San Francisco Congressional Battle Has Three Different Visions for Government [View all]

A working-class voice, a policy wonk, and a champion of political revolution face off for Nancy Pelosi’s seat.

https://prospect.org/2026/05/11/san-francisco-congressional-11-district-scott-wiener-saikat-chakrabarti-connie-chan/


Saikat Chakrabarti, Scott Wiener, and Connie Chan at the San Francisco Congressional District 11 candidate forum in January 2026. Credit: Scott Strazzante/San Francisco Chronicle via AP Photo

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...........................'

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