorities.
“I feel like we need trustworthy people in Congress, and that comes from people who aren’t funded by mega billionaires and big pharma and things like that,” Halem said.
Halem and others also expressed a desire to keep working with a youthful crew that forged connections with each other through the long days trying to sell voters on Chakrabarti.
“We are all friends, like outside of this, we all see each other after hours and on the weekends, and I think that’s what makes our bond and our work ethic so strong,” said 23-year-old Dior Hartman. “Here you want to go above and beyond because you love your coworkers.”
Hartman joined in March as a canvasser along with several others, all of whom had been doing similar work to raise money for The Nature Conservancy.
“This is the hardest I’ve worked in a job, but it also just feels very energizing,” said Kaizen Betts-LaCroix, a Berkeley resident and former bartender in Emeryville who joined Chakrabarti’s campaign in January.
The SF Solidarity PAC’s operation is about half the peak size of Chakrabarti’s campaign, which Chakrabarti called the largest field operation in The City’s history. Its headquarters are in a retail space at 9th Avenue and Irving Street in the Inner Sunset, one of the three offices that Chakrabarti’s campaign had at its height.
The new operation will continue at its current level until July 15 and then continue in a slimmed-down form through November, Chakrabarti said. He estimated that “all in, it’s going to end up being a seven figure [independent expenditure] by November, for sure.”
Current campaign manager Alex Vanscoy, 22, is expecting to return soon to San Francisco State University, from which he took a leave of absence to work on Chakrabarti’s campaign. He said he plans to stay politically involved.
“I am just on the lookout for the next big progressive cause that I can join, because, you know, the fight is definitely not over,” he said.
Jason Olaru-Hagen, 23, said working on the campaigns had been stimulating after working in the health-care industry.
“I could still be doing an office job where I really did not feel any meaning attached to my work,” he said. “It’s been the exact opposite, and it’s been the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done.”
Olaru-Hagen said he likes the high intensity of campaign work and he is hoping to continue working in progressive politics in some fashion.
Shawn Canin, 23, an organizer who is a senior at UC Berkeley majoring in media studies with a focus on law and policy, said he hoped to stay connected to his coworkers.
“This is, I think, just the beginning,” he said.
Whether the intensive door-knocking operation on Chan’s behalf will have more effect than the one for Chakrabarti remains to be seen. Chakrabarti ultimately won 42,060 votes (or 17.87%) to Chan’s 69,899 (29.7%) and Wiener’s 95,816 (40.71%).
Chakrabarti said in an interview that voters who supported him skewed younger than Chan’s and could complement her base of support.
“If we actually combine those two bases, that’s a winning coalition,” he said. “That’s a formidable coalition.”
“It’s really important just to establish who she is and get her name out there, so people know who she is and what she stands for,” Chakrabarti said.
The SF Solidarity PAC is an independent-expenditure committee. A Chan spokesperson declined to comment about the independent operation.
The message Chakrabarti’s team is purveying is “We Trust Connie” because she does not take “corporate bribes,” including money from lobbyists or CEOs or contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Joe Arellano, Wiener’s campaign spokesperson, said that Wiener “has not taken and will not take money from AIPAC due to significant policy differences.”
Wiener’s campaign money has come almost entirely from individual donors, and though the campaign has accepted funds from union political-action committees, it has a rule against taking money from corporate PACs — and if such donations sneak through, the policy is to return them, Arellano said.
The money theme is one that members of Chakrabarti’s committee staff said resonated with them and helped them to switch to supporting Chan.
“We’re all fighting the same fight — and especially when it comes to corporate money,” Hartman said.
Chakrabarti, who made a fortune as an early software engineer at the payments company Stripe, loaned or contributed at least $9.9 million of the $10.3 million his campaign raised in the leadup to the election. Chan, who declared her candidacy relatively late, on Nov. 20, had raised about $700,000 by the time of the election. Wiener raised about $4 million.
Arellano said that Chakrabarti’s new spending won’t have a different result.
“Saikat’s money wasn’t effective then, and his corporate super PAC for Connie Chan won’t work either,” Arellano said.
Arellano predicted voters will choose Wiener, highlighting in particular his record on housing. Among the numerous pieces of legislation Wiener has authored are laws aimed at spurring new housing development and weakening cities’ regulatory ability to impede it.
“This November, voters have a clear choice: Connie Chan, who’s blocked housing at every turn, or Scott Wiener, who has the record — and the vision — to actually solve the housing-affordability crisis when he gets to Congress,” Arellano said.
Chan spokesperson Julie Edwards, meanwhile, said that, “Scott Wiener has claimed to be a housing champion for 16 years, and housing has never been more expensive.”
Edwards said Wiener “has said he supports progressive taxation — but every chance he gets, he caves to his corporate donors instead of making big corporations pay their fair share.”
Wiener has said he opposes a labor-union-backed November ballot measure that would impose a one-time tax of up to 5% on taxpayers and trusts with certain assets valued over $1 billion, primarily to fund health care, as well as food-assistance or education-related programs.
Wiener has said he has supported progressive tax proposals in the past, but a one-time tax is not the optimal strategy, Arellano said.
Wiener also opposed the union-backed Proposition D, a measure that San Francisco voters rejected in June that would have increased The City’s Overpaid Executive Tax, which generally imposes a gross-receipts tax on companies at which the highest-paid managerial employee earns more than 100 times the median compensation of employees based in San Francisco. Wiener said the measure could hurt The City’s economy, Arellano said.
Chan supported Prop. D and also supports the impending statewide measure.
“Voters have had enough of his corporate Democratic ‘leadership,’ and that’s why 60% of San Francisco voters rejected him in June,” Edwards said of Wiener.
Chakrabarti, a co-founder of the economic-policy think tank New Consensus, said he believed voters lost confidence in him partly because U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York did not endorse him. He was campaign manager and chair for Ocasio-Cortez and her chief of staff in Washington, D.C. for about eight months, and had sought her endorsement.
In addition, Chakrabati said, “attack mailers” against him took a toll. An independent group funded mailers playing on the allegation that Chakrabarti lived in Maryland, though Chakrabarti insisted he only bought a home there for his parents.
“So the message no longer mattered, because people lost their trust in me as a candidate, and so we think it’s really important to establish that Connie Chan is someone you can trust,” he said.
