![\"David](\"https:\/\/prospect.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/cropped-DAVID-DAYEN_CIRCLE-80x80.png\")
by David Dayen<\/a><\/strong> May 11, 2026 (Prospect.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/prospect.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Dayen-05112026-scaled.jpg?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1\")
SAN FRANCISCO \u2013 At a coffee shop in the Castro District on a gray Saturday, state Sen. Scott Wiener ran through a list of elected officials who came from this city\u2019s often-cutthroat political scene. \u201cNancy Pelosi, Phil Burton, Jackie Speier, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, Willie Brown \u2026 Jerry Brown too,\u201d he says. \u201cThe politics here are intense and brutal at times, and so San Francisco is an amazing training ground to do hardball politics, and San Franciscans demand that their elected leaders fight hard and deliver.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wiener wants to follow in that tradition by winning California\u2019s 11th Congressional District, which is almost entirely composed of San Francisco, and filling the seat Pelosi is vacating after nearly 40 years. The race to replace her has been as ruthless as you might expect. But on a visit to the city where I met with all three major candidates, I found some key departures from the national narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, Wiener\u2019s work on housing legislation in California has won support from the abundance faction that is often at odds with progressives focused on the relentless influence of corporate power. But Wiener is also carrying one of the main bills in the state legislature this year to prevent anticompetitive conduct<\/a> from Big Tech, passed legislation<\/a> in 2024 to crack down on pharmacy benefit manager middlemen, and endorsed a bipartisan housing bill that some abundance types have opposed<\/a>. He even expressed discomfort with investor purchases of housing. \u201cThe more we move toward mass mega-ownership, you really do get into situations where you have Wall Street pressures that end up screwing renters,\u201d Wiener says. \u201cThe humanity is immediately stripped out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most national commentary on the 11-candidate field has focused on Wiener and Saikat Chakrabarti, the progressive co-founder of Justice Democrats who wants to generate a bottom-up political revolution among a restless population dissatisfied with the status quo. Yet Connie Chan, a San Francisco county supervisor, has picked up many of the state and local endorsements you would expect from a progressive leader: the California Teachers Association, National Nurses United, the state Working Families Party, the San Francisco Labor Council, the California Federation of Labor Unions, and the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club. She believes her focus on bread-and-butter issues and support among the city\u2019s large Asian American population can pay off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And while the race has been described as a test between experience and rhetoric, between work horses and show horses, another factor is the obvious but too often overlooked question of Big Money. Wiener has a cryptocurrency mogul running a super PAC on his behalf, and Chakrabarti is drawing on his own fortune gained from being an early-career employee at Stripe. Sometimes in a brawl between two flavors of Big Money a less-tainted challenger can sneak through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two of these three will almost certainly make the November runoff, so even the idea that the June primary will settle the matter is misguided: The discourse will carry on for months. But in this race we do see a microcosm of a party that\u2019s thinking about offering something new to voters, delivering on promises, standing up for working people, and figuring out what to do about the control of politics by those with wealth and power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I crisscrossed the city in one weekend day to talk to each candidate and see what they\u2019re emphasizing in their campaigns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I started my day in the Richmond District, where I lived for a few years during the first dot-com boom in the late 1990s. Then as now, the neighborhood was dominated by Asian markets and independent shops, with a heavily immigrant population. It\u2019s a little more conservative than the rest of the city but also far more modest in income compared to elite enclaves like Seacliff to its north. That morning, I picked up a dim sum breakfast of sesame balls with red bean paste for three dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Off a tree-lined street, Connie Chan\u2019s campaign was gathering in a playground for a lit drop with the local Building Trades union. \u201cShe\u2019s the choice of labor in San Francisco,\u201d one of the union members, a retired trucker named Art, told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chan was born in Hong Kong and settled in Chinatown with her single mom and younger brother when she was 13. At the time, she spoke no English. But she picked it up quickly, and after college she worked at community groups around the city and volunteered teaching Chinese. She entered politics as a legislative aide for a local supervisor and held numerous city jobs, including under then-District Attorney Kamala Harris. This is her second term as a county supervisor, serving as Budget Committee chair and on three other local commissions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite running a distant third in most recent public<\/a> polls<\/a> of the race, Chan\u2019s campaign has an answer to that: the poll excluded monolingual Chinese speakers, who are numerous in the Richmond District and across San Francisco. The campaign sees those voters as their base. A San Francisco Chronicle poll has Chan basically tied with Chakrabarti for second<\/a>; with the top-two format, that would be all it would take to get her into the general election and a one-on-one matchup with Wiener. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As union members picked up their lit, Chan bounded up to the table. It was the first of three stops for her on the day. She chatted up the crowd, including an Asian couple who brought their teenage son to canvas on his birthday. \u201cThat\u2019s just what you want to do today, right?\u201d Chan teased.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI know this is a congressional race but fundamentally this is a San Francisco race,\u201d she told me earlier in an interview. \u201cYou do see someone like me, who does not come from money, have the backing of workers and unions and is able to win.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout our conversations, Chan constantly steered the conversation toward topics that would be considered hyper-local: whether to allow cashless stores, a years-long controversy<\/a> about a park abutting the ocean that closed a portion of the Great Highway and led to a supervisor recall, or the Alexandria Theater at 20th and Geary, a now-empty former movie palace that Chan worked to convert into a mixed-use apartment complex<\/a>. She says voters are focused on three questions: \u201cHow can we afford life, how can we stay in San Francisco, and will we have democracy tomorrow?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the canvass kickoff, Chan and I talked about what she called an \u201cillegal\u201d war with Iran, how the war and its effect on supply chains have put pressure on local small business, and her policies on artificial intelligence (\u201cI have two guiding principles: safety and not displacing the workforce\u201d). As Budget chair, she created a $400 million reserve fund to backfill federal cuts to essential benefits, and a separate fund for immigrant legal services. In Congress, she wants to focus on financing affordable housing, lowering costs of health care and education with free city college as a model, and finding a path to citizenship for immigrants. <\/p>\n\n\n\n She also related the dynamics in San Francisco to the rising oligarchy we see across the country. \u201cThere\u2019s the PayPal mafia,\u201d she said, referring to a group of expats from the early days of the payment processing company that included Elon Musk, David Sacks, and Peter Thiel. \u201cTheir chant is \u2018Move fast and break things.\u2019 They look at San Francisco and think, \u2018How do we break you, the working people?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some see Chan as the more authentic voice of the city\u2019s left in the race. (She also has mainstream support; Pelosi hasn\u2019t endorsed, but Sen. Adam Schiff, a key Pelosi ally, has endorsed her.) But getting that message out takes money. As of the most recent campaign finance disclosures<\/a>, she is lagging far behind her opponents in fundraising. And while labor and the Asian vote are strong factions, they are only fragments of the electorate. Can she succeed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOnly in San Francisco, someone like me can run for Congress,\u201d she insisted. \u201cWe ran in 2020 and 2024 and won both times, running against candidates supported by billionaires and their PACs. I have that same optimism and attitude.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the kickoff, she put it more clearly to the crowd. \u201cWhen you send Connie Chan to Congress, you are sending all working people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wiener, meanwhile, is 6 foot, 7 inches (a fact he used in his introductory ad<\/a> in this campaign) and was easy to spot getting his coffee and breakfast in a caf\u00e9 near the legendary Castro Theater. He has lived in San Francisco for almost 30 years, or what some locals would call a transplant. He worked for several LGBTQ and Democratic organizations, including the critical San Francisco County Central Committee, before being elected to the Board of Supervisors and then the state Senate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When running for the legislature, Wiener was told that Sacramento is a place where good ideas go to die. \u201cI said, \u2018I\u2019m going to prove you wrong,\u2019 and I did,\u201d he says. \u201cI passed over 100 laws, including some blockbusters, and I\u2019ve defeated some of the most powerful corporations on the planet. Sometimes they defeated me \u2026 [but] when you were defeated, you went back.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is Wiener\u2019s value proposition: he\u2019s persistent and creative enough to break through dysfunctional policymaking bodies and make progress. For a Congress that seems like it can\u2019t tie its own shoes at times, that\u2019s a selling point. Yet some of the fights he\u2019s mounted have not endeared him to critics in the crucible of San Francisco politics. And Wiener leans into that. \u201cI\u2019m not one of those politicians that feels the need to be loved by everyone,\u201d he says bluntly.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wiener\u2019s most high-profile controversies have been on housing, where he has strived to increase supply, antagonizing resistant cities and those who see it as disproportionately deregulatory. There are deregulatory lines that he won\u2019t cross, however. \u201cI don\u2019t want to see a situation where private equity is owning a huge piece of single-family homes in this country,\u201d he said, while endorsing the stalled bipartisan federal housing bill that some in his ideological camp have condemned for forcing investor sales of so-called \u201cbuild to rent\u201d properties after seven years. While he thinks rental stock of all kinds is important, the benefits of the bill, like not requiring manufactured homes to have a chassis, matter more, he said. Wiener added that junk fees in housing were a problem requiring regulation, and it is worsened when Wall Street-aligned landlords prioritize returns for shareholders over tenants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Much of Wiener\u2019s legislative record<\/a> has been mainstream progressive stuff: public transit funding, criminal justice reform, public health access, immigration protections, phase-out of single-use plastics, child care expansion, caps on out-of-pocket costs for insulin, bans on surprise ER billing, and a number of LGBT rights bills. He wrote the law requiring federal officers like ICE operating in the state to remove masks. When a judge tossed it out<\/a> because it didn\u2019t also apply to state officials at the request of Gov. Gavin Newsom, Wiener reintroduced it with the state ban.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He has a similar agenda for Washington and would likely be an active lawmaker with his hands in a lot of projects. He expressed to me the need to expand the Supreme Court to ensure that those laws, and other vital needs like campaign finance reform, would not be overturned. But being a progressive in America is not the same as being a progressive in San Francisco, where Wiener has faced criticism on a variety of fronts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n After local pressure<\/a>, Wiener became one of the first Jewish elected officials to call the situation in Gaza a genocide, something that led him to step down from chairing a legislative Jewish caucus. He told me he would have voted with 40 senators to block arms shipments to Israel, and that he opposes offensive weapons sales to the country; he would allow defensive weapons but Israel would have to buy them, without the use of taxpayer dollars. \u201cIt pains me to say that,\u201d he said. \u201cIsrael is home to half of all Jews on the planet. It matters to Jews globally. And the Israeli government is an abomination, and it has been for a long time, and it has fueled instability in the region. It is making Israelis less safe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Closer to home, Wiener has been enmeshed in a number of controversies involving big money. Labor union SEIU un-endorsed him<\/a> for his opposition to a local measure on the ballot in June called the \u201cOverpaid CEO Tax,\u201d which would increase taxes on businesses whose CEO is paid more than 100 times the median earnings for their employees. SEIU threw their endorsement to Chan. Wiener has also said he opposes SEIU\u2019s statewide billionaire wealth tax<\/a>, which will be on the November ballot, arguing that a one-time tax for an ongoing budget hole (in this case created by Trump administration cuts to Medicaid) isn\u2019t practical. He has elsewhere endorsed taxing the rich<\/a> by reversing the Bush and Trump tax cuts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wiener has billionaires in his corner, including Trump donors. Chris Larsen, CEO of blockchain company Ripple (a major Trump inauguration donor), has given $100,000 to an outside Super PAC called Abundant Future<\/a>, which has thus far spent about a half-million dollars attacking Chakrabarti. Y Combinator\u2019s Garry Tan is also a donor to that PAC. Chakrabarti has also highlighted dozens of corporate PACs<\/a> who have donated to Wiener over his state legislative career. (None of them have given to his congressional campaign<\/a>, where Wiener is rejecting corporate PAC money. And some have criticized Chakrabarti for supporting tech-friendly moderates in San Francisco before running for office.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In response, Wiener said that Chakrabarti listed about 30 corporate donations out of his 10,000 donors across campaigns in the last decade-plus. \u201cYou can go around when you have no track record and cherry-pick donations,\u201d he said. \u201cMy lifetime [Chamber of Commerce] score is 16 percent. My lifetime California Labor Fed score is 97 percent. My League of Conservation Voters score is 97-98 percent. I have one of the most pro-labor, pro-environment, pro-consumer records in the entire legislature.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI have gone to war repeatedly with Big Tech,\u201d he added. \u201cI\u2019ve gone to war with Big Oil repeatedly, I\u2019ve beat them and they\u2019ve beat me sometimes. I\u2019ve gone to war with the health insurance industry, with the [pharmacy benefit managers]. I passed net neutrality law, that was war with the telecoms and the cable companies. And so my voting record and the work I\u2019ve done, I stick up for people over some of the most powerful corporations in the history of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even critics of Wiener would consider him relentless, and his theory of the case is that Democrats win by providing tangible results for families. \u201cThis has been brewing for decades, where the federal government has told the middle class and working class to go screw themselves,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s a handful of policies that if we enacted them the way that they should be enacted, people\u2019s lives would be so much better \u2026 Democrats need to focus on rapidly delivering.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bernal Heights is at the southern end of San Francisco, and from the top of the lovely circular park you could look down on practically the entire city and the bay. About 45 volunteers had shown up here to canvas for Chakrabarti, and they were far younger than Connie Chan\u2019s group of union members. By this point in the campaign a couple weeks ago, Chakrabarti volunteers had already knocked on 364,000 doors and talked to 128,000 voters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere are two futures: one where corporations own it all, and one where the people rule,\u201d Chakrabarti told the crowd. \u201cThis work you\u2019re doing is what makes our vision possible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A native Texan who has been in and out of San Francisco since 2009, Chakrabarti left Stripe and joined the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. He later founded Justice Democrats and joined the organization\u2019s most successful recruit in 2018, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), as her chief of staff. That was a quick and turbulent tenure<\/a>, and some have characterized AOC\u2019s lack of an endorsement<\/a> in the race as a signal that he was in fact fired. But he continued on devising a progressive agenda, founding a nonprofit called New Consensus<\/a> that advocates for strong industrial policy and a clean energy transition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFor decades now, we basically have had this ideology running the country, where profit alone drives the economy, and we can\u2019t do anything about that,\u201d he told me on the sidelines of the canvassing kickoff. \u201cPeople keep voting for anybody running on sweeping economic change. They just know this is not cutting it. We need something dramatically different.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like everyone in the race, Chakrabarti wants to ameliorate the cost-of-living crisis and tackle official corruption in Washington and in campaigns. \u201cThey are just trying to buy votes to run our government,\u201d he said of super PACs attacking him. But his campaign is largely powered by his fortune made as a tech engineer. About 93 percent of his $5 million campaign haul is self-funded. Wiener in our discussion emphasized that a public financing system for elections should include limits or bans on self-funding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI mean, it\u2019s really a terrible system right now, right?\u201d responded Chakrabarti, who mentioned that he has more individual small-dollar donors on his campaign, about 10,000, than all his opponents combined. \u201cI could either do the thing Scott Wiener\u2019s doing and spend a lot of time calling big donors for money, and frankly, they wouldn\u2019t donate to me because my politics is one of going in there and taxing them and changing the party. Or I can put my own money in, and then I do have the freedom to do things like talk about controlling AI and taking on the crypto industry.\u201d He said that he endorses full public financing of elections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the issues, Chakrabarti has focused on breaking the bipartisan foreign policy consensus, where presidents of both parties expand the military budget, project power, and inspire hatred, while Congress walks away from its responsibilities to manage war powers and rein in runaway appropriations. He wants to repurpose military assets like the Army Corps of Engineers to build domestic capacity. And he wants to end multinational exploitation of just-in-time logistics to hollow out our industrial base. He has a new AI policy<\/a> that imagines a public option for the technology (one poised to buy out other assets in the event of a bubble collapse) to ensure that gains are distributed broadly, including from a wealth-sharing fund. The last one has earned him super PAC opposition from interests tied to AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chakrabarti has been criticized for having only scant legislative experience and no record of achievement. But he addressed what is often a blind spot for candidates for office, the implementation part of governing, and the planning institutions (like public banks) necessary to make policy work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also cited his ability to build bottom-up movements that have pressured politicians on subjects like Gaza and universal health care. \u201cA lot of these politicians are worried about primaries popping up that are going to challenge them,\u201d he said. \u201cAt the beginning of Justice Democrats, it was like fewer than 60 people co-sponsoring Medicare for All. And we started a project to say we\u2019re going to primary anyone who doesn\u2019t support this. And we got it up to over 100. Threatening political power does change the political landscape faster than anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That challenge to the Democratic establishment underscores everything Chakrabarti is doing. He sees a path for mass mobilization of public resources and a mission-driven politics, similar to the New Deal in the U.S. or Asian economic development in the 1970s. It requires, in his view, use of new communication tools, leadership driving the mission, and institutions to coordinate it. And he sounded very much like Wiener in terms of the focus on delivering: \u201cWhen you get the country into that mission, when you get at least half the country bought into this larger vision of where you\u2019re going, you then have to do things that are showing daily progress.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hasan Piker\u2019s new favorite candidate was gaining surprising traction challenging self-described \u2018Ron DeSantis Democrat\u2019 Jared Moskowitz. Then DeSantis vaporized the district.<\/p>\n\n\n\n by Maureen Tkacik<\/a><\/strong>May 7, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n Democratic Majority for Israel hastily got out of the Second District race after realizing the beneficiary of its spending had disavowed the group. It\u2019s back under a different name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n by David Dayen<\/a><\/strong>May 6, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Gov. Janet Mills recovers from her anemic Senate bid, she\u2019ll have to decide how to handle Graham Platner, the all-but-voter-anointed Democratic nominee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n by\u00a0Gabrielle Gurley<\/a><\/strong> May 6, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n I hope that you found this article interesting and thought-provoking. The reason we\u2019re able to publish stories like this \u2014 free of programmatic ads and never behind a paywall \u2014 is because readers like you step up to support our work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Prospect <\/em>doesn’t answer to advertisers or billionaire owners. We answer to you and to our commitment to pursuing the truth, wherever that leads us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Independent, reader-supported journalism is critical at a time when the free press is under assault. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you believe this kind of reporting should exist and remain free to read, we hope you’ll consider chipping in. Every contribution, however modest, makes a real difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Donate Now<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n ddayen@prospect.org<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street\u2019s Great Foreclosure Fraud. He co-hosts the podcast Organized Money with Matt Stoller. He can be reached on Signal at ddayen.90. More by David Dayen<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A working-class voice, a policy wonk, and a champion of political revolution face off for Nancy Pelosi\u2019s seat. by David Dayen May 11, 2026 (Prospect.org) SAN FRANCISCO \u2013 At a coffee shop in the Castro District on a gray Saturday, state Sen. Scott Wiener ran through a list of elected officials… Continue reading The Working-Class Tribune<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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The Man Who Gets Things Done<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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The Revolutionary<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Read more on the 2026 election<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Oliver](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/prospect.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Tkacik-Florida-Dems-060726-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nOliver Larkin vs. the Epstein State<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Outside](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/prospect.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Dayen-NE-02-050626.webp?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nOutside Spending in Nebraska House Seat Tops $3.5 Million<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Failing](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/prospect.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Gurley-ME-Mills-050626.jpg?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nFailing to Read the Room in Maine<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Before you go.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"David](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/prospect.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/cropped-DAVID-DAYEN_CIRCLE.png?resize=780%2C780&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nDavid Dayen<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n