An India-origin political activist, Saikat Chakrabarti will contest against House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi for her San Francisco seat in the US Congress. The 30-year-old tech entrepreneur entered politics after 8 years of experience in the tech industry.
Previously, he managed the election campaign for House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and worked with Vermont Senator Benrie Sanders, as per an NDTV report.
Chakrabarti announced his candidature on Wednesday for the 2026 midterm elections on X, saying after watching Donald Trump and Elon Musk “freely unleash chaos in their illegal seizure of government”, it was clear to him that the Democratic Party needed new leadership.
“I respect what Nancy Pelosi has accomplished in her career, but we are living in a totally different America than the one she knew when she entered politics 45 years ago,” he said.
Pelosi has not announced her reelection bid yet but filed a statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission last November.
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Who Is Saikat Chakrabarti?
Chakrabarti was born in 1986 into an Indian Bengali family in Fort Worth, Texas. He graduated from Harvard University in 2007 with a Bachelor’s in computer science and later moved to California where he co-founded Mockingbird, a tech startup.
He also worked as a founding engineer for Stripe, a payment processing company.
Chakrabarti entered politics after working for nearly 8 years in tech industry. He worked for Sanders’ presidential campaign. After Sanders’ presidential bid came to an end, he founded a political action committee called the Brand New Congress with other members.
He successfuly heped Cortez in her congressional campaign for the New York seat in the US Congress working as her campaign manager and first chief of staff.
Chakrabarti has been a strong opponent of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and backs its abolition. He featured on Politico’s “Playbook Power List” 2019, which includes politicians, activists and operatives across the US likely to or positioned to play an important role in the country’s political landscape the following year.
