The Progressive on a Mission

At first glance, Saikat Chakrabarti, a progressive Democrat running to succeed Nancy Pelosi in Congress, calls to mind Zohran Mamdani. Like Mamdani last year, Chakrabarti is an underdog campaigning on a platform that promises affordability through expansive state subsidies. He’s a millennial whose campaign is investing heavily in punchy social-media clips. He is also the child of South Asian immigrants—though not the scion of postcolonial cultural elites. While Mamdani grew up shuttling between Morningside Heights in Manhattan and private schools in Kampala, Chakrabarti attended public schools in Fort Worth.

The parallels are suggestive but ultimately misleading. Unlike Mamdani, whose first run for office followed stints managing losing campaigns for niche New York Democratic Socialists of America candidates, Chakrabarti, 40, began his career in Silicon Valley as one of the first engineers at Stripe. By his mid-twenties, he was a self-made multimillionaire who could quit tech and volunteer for Bernie Sanders’s fledgling presidential campaign. After Sanders dropped out, Chakrabarti cofounded Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, the PACs that recruited and fielded hundreds of progressive candidates for Congress. Most lost, but the effort produced several winners—Ro Khanna, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Pramila Jayapal, Ayanna Pressley, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose 2018 campaign Chakrabarti managed and for whom he later served as chief of staff.

Chakrabarti quickly established a reputation as an insurgent force in Washington. He helped draft the original Green New Deal proposal and organized a sit-in in then–Speaker Pelosi’s office to demand a select committee to consider it. Several months later, he sparked an internecine war after tweeting that moderate Democrats who supported a border funding bill were “enabling a racist system.” Soon after, he left AOC’s office and joined New Consensus, a think tank devoted to promoting the Green New Deal and other forms of “total economic mobilization.”

Chakrabarti, then, is an experienced political operator—one who helped build much of the modern progressive movement’s institutional and ideological scaffolding. He is not a Mamdani-style influencer whose pitch consists essentially of promising free stuff with a smile.

This is not to say that his politics aren’t extreme. Chakrabarti believes, among other things, that we should abolish ICE, implement a wealth tax to pay down the national debt, and end “federal attempts to target transgender students”—apparently a reference to the Trump administration’s 2025 executive orders and regulatory actions that have rolled back transgender protections and conditioned federal education policy on compliance with its views on gender.

The core of his platform is an industrial policy outlined in “Mission for America,” a dense 77-page white paper calling for the restoration of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the independent agency that allowed the Roosevelt administration to fund New Deal loan programs without congressional approval. A new RFC, he argues, would be needed to channel billions of dollars in public subsidies into industries highlighted in the document, including EVs, steel, shipping, nuclear and hydrogen power, and aircraft. (On the last, Mission for America envisions a “moonshot-style partnership between the federal government, military, RFC, and U.S. aerospace industry to develop hydrogen-powered long-haul jets”—a long-coveted solution for decarbonizing aviation.)

Chakrabarti has been interested in sweeping industrial policy of this kind for years. Discussing the Green New Deal with reporters in 2019, he admitted that the policy “wasn’t originally a climate thing at all” but instead a “how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” His campaign literature is filled with references to the need for “total economic mobilization” and a “whole new economy.”

This orientation toward top-down industrial mobilization puts Chakrabarti at odds with the redistribution-obsessed local DSA chapter, which recently released a statement stressing that Chakrabarti “is not a DSA SF member, doesn’t identify as a socialist, and is not endorsed by our chapter,” while also noting that he had donated to candidates opposing former Supervisor (and DSA SF member) Dean Preston.

In Chakrabarti’s eyes, it also sets him apart from the Abundance movement, closely aligned with State Senator Scott Wiener, the presumed favorite in the race to succeed Pelosi. Abundance, Chakrabarti suggested on a podcast, is too narrowly focused on “procedure and zoning reform and permitting regulations” rather than comprehensive agendas calling for “massive, massive [state-led] investments.” As Chakrabarti recently told Ezra Klein, Abundance would require a kind of leadership that “capture[s] the national attention . . . make[s] a show of progress [and] call[s] out the heroes, and they use that as political capital to blow through obstacles.”

A nation filled with young adults distrustful of institutions, addicted to social media, and increasingly obsessed with gambling might respond well to this kind of symbolic politics. And Chakrabarti, who is fond of describing his financial success as the product of randomly “winning the startup lottery” in a “rigged casino economy,” may strike them as a sympathetic messenger: the self-made ultra-wealthy man who takes umbrage at the growing ranks of self-made ultra-wealthy men.

Or maybe he won’t. The campaign recently weathered its first major setback after the San Francisco Standard reported that Chakrabarti had spent years claiming a house in Maryland as his primary residence. (Chakrabarti says he purchased the home for his parents and mistakenly identified it as his own on property deeds.) It also remains unclear as to whether Chakrabarti has the “it” factor needed to reach voters. As Mamdani’s victory proved, success in today’s politics depends less on substance than social-media star power—what English writer Mary Harrington has called “the viral mandate of heaven.” This—not policy white papers—will likely determine whether Chakrabarti gains traction.

Photo by Mary F. Calvert For The Washington Post via Getty Images