The Scene
Saikat Chakrabarti arrived in Washington six years ago, the chief of staff to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, eager to work on the “most ambitious, the boldest, the biggest things we can.” He left eight months into that job, moving back to San Francisco where he’d lived after college, to advocate for the Green New Deal. Chakrabarti launched his own campaign for Congress last week, against former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — but he didn’t talk to Ocasio-Cortez until after.
“She had absolutely nothing to do with it,” Chakrabarti told Semafor. “I didn’t want to put her in a weird spot.”
Chakrabarti talked with Semafor recently about his decision to run, about elderly Democrats being reluctant to give up their seats — “I just don’t know if she still has it in her to do this fight” — and why he thinks it’s better to save the Democratic Party than to replace it.
This is an edited transcript of the conversation.
The View From SAIKAT CHAKRABARTI
David Weigel: What’s been the reaction in San Francisco since you launched this campaign?
Saikat Chakrabarti: It’s been largely positive. Obviously, going up against someone like Nancy Pelosi, I was expecting a bit more pushback. There are a lot of people in San Francisco who really like Nancy Pelosi. She’s been this historic figure for a long time, but she has been in there for so long, and we just had this election where the Democratic leadership just completely failed, you know, and people really recognize that we need some sort of change.
Tell me a little bit about your thought process before you did this. What was your “aha, I’ve got to” moment?
It had been building since Trump won — just, come on, I can’t believe that we lost this again. After that, I heard Pelosi go on Ezra Klein’s show, and he pressed her. How should the Democrats change? What do they get wrong? Her answer was basically that they did nothing wrong. We don’t need to change anything at all. And then I saw her play that out in practice, when she blocked AOC’s nomination for House Oversight Committee chair.
Democrats have two things going on. One is, they need to learn how to actually fight against Trump now that he’s back and is about to take the country down this really dark authoritarian road. Two, they actually need to give the country a big sweeping vision for change. Whether it was with Obama or with Trump, voters actually want sweeping change. They’re open to what that change looks like. I don’t think they’re getting it now, and Trump is going to exploit the situation to turn the country into a kleptocracy and an oligarchy to enrich himself. We need new leaders who can change the party, who are committed to actually rebuilding our institutions and our industries and communities and everything that’s been crumbling in the country. That’s going to be 1,000 times harder than tearing them down, which Trump is doing.
How has Pelosi been failing at that?
I think Nancy Pelosi doesn’t actually believe this is happening. She believes that everybody runs their own race. There is no national platform. There is no national vision of what we should do for people. It sounds good in theory, but what you end up with is 400 candidates all running with their own little messages that no one’s hearing, competing against the right, which does have this big message. This is why you can’t afford a home anymore, and this is why your lives are getting worse, and this is why your wages are stagnating, and we’re going to change stuff to fix it.
I’m curious about what you learned about this job from the time in AOC’s office. You came in advocating for a Green New Deal, a framework for ways to build an abundant economy with green energy. It rolls out, Republicans pick it apart, and Pelosi jokes about it — even if some of it makes it into the Biden agenda. What did you learn?
One thing I learned from the Green New Deal experience was that it’s really difficult for one person to change the Democratic Party. We’re looking for people to run all around the country who want to be part of a new generation of leaders who are pushing forward a big vision of rebuilding the country, and creating abundance and prosperity for everybody.
In the Republican Party, when there’s a bunch of energy and younger candidates who pop up with new ideas, they kind of embrace that. On the Democratic side, it’s a shame: When someone like AOC pops up, and she’s exciting and she’s getting attention and she’s got new ideas, you’ve got people like Nancy Pelosi just dismissing that and trying to try to minimize that and make them marginal within the party. That fundamental attitude is part of why the Democratic Party is now at an all time record low in its approval rating.
The Green New Deal was really meant to be this political intervention for the Democratic Party, to get the Democrats thinking a little differently, and realizing that you actually have to intentionally rebuild your economy. And I do think that we changed the party in some ways.
Right now, if you were in this seat, what would you be doing differently than Pelosi in opposing Trump?
There’s a bunch of ways to gunk up the works in Congress. Part of that is in the Senate, not the House, but I don’t know what Nancy Pelosi is doing. I haven’t really seen her out there advocate for much. When one party is doing an illegal seizure of the entire government and throwing checks and balances out the window, you have to start playing hardball.
There’s a second piece, which is the battle for messaging and attention. I know it’s hard, but the Democrats are letting Donald Trump, once again, completely control what everyone’s talking about. They’re just on their back foot playing defense. And look at what the Republicans did with something like Hunter Biden’s laptop or Hillary Clinton’s emails. They got this national attack going, and they just harped on it for months and months and months, and they talked about it everywhere.
The Democrats have better material than that. A billionaire is digging into the information for every CIA employee. They’re shutting Head Start programs down. They can pick one of these issues and harp on it for a month. Go on the offense. I hear Democrats ask where their Joe Rogan is — but they’re still not going on Fox News! They’re not going on all the various YouTube and influencer challenge channels on the internet. They need to actually go out there and push their message. Maybe that’s a funny idea, Nancy Pelosi going on Joe Rogan, but that speaks to why you need new leaders.
Pelosi’s investments get a ton of negative attention; there’s a whole little industry of figuring out what stocks she buys, and buying them. What impact has that had on the party?
It’s been very damaging. I don’t know if she’s actually using insider knowledge to trade or what, but it doesn’t matter. The way people see it is, she’s making money off of stock trades when she has insider knowledge. And any time there’s a bill to try to actually block it, it doesn’t go anywhere. I think that does a lot of damage to the brand of Democratic Party.
California has a top-two primary system, not primaries. So why run as a Democrat at all? Why not run outside the party?
Right now, the party looks like a failure, but I don’t think it has to be. The Democratic Party still gets about half the votes in this country. I think trying to start something completely new, outside the party, at this time, is much more of an uphill challenge than challenging Nancy Pelosi.