Estimated reading time: 18 minutes
As voters in New York City make a decision on Zohran Mamdani as their likely next mayor this week, voters on the other coast in San Francisco have another Brown guy shaking up the political status quo.
Saikat Chakrabarti, 39, is running to represent California’s 11th Congressional District, which covers San Francisco. Rep. Nancy Pelosi has represented the region in Washington since 1987, most recently winning re-election in 2024 with 81% of the vote.
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A Harvard grad, Chakrabarti was an early engineer at payment titan Stripe, making millions from company equity. But he’s no stranger to politics, later having worked as Rep. Bernie Sanders’ tech director and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (“AOC”) first campaign manager and chief of staff. He played a key role in developing the Green New Deal.
His campaign says he is not taking any corporate PAC money, and public data reveal he’s already given more than half a million dollars of his own to his run.
Chakrabarti and I recently sat down in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood for a conversation about his bold plan to take on Pelosi’s seat. See the Q&A below.
Since our interview, California State Senator Scott Wiener, 55, has also announced he is running for the seat. Nancy Pelosi, 85, still has not officially announced her decision on whether or not she’ll run in 2026.
Q&A with San Franciscan and congressional candidate Saikat Chakrabarti
Vignesh: A lot of people know you as a man who worked with the Bernie Sanders campaign, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (“AOC”) former chief of staff and the guy behind the Green New Deal. There have been other headlines out there of “tech millionaire.” But who is the Saikat you want people to know?
That was around the time Bernie came onto the scene. He was starting to fill stadiums with these rallies talking about inequality, poverty and climate change. So I joined the Bernie campaign as a programmer trying to just learn whatever I could. I went around with this amazing team that was trying to organize all the volunteers across early states.
Saikat: I grew up in Texas, going to public schools and had a solid middle-class life. I grew up pretty apolitical and always wanted to do stuff to try to impact the world — do good. But after college I ended up working in the tech industry, partly because that was the pitch for how to change the world back then. Obama had just gotten elected, things seemed optimistic, and I thought I’d come and work on big stuff in San Francisco in 2009. I’m proud of the stuff I built in tech. It was a fun time, but what I really saw was: This did not seem like the big answer to the big problems that we were facing as a society. And especially if you live in San Francisco, you see the effects of inequality and unaffordability all around you.
So I quit, trying to figure out what I can do to make some sort of positive impact. It’s cheesy to say now, but I wrote a list: I want work on climate change, inequality and poverty.
That’s how I got my start in politics. It has been this discovery process of trying to figure out what is causing this overall feeling of decline in the country? What’s causing people’s wages to be stagnant for so long, while the costs of stuff are going up?
If our country can’t solve this stuff, we just let these problems keep festering on and on and on. We have to grapple with it. That’s part of the reason why I’ve stuck with [politics] for the last 10 years. I really think it’s possible.
Vignesh: As you wrote that list (climate change, inequality, poverty) of challenges you wanted to address, there are so many different ways to tackle those them — especially after exiting the tech world with some resources. What gravitated you toward politics and public service?
Saikat: It turns out you can make more of an impact than you think through politics. I grew up thinking politics is this other thing that’s separate from you — it’s so hard to get into, it’s kind of this messy black box.
Then I had this experience being a part of all these campaigns, which were mass-movement, people-driven campaigns. I really got a sense of how much change is possible, when you are a part of politics like that.
We did the Green New Deal stuff in 2018 at a time when I’d say ambition on climate was not big enough. A lot of the discussion was just around how do you stop fossil fuel infrastructure or how do you put a price on carbon? We were trying to introduce a new idea, trying to say we actually have to do industrial policy — build all the clean energy industries that we need to solve climate change. And we have to do it at a 10X scale of what people were pitching at the time.
We introduced the Green New Deal in a slightly hostile way. AOC did a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office. But that got a lot of media attention and it pressured people running for president to respond, including pressuring Joe Biden to respond with his Build Back Better plan. That turned into real legislation, and that was one member of Congress doing that.
I’d say the chance for really big impact is part of what drove me into public service. I have a lot of friends who work in the federal government in a lot of different stages, and they all have such a tough time staying in the private sector whenever they get burned out and quit — because the amount of impact you can have working in government is massive.
Vignesh: You are taking on a really big challenge with Nancy Pelosi, who in San Francisco is quite popular and got 81% of the 2024 vote in the district. Nationally, her popularity is obviously more split. Why take her on?
Saikat: Part of my whole theory is that there has been this long-term decline for most people in America, and that’s what’s driving our politics. For most people in the country, lives are getting harder. People are working more hours to be able to afford less. This has been happening for decades, but it got supercharged after the Great Recession. That’s why you see people voting for whoever runs for president on some sweeping economic change, whether that’s Barack Obama or Donald Trump. People are really open to what the change looks like, clearly, because people vote for Obama and they vote for Trump.
I think Nancy Pelosi came up in a politics that does not believe that’s true. I think she came up in a politics where her skills are really about maintaining the (Democratic) caucus, maintaining the status quo. When she ran in 1987, Republicans believed in democracy and climate change. That era of politics is done. We’re in an era where there’s really a battle for ideas to define what the next 20, 30, 40 years of politics is going to be.
How do we solve these core problems that are driving our elections? MAGA (Make America Great Again) is telling us their answer: Kick out the immigrants, stop focusing on other countries, stop all foreign aid, and that’s going to magically solve you getting worse jobs and worse housing.
We actually need a constructive vision of how to build wealth in this country and how to build a real social safety net to get cost of health care and child care to go down. I don’t think those new ideas are going to come from someone like Pelosi. As much as I respect her career, her job is not that, that’s not her style of politics. It’s to really hold the current status quo together. After we lost to Donald Trump in 2024, I heard her go on a podcast and basically make a pitch that Democrats don’t need to change — we’re doing everything fine. And I just disagree.
Vignesh: Considering the momentum in parts of the U.S. around the MAGA movement, how do you win over skeptics who say progressive politics have not necessarily worked? You think about even the context here in San Francisco: The new Mayor Daniel Lurie is more of a moderate Democrat, and in 2022, the city recalled a progressive district attorney. How do you win over voters when the momentum seems to be swinging more to the center at this time?
Saikat: I think the fundamental thing going on in the country is not so ideological — most people are not very ideological. I think it’s really about we’re going to give this government a chance and if they don’t fix the problems, we’re going to give someone else a chance. It’s anti-establishment. It’s about change versus status quo.
What I saw when I worked in Congress was real division. The Democratic Party was also not really progressive vs. moderate. It was people who wanted to do stuff, fight and push for things, and people who wanted to be cautious and not do anything. Now people are talking about fighters versus folders, but it was like inaction versus action.
We need to embrace a Democratic Party that’s going to try to do things. What I learned is most Democratic Party politicians believe political capital is a set thing: You go in with this battery of political capital, and every time you do something, it gets less and less. So you do as little as possible, because every time you do something, you might piss off your donors, you might piss off some people.
I’d say the political capital for someone like FDR (Franklin D. Roosevelt), who was a popular president, was the opposite. It was: I’m going to continuously make a show of trying stuff, and if it fails, who cares? Move on. Bold, persistent experimentation, until we get the job done, until we solve the problems. That is what we need to return back to if we have any hope of solving these large, systemic problems.
Vignesh: As a member of Congress, it will involve all sorts of compromise. How do you think about potentially making progress, pushing things forward, staying true to your values and to your constituents, while actually getting things done in Washington, D.C.?
Saikat: You can push new ideas, because at the end of the day, I just think we’re at a breaking point. We have to try to tackle these systemic problems.
Some of this stuff is really popular — bipartisan popular. When I talk about banning members of Congress from trading stock, it may sound like a minor thing, but that’s a big reason why people are losing faith in our institutions, people are losing faith in Congress and they’re voting for demagogues like Trump who run on “drain the swamp.” [Banning congressional stock trading] is an issue that polls at 90% amongst Republicans. So I would feel very comfortable going into Congress and upsetting any number of colleagues to push that issue.
There are things single members of Congress can do to force votes on issues — a discharge petition. It’s currently being used to try to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files. In the past, it has been used on things like getting civil rights out of committee and campaign finance reform.
I would do that. Most people don’t do it because it pisses off leadership. I think we’re at a point where we can’t be so worried about upsetting a few people and not solve the larger problems.
In the long run, to solve the big issues like health care and universal childcare, we are going to need a movement of people who are willing to take on the big-money interests that hold up progress.
I’m actively recruiting people to run for Congress around the country, and I think the whole Democratic Party can change. We saw Trump change the entire Republican Party as a single person. I don’t think we should do a cult personality in the Democratic Party. But I do think you could imagine a movement — hundreds of people running for Congress and someone running for president in 2028 on a real vision and platform.
Vignesh: If you were to win and head to D.C. in early 2027, you would be part of the unofficial “Samosa caucus” in Congress, as a South Asian American. What would that mean to you?
Saikat: It is good that there is some amount of South Asian representation starting to happen in Congress — both to represent folks but also because there are issues that are specific to the South Asian community that never get addressed.
As someone who would come out of San Francisco and represent Silicon Valley, I think the issue of caste discrimination and hiring here is kind of a niche issue for non-South Asians in the country, but it’s a serious issue here. I would push my colleagues to take it more seriously, because I think it is one of the issues that even the South Asian members of Congress sometimes shy away from.
The other major issue is immigration. This is one of those places where, unfortunately, I think a lot of the Democratic Party at-large is sort of reflexively becoming kind of anti-immigrant. They wouldn’t put it that way, but they’re thinking that the way to win the next election is throwing trans people under the bus, throwing immigrants under the bus, and maybe that’ll help win.
We have got to actually make the case for immigration and what a society looks like that’s growing, optimistic and welcoming people.
This issue is so connected to the larger issue of economic progress for the country. The way you get the country to accept that immigration is a source of our strength, not something that we should feel attacked by, is you get the country feeling like the future is bright and we can be welcoming.
That’s where we were in the 1970s when the parents of South Asian Americans in my generation immigrated here. In that era, it was after putting a man on the moon, building the interstate highway system, we had decades of rising income and living standards. We had these immigration offices all over the world recruiting people to come to this country. It’s how my dad got here: A friend of his took him to an immigration office in Calcutta and some nice staffer there pitched him on the American Dream.
How do we create a U.S. that’s not a fight between immigrants versus Americans who are here right now? How do we create this pluralistic society that everybody feels is better for them? It’s a win-win situation, and I think we’ve got a special responsibility to proactively be making that case.
If you’re growing as a country, you’re optimistic as a country. That’s how you start including more and more people in society. But once you start declining, it feels like a zero-sum game. That’s when these right-wing movements pop up and they start telling you, we got to cut everybody out.
Vignesh: There has been a lot of discussion of the “American Dream” and how that’s changed over the years. How do you still sell people on the American Dream today, and what is it to you?
Saikat: I think the American Dream fundamentally is that your kids are going to do better than you. That’s what has stopped happening for decades for a lot of people.
A lot of progressives focus on one piece of how to get that back, which is the essentials: universal health care, universal child care, things like that. I support all that because cost of those services have become insane, like having good public education.
But another piece of it is you’ve got to actually reinvent our society and industries constantly. We were able to have the American Dream after World War II, building up this whole industrial base. It was just like government-led investment on steroids. We’ve seen nothing like it since, and we’ve just been living off that wealth. It’s funny saying this in Silicon Valley, which is one of the few places where we have built a lot of wealth, but it’s really been concentrated in the hands of a few people.
We have to really pitch the idea that we can build jobs with good dignity and with high wages — where you don’t have to go to school for 20 years — that can provide you a solid life all across the country.
It takes work. It’s not going to happen just because of a few tariffs.
Vignesh: For years, the Indian American community has leaned Democrat. In 2024, we saw a rightward shift among parts of our communities, especially Indian American men under age 40, according to a Carnegie survey. You’re a fellow Brown guy under 40. Why do you think that’s happening?
Saikat: Among the non-Muslim Indian American community, I think part of what drives some attraction to Trump is some of the anti-Muslim rhetoric. I’ve certainly seen that among community members that I’ve talked to, who say Trump is making some sense. But you realize Trump isn’t distinguishing between you and other Brown folks.
I think part of the male-female divide is part of the larger trend of a reaction to wokeness and a lot of the media around that. Part of it is being driven by real economic anxieties: Men with degrees have higher rates of unemployment than women. They’re having a harder time in school. There’s a general anxiety happening for men in American society of what is our place.
The right is pitching an answer that I think is toxic, but is appealing to some patriarchal Brown men as sort of a return to this old culture that we also have in our history. We have to figure out both for Brown men and for men at large, how to be a man in today’s society that’s doing well and feeling secure, and also accepting women, accepting other people. It’s not about going back to this patriarchal society we had.
Vignesh: What are your thoughts on the momentum mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani has built in New York City, challenging a status quo candidate, Andrew Cuomo?
Saikat: [Mamdani] ran an incredible race — exactly the kind of race you need to run to win as an insurgent. Part of what made his campaign work was he had this focus on affordability, laser-focused on the economics. But he also talked about how to actually fix problems in the government, to make the case for investing in government.
When people hear these big programs, they just hear government waste. But I think we actually need to pitch how do universal programs tackle things like health care and child care, but also how do you actually make sure it’s effective? How do you make sure government is delivering? I think he did a very good job of doing that.
Vignesh: What has prepared you for political moments where you have to negotiate and figure out ways forward?
Saikat: Working in tech and in politics, you’re always trying to push for something and you have to recognize when you’ve got what you’ve got.
But at the end of the day, a lot of it is about just having a moral backbone —you know what you stand for and what you don’t stand for, and for the things that you want to solve, you try to get to where you’re going with persistence and gumption.
Vignesh: You’ve lived in Texas, Massachusetts and California (in addition to living in Calcutta, India for a year of childhood). What have you learned from seeing different politics in these places?
Saikat: I’ve talked to people of every political stripe my whole life, and most people at the end of the day are good people. People want to do the good thing and they want to help other people
It’s really easy when you’re in politics to start viewing our politicians as real representatives of the people — and that’s just not true. We have a kind of crazy polarized system in our Congress. People are not actually that polarized and are willing to hear out other arguments.
Even in Texas, a very Texan way of being is: I’ll disagree with you, but I’ll defend you with my life when it comes to your right to say what you want to say.
I think you just have to be willing to engage with folks where they are. There’s something about when you grow up in all these different cultures, you see different ways of living. There’s a way of living in Texas. There’s a way of living in California.
In Calcutta, it was a fun year. We had a group of 40 kids who lived in the apartment buildings who would go out and play cricket every afternoon. There’s just so much freedom as a 7-year-old there. After you have that experience and you come back to the U.S., I think you try to figure out how you can use the good parts of that and make that part of society now. It’s something I think about now when I’m raising my kid is we should have a society in San Francisco where my kid can run out and just play with their friends in the park, without parents having to worry about it. How do you accomplish that? How do you get to a place where we feel safe enough to do that, and where we feel like we can trust each other enough to do that?
Vignesh: What is your hot take on Bengali food in the Bay Area?
Saikat: It is hard to defeat Bengali food at home. People should maybe give me recommendations. I haven’t found any great Bengali food in San Francisco, but I haven’t made it down to Fremont yet.
This article was first published in redwhiteandbrown.com
