Immigrant upbringing, tech experience, and a decade of civil service

The American Dream is failing and authoritarianism is winning — and those two things are connected. The cost-of-living crisis is fundamentally why Trump is in the White House, and if living standards don't start going up again, we'll keep seeing authoritarians rise. Yet the Democratic Party keeps responding the same way it always has. Saikat is running because fixing this means making the impossible possible — and that's what he's spent his career doing, from electing the Squad to launching the Green New Deal. He's running to stand up to Trump's attacks on San Francisco and our democracy, and to finally deliver affordable housing, Medicare for All, and public power — without corporate donors in the way.

The other candidates won't criticize their own party's leadership, even when those leaders are the reason nothing gets done on issues like housing or healthcare. Saikat will. He's the only candidate in the field willing to call out Democrats by name when they put donors ahead of constituents — and the only one refusing corporate PAC and federal lobbyist money to keep that pressure honest. Business as usual won't solve the problems facing working people — we need a representative in Washington who will stand up to the status quo and fight for real change.

Because the crises facing us — climate change, the cost of living crisis, the threat of AI job displacement, rising authoritarianism — are too big to be solved by incremental policies and reforms. Saikat believes you have to meet problems at the scale they actually exist. Running on smaller, "realistic" ideas is what got Democrats to a position where they're losing voters and the underlying problems for working people only get worse. The path forward is to fight for solutions that match the size of the problem, then organize the political power to win them.

Saikat is honest that with Trump in the White House, the first term is about building power and protecting San Francisco from Trump's attacks, not passing the whole platform. Saikat is working with a dozen or so insurgent candidates likely to win alongside him to organize a caucus that withholds its votes during budget and debt-ceiling fights to force restorations of ACA, Medicaid, SNAP, and clawbacks of ICE funding, and uses discharge petitions to force floor votes on broadly popular reforms Democratic leadership won't bring up — like banning congressional stock trading. The goal is to win some fights, build political capital, and set up 2028 as the real change election.