Saikat Chakrabarti, who previously served as chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., last month announced a primary challenge against former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., citing frustrations with Democratic leadership stifling the voices of some of the party’s most compelling young talent.
The co-founder of Brand New Congress — which helped launch “The Squad” of progressive lawmakers in Congress — and a longtime progressive activist, Chakrabarti spoke to Salon about the divide he sees among Democrats, not along ideological lines but between those willing to fight for change and those looking to preserve the status quo.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Salon: I was hoping to speak with you because of your primary challenge to Nancy Pelosi. But, more broadly, you’re the founder of Brand New Congress, which lives on through the Justice Democrats. You were the chief of staff to one of the most high-profile insurgent House Democrats in recent years, and now you’re a primary challenger to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. I was hoping you could explain your philosophy when it comes to primary challenges and what you see as their role and purpose from a voter’s perspective, in terms of getting politicians to take action on issues that people care about.
Chakrabarti: My view is, I think there’s these huge problems that most Americans have been facing for decades now. You look at most Americans’ wages, they’ve been stagnating or barely climbing up for three or four decades, and at the same time the kind of big things people used to plan their lives around—buying a house, raising a family, having childcare, getting a good education, going to the doctor—those essentials have just been skyrocketing in price. And so this is culminating in creating this huge squeeze on a big part of the American population, and people are still really stuck. And they also feel like the country is completely stuck.
The country can’t build two miles of subway in New York without taking 40 years, and we see stuff like — we’re millions of houses short — to build affordable housing, that seems impossible.
So what ends up happening is people keep voting for change. That’s Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016 and 2024 and people are open to what the change looks like, but they just keep voting for change.
And so, my big thing, I’ve been trying to push the Democratic Party to be since I started Brand New Congress and the Justice Democrats — the Democratic Party needs to have a transformative economic agenda that’ll actually convince people in America that it’ll improve their lives.
I’m talking about at a scale of what we saw post World War II, when we created the middle class. People could come out of school with a high school degree and get a $50-an-hour job at a factory. And I think the Democratic Party — I can go into their offices right now and I don’t think they see it this way. Or they sort of see this as “we just have to figure out which issues to put some small positions out on and the pendulum will keep swinging back and forth between Republicans and Democrats.” That’s sort of how politics works.
“People keep voting for change. That’s Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016 and 2024 and people are open to what the change looks like, but they just keep voting for change.”
But I think we’re just like in a completely new era where there’s this Republican Party that’s trying to do a coup of the federal government. So I think the purpose of these primary challenges — back in 2018 when we were doing them, it was a bit more to try to push the party towards more action. I see the divide in the party as not being left versus center, but really about doing something versus doing nothing, or like change or status quo or action versus inaction.
But now that the party has aged so much, and the people in charge are so out of touch that I really think we need to rebuild the party. The party’s brand is in the dumpster right now. It’s underwater by nine points amongst Democrats. To fix this trust issue, the party actually needs to have some people in it to be a new party, so that people can trust it again and get credibility again.
Why do you think people have been hesitant to launch these sorts of primary challenges in the past? You saw some of that in 2018 and saw a little bit of that in 2020, but I’d be curious to hear your opinions on how that project is going. Because there’s been some success, but I don’t think there’s been the sort of sweeping success that some people envisioned could come to the party in that moment, six, seven years ago.
I think there’s a bunch of reasons why people don’t do primary challenges. I think usually the people who tend to run for Congress normally are career politicians. They’re assumed that they’re gonna be city council members or other elected officials, and they don’t want to — there’s just sort of this conveyor belt, like a Congress person retires, and then the next in line gets it, and there’s a reshuffling of decks on what right now is the sinking Titanic.
And no one wants to ruffle any feathers amongst the serious politician class. So then you’re talking about trying to get non-politicians to run for office. And that was what the project was with Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats. Most non-political people don’t — I mean, if they’re doing something important and serious in their lives, why would they run for Congress in a seat that they’re probably going to lose, and if they’re already doing something that’s valuable and worth their time. Even if they win, it’s one person in Congress.
You kind of know once you get in, you’re not going to go make systemic change, and the whole process of running sounds awful, and you’re going to get attacked. You get smeared. So the only way we got people to run in 2018 was — we did this project that was a national project, trying to recruit people all around the country. And, you know, then they got courage from each other. They saw each other run. We thought people seeing other people running, and making the connection that if we get in there together, maybe we can push for some real change together, and that might be more important than whatever I’m currently doing in my life. But I think the better question is, why would anybody run for Congress, if you’re currently a productive, serious person in society?
As a follow-up question, I’m wondering, what in your experience, including your experience as chief of staff for AOC, has informed your decision to run?
I think the main experience I got from my time in there was that I got to see the culture of the Democratic Party up close, and described it kind of like a mix between this culture of extreme caution and big company bureaucracy. We had these chief of staff meetings every Friday, and this is when Trump was president. Something crazy was happening every week. And instead of the substance of what’s going on, what the response should be, what we should be trying to do with our offices, it would be things like: “The members are complaining that there are too many staffers going to the members on the elevator. So remember, staffers don’t go into the elevator.” It’s like TPS report style stuff from “Office Space.”
The other thing I remember really thinking is that the Republicans have the strategy of just being on the attack all the time. They’re going on every show. They’re not afraid to go out there and state their case and pitch their view of how the world works. And they pitch a story, you know, they pitch a whole story to tell Americans: “Your house is too expensive right now, you’re losing your job. All this is happening because immigrants are coming in and taking the houses and taking the jobs.” And, you know, they tell a story of American decline, whereas on the Democratic side, I think what you’re seeing right now in real time, the fear is, if you ever say something, that something might get used against you, you know.
And the more of a swing seat that you’re in, the more you’re scared of ever saying anything because everyone just has this idea of the attack ad that’ll get run against them. So the best course of action is to say nothing, not trying to pitch any sort of vision and hope the Republicans self-immolate. Maybe that’ll work right now, and maybe we’ll have a free and fair election in two or four years. But in this moment, I just really felt like that whole strategy isn’t going to cut it.
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I’m curious what you think of Democratic leadership in this moment, and whether or not you think they’re up to the task in front of them?
I don’t think they are. You know that if I thought they were, I wouldn’t be running this primary challenge. But no, I don’t think they are. Here’s another thing I’ve learned from the first time Trump was in office: They operate on these sort of set procedures and rules of how they do stuff. So Trump comes up and says something crazy, he’s gonna buy Greenland, or take over the Panama Canal. They set a press conference for a week later to address it, that no one pays attention to. It’s so hard for them to change that habit of kind of doing this proceduralism.
As a result, right now, the Democratic leaders aren’t thinking in the same way. They’re still thinking in terms of “we’re gonna just let Donald Trump become unpopular by doing stuff,” because their view is, if you do stuff, you become unpopular and then we’ll sit back and win from the backlash in the midterms.
But are they thinking through the Republicans taking over county election boards across the country? So what happens in 2026 or 2028 when, say, the Republicans lose by five seats and the seats are close? What happens if they say, “Actually, the election can’t certify there’s fraud.” Are the Democrats writing a plan for that?
Look at the way the Republicans made Hunter Biden’s laptop, a complete nonissue, into a story that everyone heard about all around the country. Or Hillary Clinton’s emails. They picked something, and they hammered it for weeks and weeks and weeks, and everyone hammered it and it broke through. And the Democrats, they sometimes try that, but with a terrible message. They should pick something that’s actually salient. Find people whose actual lives are being affected by this stuff because they have so much actual fodder. There are real people getting affected by what Trump and Elon are doing, and then take one and go on the attack, and go out your bubble.
That’s the other thing. Democrats are so afraid of going outside of the media ecosystem that they’re comfortable in. So, you know, they’re not going on Joe Rogan still. Even though everyone was discussing, “should Kamala go on Joe Rogan?” They’re still not doing it.
You know, they’re not going on all the YouTube channels. They’re not going on Fox News. They’re not going outside their bubble trying to actually persuade this other part of the country.
“They’re playing a different game. And the Republicans, unfortunately, are going faster. They’re moving too fast for them.”
But, I think there’s this other piece that I’ve alluded to. Republicans, they look at the points of implementation. I wish I had a better phrase, but they kind of go with the places where the rubber meets the road. You know, Elon Musk takes over OPM and he goes straight for the Treasury disbursement system to stop payments where they happen. Republicans, they take all these county election boards to stop the elections, where they get counted. They don’t rely on the courts. They know the courts move slowly. They dismantle USAID, and they know that by the time that whatever lawsuit blocking that goes through, everyone from USAID is gone. They’re not going to be able to hire back up. The agency is functionally defunct.
They’re doing the same thing with NLRB, the CFPB. I think the Democrats could be doing a bit more, and put the Republicans in the position of having to sue to get their way. So, one example I thought of when it happened, when Elon took over OPM, he put an email server in OPM to blast out an email to all the federal workers to start giving them orders based on the executive orders. And the funny thing was, when they put that server in, they actually didn’t do the security right, so anyone could email every federal worker anything they wanted.
So imagine if in that moment when the funding freeze happens, for example, if the congressional Democrats wrote a very official sounding email also to all the federal workers, saying, “You guys are authorized by Congress. You are not allowed to stop working. People who are in charge of the IT systems, you’re not authorized to hand over the keys to Elon Musk and for an illegal order.” Then they create a gray area, and make the Republicans sue to get their way.
You know, they’re playing a different game. And the Republicans, unfortunately, are going faster. They’re moving too fast for them.
I’m wondering what you think the optimal message would be? Part of the reason I’m curious here is because the Democrats spend a lot of time discussing their messaging but less time discussing the content of that message. I’m wondering what you think the relationship here is and whether or not this sort of messaging problem that they like to talk about is downstream of the sorts of policies that they’re willing to support?
I think there’s two things here. So there’s one form of messaging, which is, what to attack? How to message? What Trump and Elon are doing, what they’re attacking, what’s actually going on, and what’s the strategy around that. One of the policies Democrats have is they do a Democratic caucus meeting and come up with a message in this top-down way, like “quid pro quo,” you know, something that half the country probably is like, “What are you talking about?” But they’ll call it a “quid pro quo” for what Trump did with Ukraine and it doesn’t really hit.
I think the better way to do that for the attack messaging is, you see what’s already working. Everyone says there’s no, like, left-wing version of the right-wing YouTube and podcast channels. But there are all these people on social media and you can see what messages are taking off. You can see what’s sticking and that’s what the Republicans do. They have this blogosphere and podcast sphere, and those people like Steve Bannon and our new deputy secretary for the FBI. They’re messaging, and they see what sticks, and then it kind of filters up, and it ends up on Fox News, and then it goes from Fox to all the other right-wing stations, and then the politicians start using it. So that’s a good way to get bottom-up messaging that will actually work.
On the attack, the strategy right now, I think, is that you go after a bunch of Republicans who are starting to get nervous. You know, you look at the current budget deal that’s going through, a bunch of Republicans are publicly getting nervous about these deep cuts they want to make to Medicaid. So the Democrats should be working nonstop to get the attack messaging into those Republican districts right now, while working on those Republicans in the caucus to start peeling them off and start getting them to not be going along with this takeover.
You know, are you really willing to go along with an executive power grab? The executive power taking over all the powers of Congress, throwing out checks and balances. That would be an effective way in this moment to fight back but in the long run, I agree with you.
I think the problem the Democrats have is with doing a message on what they’re actually going to do. You know, their vision is downstream from fact that they it’s not just that they don’t have policies. If they don’t have a real idea or vision of what they even want to accomplish, they don’t have a coherent story. They don’t have a story to tell Americans for why their lives are the way they are? And part of this is that I don’t think they believe there’s a problem. Step one here is even acknowledging that in the lives of a vast majority of Americans, they are feeling stuck. And there’s a legitimate reason for people to want change. And I think that we saw that at the end of Biden’s term, where there was this big debate in the Democratic Party on the economy. Are people just whining for no reason? That’s kind of what the argument was about the Democratic Party. But yes, I think that’s downstream from the fact that Democrats actually need to acknowledge what the problems are and come up with a vision. Then downstream from that to figure out the messaging and how to deliver that to the American people
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