Saikat Chakrabarti, the progressive operative who helped build Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's political career, is running for Nancy Pelosi's former congressional seat in San Francisco, and he's not stopping there. He wants to organize primary challenges against Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the two most powerful Democrats in Washington.
That a co-founder of Justice Democrats and former AOC chief of staff would target his own party's top brass is not exactly a surprise. But the scope of Chakrabarti's ambition, and the bluntness of his diagnosis, tells you something about the fractures running through the Democratic coalition as 2026 approaches.
In an interview with Newsweek's Jesus Mesa, Chakrabarti laid out his case: the Democratic Party's leadership class has failed, voters know it, and the only remedy is to replace the people at the top through contested primaries.
"If we don't change the Democratic Party, we are going to keep losing elections, and we're not gonna be able to do anything for people."
He went further, taking aim at the party's broader standing with the public.
"The one thing people don't like more than Donald Trump is a feckless and ineffective leadership in the party."
Chakrabarti's complaints are not purely ideological. The polling data he's pointing to is genuinely grim for Democrats. Recent CNN/SSRS polling showed only 28 percent of Americans view the Democratic Party favorably, barely trailing the Republicans' 32 percent. Nearly 71 percent have little to no confidence in the party.
A December Quinnipiac University poll found just 42 percent of Democrats approve of how their own party's members in Congress are handling their jobs. That figure had been 58 percent in October, a 16-point collapse in roughly two months.
Then there's Schumer himself. The New York senator carries a net minus-32 favorability rating among the public overall and a net minus-4 rating even among Democrats. Those are not the numbers of a leader whose caucus is rallying behind him. They are the numbers of a man whose own base is losing patience.
As Democrats face grim polling ahead of the 2026 midterms, it's no wonder the party's left flank sees an opening to make its move.
Chakrabarti's immediate battlefield is the San Francisco congressional seat Pelosi held for 34 years before stepping aside. He's running against State Senator Scott Wiener and San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan. As of early 2026, Wiener led in fundraising with $2.8 million raised, compared to Chakrabarti's $1.8 million, most of it his own money, and Chan's $175,000.
Chakrabarti's personal wealth is substantial. He was a founding engineer at the payments company Stripe and is worth at least $167 million, Newsweek reported. That fortune gives him the ability to self-fund a campaign in one of the most expensive media markets in the country.
An October 2025 poll showed Wiener at 61 percent favorability. He holds endorsements from California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the state Democratic Party. By conventional measures, he is the frontrunner.
But Chakrabarti is attacking Wiener's donor base. He argues the super PAC backing Wiener, called Abundant Future, is funded by Trump donors, crypto billionaires, and tech CEOs. Crypto billionaire Chris Larsen gave $100,000 to the PAC, and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan is among its top donors.
The residency question has also surfaced. Wiener has attacked Chakrabarti for previously listing a $1.6 million Maryland home as his residence and for voting in New York while working for Ocasio-Cortez. Chakrabarti fired back directly.
"On the Maryland home, that's just a lie. Like, I've never actually lived in Maryland. I bought my parents a home in Maryland and I never lived there."
He added a sharper jab at his opponent: "This is honestly the kind of politics that San Franciscans are sick of, because my opponent knows it's a lie. I mean, I've met Scott Wiener several times over the last several years. He knows I've never lived there, but he's willing to lie anyway."
The race has also become a testing ground for where Democratic primary voters stand on Israel. At a January debate, Chakrabarti and Chan both answered yes when asked whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Wiener refused to answer.
After facing backlash, Wiener posted a video reversing course: "I do believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza." Chakrabarti seized on the flip, questioning how voters could trust Wiener in Washington if he couldn't answer a straightforward question in San Francisco.
NBC News polling showed 65 percent of Democrats say their sympathies lie more with Palestinians than Israelis. But only 34 percent of Democratic primary voters say Israel will be a factor in their 2026 vote. The issue is a fault line, wide but not necessarily deep enough to move elections on its own.
Pelosi's influence in Democratic politics has long shaped who rises and who falls within the party's ranks, and whoever inherits her seat will carry a symbolic weight far beyond one House district.
Chakrabarti isn't just running for one seat. He described a strategy to elect a dozen progressives to Congress in 2026 and use that bloc to force votes on issues he says poll overwhelmingly well, banning congressional stock trading, closing the revolving door between Congress and lobbying, and cutting the defense budget.
He cited figures showing anti-corruption measures like the stock-trading ban poll at around 90 percent across party lines. Only 3 percent of Democrats, he said, want a larger military budget, yet 115 House Democrats recently voted for a $900 billion defense spending package.
That gap between what Democratic voters say they want and what their elected officials actually do is the core of Chakrabarti's argument. He framed it as a leverage problem.
"They believe they have no power and that's not true. There are points of leverage where the Democrats can put up a real fight. There are areas where they can make an issue."
He pointed to the shooting of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis in January as a missed opportunity. Footage showed Pretti was holding only a cell phone. Two weeks earlier, an ICE officer had shot and killed Renee Good. Polling showed 62 percent of voters said Pretti's shooting was unjustified. The killings ultimately cost Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem her job, Newsweek reported.
Chakrabarti argued Democrats should have used the moment to hold the line on ICE funding and seize public attention. Instead, he said, they passed a temporary funding measure and let the moment slip away.
"By that point, national attention had moved on."
His longer-term vision is to build enough political capital through these fights to recruit a broader progressive movement heading into 2028. He also said a Democratic Congress should impeach Trump, hold the administration accountable, and advance a substantive agenda at the same time.
As even centrist Democrats like Rahm Emanuel have acknowledged, the party has struggled to connect with ordinary voters on the issues that matter most to them.
One of Chakrabarti's most revealing arguments concerns the psychology of Democratic primary voters. He contends that voters keep choosing "safe" candidates who then lose general elections, Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020 as the cautious pick against Trump.
A recent NBC News poll found 56 percent of Democratic primary voters prefer a candidate closest to their views on the issues, while 42 percent want a more electable candidate. Chakrabarti reads those numbers as an opening.
"Voters are very open to what economic change looks like. You see from people voting for Obama, then Trump, and then Biden, then Trump. They just know that the status quo is simply not cutting it."
He said he believes Bernie Sanders could have won a general election in 2016 or 2020, a claim that remains, at best, unprovable. Sanders ran twice on economic populism and lost twice in the primary. But the argument reveals how Chakrabarti sees the Democratic electorate: hungry for something different, held back by a leadership class that mistakes caution for strategy.
Forty-five percent of U.S. adults now identify as independents, a figure that underscores the dissatisfaction with both parties. Chakrabarti wants to channel that restlessness into a progressive takeover of the Democratic apparatus. Whether Democratic primary voters, who have historically chosen the establishment candidate, will cooperate is another matter entirely.
The internal tensions over who speaks for the party and who controls its future are not limited to San Francisco. They run through every contested primary in the country.
For Republicans, this is a spectator sport worth following closely. When the progressive left wages war against its own leadership, it exposes the contradictions that the Democratic coalition papers over every election cycle. A party where 3 percent of the base wants more military spending but 115 House members vote for a $900 billion defense budget is a party at odds with itself.
Chakrabarti is betting that the Democratic establishment is too weak to fight back. Schumer's minus-32 favorability and the party's cratering confidence numbers suggest he may not be entirely wrong about the diagnosis, even if his prescription would push Democrats further from the center.
The deeper question is whether a party that can't agree on its own leaders, its own defense policy, or its own response to a government shutdown can credibly promise to govern anything at all. Chakrabarti wants to replace Schumer and Jeffries. His opponents want to keep them. Neither side seems to notice that the voters they're fighting over left the building a long time ago.
