Saikat Chakrabarti, the millionaire tech founder who helped engineer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's rise, is now running for Nancy Pelosi's former San Francisco congressional seat, and he's not shy about what comes next. In a wide-ranging Newsweek interview, Chakrabarti laid out a plan to organize primary challenges against Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, arguing that Democratic leadership has failed so thoroughly that the party's own voters have turned against it.
The former Justice Democrats co-founder framed his candidacy not as a one-off San Francisco race but as the opening move in a broader insurgency aimed at the 2026 and 2028 election cycles. His stated goal: get a dozen progressives into Congress, force votes on issues the current leadership avoids, and build enough momentum to topple the party's top two leaders.
For conservatives watching the Democratic coalition fracture in real time, the spectacle is instructive. The left's internal war is no longer a simmering disagreement about messaging. It is an open campaign to replace the party's highest-ranking officials, led by a man worth at least $167 million who made his fortune as a founding engineer at Stripe.
Chakrabarti's case against Democratic leadership leans heavily on polling, and the figures he cites are grim for the party. Only 28 percent of Americans view the Democratic Party favorably, according to recent CNN/SSRS polling referenced in the interview. Republicans fare only slightly better at 32 percent. But the internal collapse is sharper: nearly 71 percent of Democrats have little to no confidence in their own party.
A December Quinnipiac University poll found that just 42 percent of Democrats approve of how their members in Congress are handling their jobs, down from 58 percent in October. Schumer's personal numbers are worse. He carries a net minus-32 favorability rating among the public overall and a net minus-4 rating even among Democrats.
Those numbers help explain why Senate Democrats have quietly counted votes to remove Schumer from leadership, a development that predates Chakrabarti's campaign but fits the same pattern of institutional dissatisfaction.
Chakrabarti told Newsweek bluntly:
"The one thing people don't like more than Donald Trump is a feckless and ineffective leadership in the party."
None of this is entirely new territory for Chakrabarti. He co-founded Justice Democrats, the organization that recruited Ocasio-Cortez and helped her unseat a longtime Democratic incumbent in 2018. That model, find a deep-blue district, recruit a progressive challenger, overwhelm an establishment incumbent, is exactly what he says he wants to scale.
The difference now is the scale of ambition. He is not targeting a single obscure committee chairman. He is naming the top two Democrats in Washington and saying openly that they need to go.
The pressure on Schumer, in particular, has been building for years. Newsmax reported that progressive groups had previously warned Schumer he could face trouble with left-leaning primary voters if they believed he was capitulating rather than delivering for working families. Waleed Shahid of Justice Democrats said at the time, "Schumer will have to explain every one of his decisions to one of the most progressive primary electorates in the country."
That pressure has only intensified. Schumer's handling of legislative negotiations has drawn fire from members of his own caucus, with House Democrats openly turning on him after he cut a funding deal with Republicans.
Chakrabarti's immediate contest is for the seat Pelosi held for 34 years. His main opponent is State Senator Scott Wiener, who led in both polling and fundraising as of early 2026. Wiener had raised $2.8 million compared to Chakrabarti's $1.8 million, most of which Chakrabarti says is his own money. San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, a third candidate, had raised $175,000.
An October 2025 poll showed Wiener at 61 percent favorability, the highest among potential candidates. He holds endorsements from California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the state Democratic Party.
But Chakrabarti has attacked Wiener's donor base. He pointed to Abundant Future, a super PAC backing Wiener, and argued it is funded by Trump donors, crypto billionaires, and tech CEOs. Chris Larsen, a crypto billionaire, gave $100,000 to the PAC. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan is also listed as a top donor.
The race has turned personal. Wiener attacked Chakrabarti's residency, arguing he voted in New York while working for Ocasio-Cortez and previously listed a $1.6 million Maryland home as his residence. 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 went further, accusing Wiener of knowingly spreading a falsehood:
"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."
Chakrabarti's critique of Democratic leadership extends beyond personnel to specific legislative failures. He described a missed opportunity around ICE funding following the shootings of Renee Good, who was shot by an ICE officer, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse whom Border Patrol agents shot and killed in Minneapolis in January. Footage showed Pretti was holding only a cell phone.
The killings cost Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem her job, and polling showed 62 percent of voters said Pretti's shooting was unjustified. Chakrabarti argued that Democrats had a rare moment of leverage, and wasted it.
"That would have been the moment for Democrats to capture that national attention, hold the line on not just ICE funding, claw back the money to ICE and then use that national attention to win the battle of public opinion."
Instead, he said, they "kicked the can down the road for two weeks, passed a temporary funding measure. By that point, national attention had moved on." The episode illustrates a broader pattern that has left even centrist Democrats frustrated, Schumer has increasingly found himself sidelined in high-stakes negotiations while the White House deals with other members of his caucus.
Chakrabarti also highlighted the disconnect between Democratic voters and their representatives on defense spending. Only 3 percent of Democrats want a larger military budget, he said, yet Democrats recently passed a $900 billion defense budget with 115 party members voting in support. Anti-corruption measures such as banning congressional stock trading poll at around 90 percent across party lines, yet Congress has not acted.
The San Francisco race has also become a flashpoint on the Israel-Gaza issue. At a January debate, Chakrabarti and Chan both answered yes when asked whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Wiener refused to answer.
After backlash, Wiener posted a video reversing course: "I do believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza." Chakrabarti seized on the reversal, arguing it showed Wiener cannot be trusted to take clear positions under pressure. "Because you can't call out a genocide when the whole world sees one," Chakrabarti said, "how can we trust you in D.C.?"
NBC News polling showed 65 percent of Democrats now say their sympathies lie more with Palestinians than Israelis, though only 34 percent of Democratic primary voters say Israel will be a factor in their 2026 vote. That gap matters. It suggests the issue may animate activists without moving the broader primary electorate, a dynamic that could limit Chakrabarti's ability to use it as a wedge.
Chakrabarti made clear that his San Francisco campaign is a means, not an end. He described a strategy to build a progressive bloc in Congress that could force votes on populist economic issues and anti-corruption measures, then use that record as a springboard for a larger movement in 2028.
"By fighting on those issues, by going up against not just Republicans, but our own party leadership to force votes on those issues, we will be able to build up political capital. That is what I'm going to use to try to help recruit a larger movement going into 2028."
He also said flatly that a Democratic Congress should impeach President Trump: "We have to impeach Trump. The things he's done, the things he's said, are clearly impeachable offenses." He warned that if Democrats retake Congress and fail to hold the administration accountable, "they will lose the support of voters who put them in there."
The broader revolt against Schumer's leadership strategy is already visible. Sitting senators have backed insurgent candidates over Schumer's preferred picks, and his handpicked recruits have refused to commit to supporting him as leader.
Chakrabarti pointed to the pattern of voters swinging from Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump again as evidence that the electorate is hungry for change, any change. "They just know that the status quo is simply not cutting it," he said. He argued that 45 percent of U.S. adults now identify as independents, and that 56 percent of Democratic primary voters prefer a candidate closest to their views over a more electable one.
Conservatives should watch this fight with clear eyes. Chakrabarti is not an ally. His policy vision, impeachment, expanded government programs, hostility toward the tech wealth class he himself belongs to, sits far to the left of the American mainstream. He called figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel part of a CEO and venture capital class aligned with Trump, and described technology as "being used to just consolidate wealth and power into the hands of a few at an increasingly alarming rate."
But the fracture he represents is real. The Democratic Party's progressive wing is no longer content to grumble from the back bench. It is organizing openly to replace the party's top leaders, running wealthy insurgent candidates in safe blue seats, and building infrastructure for a generational takeover attempt.
The irony is rich. Chakrabarti made his fortune in Silicon Valley, now rails against tech billionaires, and is spending his own millions to win a seat in the city that incubated the very industry he criticizes. He calls his opponents "grifters" while self-funding a campaign that most Americans could never afford to run.
When the other side is busy tearing itself apart over who lost harder and why, the smartest move is to let them finish the job.