SAN FRANCISCO – At a coffee shop in the Castro District on a gray Saturday, state Sen. Scott Wiener ran through a list of elected officials who came from this city’s often-cutthroat political scene. “Nancy Pelosi, Phil Burton, Jackie Speier, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, Willie Brown … Jerry Brown too,” he says. “The politics here are intense and brutal at times, and so San Francisco is an amazing training ground to do hardball politics, and San Franciscans demand that their elected leaders fight hard and deliver.”

Wiener wants to follow in that tradition by winning California’s 11th Congressional District, which is almost entirely composed of San Francisco, and filling the seat Pelosi is vacating after nearly 40 years. The race to replace her has been as ruthless as you might expect. But on a visit to the city where I met with all three major candidates, I found some key departures from the national narrative.

For example, Wiener’s work on housing legislation in California has won support from the abundance faction that is often at odds with progressives focused on the relentless influence of corporate power. But Wiener is also carrying one of the main bills in the state legislature this year to prevent anticompetitive conduct from Big Tech, passed legislation in 2024 to crack down on pharmacy benefit manager middlemen, and endorsed a bipartisan housing bill that some abundance types have opposed. He even expressed discomfort with investor purchases of housing. “The more we move toward mass mega-ownership, you really do get into situations where you have Wall Street pressures that end up screwing renters,” Wiener says. “The humanity is immediately stripped out.”

Most national commentary on the 11-candidate field has focused on Wiener and Saikat Chakrabarti, the progressive co-founder of Justice Democrats who wants to generate a bottom-up political revolution among a restless population dissatisfied with the status quo. Yet Connie Chan, a San Francisco county supervisor, has picked up many of the state and local endorsements you would expect from a progressive leader: the California Teachers Association, National Nurses United, the state Working Families Party, the San Francisco Labor Council, the California Federation of Labor Unions, and the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club. She believes her focus on bread-and-butter issues and support among the city’s large Asian American population can pay off.

And while the race has been described as a test between experience and rhetoric, between work horses and show horses, another factor is the obvious but too often overlooked question of Big Money. Wiener has a cryptocurrency mogul running a super PAC on his behalf, and Chakrabarti is drawing on his own fortune gained from being an early-career employee at Stripe. Sometimes in a brawl between two flavors of Big Money a less-tainted challenger can sneak through.

Two of these three will almost certainly make the November runoff, so even the idea that the June primary will settle the matter is misguided: The discourse will carry on for months. But in this race we do see a microcosm of a party that’s thinking about offering something new to voters, delivering on promises, standing up for working people, and figuring out what to do about the control of politics by those with wealth and power.

I crisscrossed the city in one weekend day to talk to each candidate and see what they’re emphasizing in their campaigns.

The Working-Class Tribune

I started my day in the Richmond District, where I lived for a few years during the first dot-com boom in the late 1990s. Then as now, the neighborhood was dominated by Asian markets and independent shops, with a heavily immigrant population. It’s a little more conservative than the rest of the city but also far more modest in income compared to elite enclaves like Seacliff to its north. That morning, I picked up a dim sum breakfast of sesame balls with red bean paste for three dollars.

Off a tree-lined street, Connie Chan’s campaign was gathering in a playground for a lit drop with the local Building Trades union. “She’s the choice of labor in San Francisco,” one of the union members, a retired trucker named Art, told me.

Chan was born in Hong Kong and settled in Chinatown with her single mom and younger brother when she was 13. At the time, she spoke no English. But she picked it up quickly, and after college she worked at community groups around the city and volunteered teaching Chinese. She entered politics as a legislative aide for a local supervisor and held numerous city jobs, including under then-District Attorney Kamala Harris. This is her second term as a county supervisor, serving as Budget Committee chair and on three other local commissions.

Despite running a distant third in most recent public polls of the race, Chan’s campaign has an answer to that: the poll excluded monolingual Chinese speakers, who are numerous in the Richmond District and across San Francisco. The campaign sees those voters as their base. A San Francisco Chronicle poll has Chan basically tied with Chakrabarti for second; with the top-two format, that would be all it would take to get her into the general election and a one-on-one matchup with Wiener. 

As union members picked up their lit, Chan bounded up to the table. It was the first of three stops for her on the day. She chatted up the crowd, including an Asian couple who brought their teenage son to canvas on his birthday. “That’s just what you want to do today, right?” Chan teased.

“I know this is a congressional race but fundamentally this is a San Francisco race,” she told me earlier in an interview. “You do see someone like me, who does not come from money, have the backing of workers and unions and is able to win.”

Throughout our conversations, Chan constantly steered the conversation toward topics that would be considered hyper-local: whether to allow cashless stores, a years-long controversy about a park abutting the ocean that closed a portion of the Great Highway and led to a supervisor recall, or the Alexandria Theater at 20th and Geary, a now-empty former movie palace that Chan worked to convert into a mixed-use apartment complex. She says voters are focused on three questions: “How can we afford life, how can we stay in San Francisco, and will we have democracy tomorrow?”

At the canvass kickoff, Chan and I talked about what she called an “illegal” war with Iran, how the war and its effect on supply chains have put pressure on local small business, and her policies on artificial intelligence (“I have two guiding principles: safety and not displacing the workforce”). As Budget chair, she created a $400 million reserve fund to backfill federal cuts to essential benefits, and a separate fund for immigrant legal services. In Congress, she wants to focus on financing affordable housing, lowering costs of health care and education with free city college as a model, and finding a path to citizenship for immigrants. 

She also related the dynamics in San Francisco to the rising oligarchy we see across the country. “There’s the PayPal mafia,” she said, referring to a group of expats from the early days of the payment processing company that included Elon Musk, David Sacks, and Peter Thiel. “Their chant is ‘Move fast and break things.’ They look at San Francisco and think, ‘How do we break you, the working people?’”

Some see Chan as the more authentic voice of the city’s left in the race. (She also has mainstream support; Pelosi hasn’t endorsed, but Sen. Adam Schiff, a key Pelosi ally, has endorsed her.) But getting that message out takes money. As of the most recent campaign finance disclosures, she is lagging far behind her opponents in fundraising. And while labor and the Asian vote are strong factions, they are only fragments of the electorate. Can she succeed?

“Only in San Francisco, someone like me can run for Congress,” she insisted. “We ran in 2020 and 2024 and won both times, running against candidates supported by billionaires and their PACs. I have that same optimism and attitude.”

At the kickoff, she put it more clearly to the crowd. “When you send Connie Chan to Congress, you are sending all working people.”

The Man Who Gets Things Done

Wiener, meanwhile, is 6 foot, 7 inches (a fact he used in his introductory ad in this campaign) and was easy to spot getting his coffee and breakfast in a café near the legendary Castro Theater. He has lived in San Francisco for almost 30 years, or what some locals would call a transplant. He worked for several LGBTQ and Democratic organizations, including the critical San Francisco County Central Committee, before being elected to the Board of Supervisors and then the state Senate. 

When running for the legislature, Wiener was told that Sacramento is a place where good ideas go to die. “I said, ‘I’m going to prove you wrong,’ and I did,” he says. “I passed over 100 laws, including some blockbusters, and I’ve defeated some of the most powerful corporations on the planet. Sometimes they defeated me … [but] when you were defeated, you went back.” 

This is Wiener’s value proposition: he’s persistent and creative enough to break through dysfunctional policymaking bodies and make progress. For a Congress that seems like it can’t tie its own shoes at times, that’s a selling point. Yet some of the fights he’s mounted have not endeared him to critics in the crucible of San Francisco politics. And Wiener leans into that. “I’m not one of those politicians that feels the need to be loved by everyone,” he says bluntly. 

Wiener’s most high-profile controversies have been on housing, where he has strived to increase supply, antagonizing resistant cities and those who see it as disproportionately deregulatory. There are deregulatory lines that he won’t cross, however. “I don’t want to see a situation where private equity is owning a huge piece of single-family homes in this country,” he said, while endorsing the stalled bipartisan federal housing bill that some in his ideological camp have condemned for forcing investor sales of so-called “build to rent” properties after seven years. While he thinks rental stock of all kinds is important, the benefits of the bill, like not requiring manufactured homes to have a chassis, matter more, he said. Wiener added that junk fees in housing were a problem requiring regulation, and it is worsened when Wall Street-aligned landlords prioritize returns for shareholders over tenants.

Much of Wiener’s legislative record has been mainstream progressive stuff: public transit funding, criminal justice reform, public health access, immigration protections, phase-out of single-use plastics, child care expansion, caps on out-of-pocket costs for insulin, bans on surprise ER billing, and a number of LGBT rights bills. He wrote the law requiring federal officers like ICE operating in the state to remove masks. When a judge tossed it out because it didn’t also apply to state officials at the request of Gov. Gavin Newsom, Wiener reintroduced it with the state ban.

He has a similar agenda for Washington and would likely be an active lawmaker with his hands in a lot of projects. He expressed to me the need to expand the Supreme Court to ensure that those laws, and other vital needs like campaign finance reform, would not be overturned. But being a progressive in America is not the same as being a progressive in San Francisco, where Wiener has faced criticism on a variety of fronts. 

After local pressure, Wiener became one of the first Jewish elected officials to call the situation in Gaza a genocide, something that led him to step down from chairing a legislative Jewish caucus. He told me he would have voted with 40 senators to block arms shipments to Israel, and that he opposes offensive weapons sales to the country; he would allow defensive weapons but Israel would have to buy them, without the use of taxpayer dollars. “It pains me to say that,” he said. “Israel is home to half of all Jews on the planet. It matters to Jews globally. And the Israeli government is an abomination, and it has been for a long time, and it has fueled instability in the region. It is making Israelis less safe.”

Closer to home, Wiener has been enmeshed in a number of controversies involving big money. Labor union SEIU un-endorsed him for his opposition to a local measure on the ballot in June called the “Overpaid CEO Tax,” which would increase taxes on businesses whose CEO is paid more than 100 times the median earnings for their employees. SEIU threw their endorsement to Chan. Wiener has also said he opposes SEIU’s statewide billionaire wealth tax, which will be on the November ballot, arguing that a one-time tax for an ongoing budget hole (in this case created by Trump administration cuts to Medicaid) isn’t practical. He has elsewhere endorsed taxing the rich by reversing the Bush and Trump tax cuts.

Wiener has billionaires in his corner, including Trump donors. Chris Larsen, CEO of blockchain company Ripple (a major Trump inauguration donor), has given $100,000 to an outside Super PAC called Abundant Future, which has thus far spent about a half-million dollars attacking Chakrabarti. Y Combinator’s Garry Tan is also a donor to that PAC. Chakrabarti has also highlighted dozens of corporate PACs who have donated to Wiener over his state legislative career. (None of them have given to his congressional campaign, where Wiener is rejecting corporate PAC money. And some have criticized Chakrabarti for supporting tech-friendly moderates in San Francisco before running for office.)

In response, Wiener said that Chakrabarti listed about 30 corporate donations out of his 10,000 donors across campaigns in the last decade-plus. “You can go around when you have no track record and cherry-pick donations,” he said. “My lifetime [Chamber of Commerce] score is 16 percent. My lifetime California Labor Fed score is 97 percent. My League of Conservation Voters score is 97-98 percent. I have one of the most pro-labor, pro-environment, pro-consumer records in the entire legislature.” 

“I have gone to war repeatedly with Big Tech,” he added. “I’ve gone to war with Big Oil repeatedly, I’ve beat them and they’ve beat me sometimes. I’ve gone to war with the health insurance industry, with the [pharmacy benefit managers]. I passed net neutrality law, that was war with the telecoms and the cable companies. And so my voting record and the work I’ve done, I stick up for people over some of the most powerful corporations in the history of the world.”

Even critics of Wiener would consider him relentless, and his theory of the case is that Democrats win by providing tangible results for families. “This has been brewing for decades, where the federal government has told the middle class and working class to go screw themselves,” he said. “There’s a handful of policies that if we enacted them the way that they should be enacted, people’s lives would be so much better … Democrats need to focus on rapidly delivering.”

The Revolutionary

Bernal Heights is at the southern end of San Francisco, and from the top of the lovely circular park you could look down on practically the entire city and the bay. About 45 volunteers had shown up here to canvas for Chakrabarti, and they were far younger than Connie Chan’s group of union members. By this point in the campaign a couple weeks ago, Chakrabarti volunteers had already knocked on 364,000 doors and talked to 128,000 voters.

“There are two futures: one where corporations own it all, and one where the people rule,” Chakrabarti told the crowd. “This work you’re doing is what makes our vision possible.”

A native Texan who has been in and out of San Francisco since 2009, Chakrabarti left Stripe and joined the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. He later founded Justice Democrats and joined the organization’s most successful recruit in 2018, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), as her chief of staff. That was a quick and turbulent tenure, and some have characterized AOC’s lack of an endorsement in the race as a signal that he was in fact fired. But he continued on devising a progressive agenda, founding a nonprofit called New Consensus that advocates for strong industrial policy and a clean energy transition.

“For decades now, we basically have had this ideology running the country, where profit alone drives the economy, and we can’t do anything about that,” he told me on the sidelines of the canvassing kickoff. “People keep voting for anybody running on sweeping economic change. They just know this is not cutting it. We need something dramatically different.”

Like everyone in the race, Chakrabarti wants to ameliorate the cost-of-living crisis and tackle official corruption in Washington and in campaigns. “They are just trying to buy votes to run our government,” he said of super PACs attacking him. But his campaign is largely powered by his fortune made as a tech engineer. About 93 percent of his $5 million campaign haul is self-funded. Wiener in our discussion emphasized that a public financing system for elections should include limits or bans on self-funding.

“I mean, it’s really a terrible system right now, right?” responded Chakrabarti, who mentioned that he has more individual small-dollar donors on his campaign, about 10,000, than all his opponents combined. “I could either do the thing Scott Wiener’s doing and spend a lot of time calling big donors for money, and frankly, they wouldn’t donate to me because my politics is one of going in there and taxing them and changing the party. Or I can put my own money in, and then I do have the freedom to do things like talk about controlling AI and taking on the crypto industry.” He said that he endorses full public financing of elections.

On the issues, Chakrabarti has focused on breaking the bipartisan foreign policy consensus, where presidents of both parties expand the military budget, project power, and inspire hatred, while Congress walks away from its responsibilities to manage war powers and rein in runaway appropriations. He wants to repurpose military assets like the Army Corps of Engineers to build domestic capacity. And he wants to end multinational exploitation of just-in-time logistics to hollow out our industrial base. He has a new AI policy that imagines a public option for the technology (one poised to buy out other assets in the event of a bubble collapse) to ensure that gains are distributed broadly, including from a wealth-sharing fund. The last one has earned him super PAC opposition from interests tied to AI.

Chakrabarti has been criticized for having only scant legislative experience and no record of achievement. But he addressed what is often a blind spot for candidates for office, the implementation part of governing, and the planning institutions (like public banks) necessary to make policy work.

He also cited his ability to build bottom-up movements that have pressured politicians on subjects like Gaza and universal health care. “A lot of these politicians are worried about primaries popping up that are going to challenge them,” he said. “At the beginning of Justice Democrats, it was like fewer than 60 people co-sponsoring Medicare for All. And we started a project to say we’re going to primary anyone who doesn’t support this. And we got it up to over 100. Threatening political power does change the political landscape faster than anything else.”

That challenge to the Democratic establishment underscores everything Chakrabarti is doing. He sees a path for mass mobilization of public resources and a mission-driven politics, similar to the New Deal in the U.S. or Asian economic development in the 1970s. It requires, in his view, use of new communication tools, leadership driving the mission, and institutions to coordinate it. And he sounded very much like Wiener in terms of the focus on delivering: “When you get the country into that mission, when you get at least half the country bought into this larger vision of where you’re going, you then have to do things that are showing daily progress.”

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David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. He co-hosts the podcast Organized Money with Matt Stoller. He can be reached on Signal at ddayen.90.