Saikat Chakrabarti, on the phone, has been appointed chief of staff to newly-elected New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Seen here are Chakrabarti and Ocasio-Cortez after she posed for the 116th Congress members-elect group photo on the East Front Plaza of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC on November 14, 2018. (/Getty Images)
Saikat Chakrabarti, chief of staff to newly-elected New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been named among Politico’s “Power List,” of people to watch in 2019. The list, Politico says, “highlights politicians, activists and operatives across the country who are positioned to play a critical role in the political landscape leading up to 2020.”
The Fort Worth Texas native and a Harvard graduate spent nearly eight years in Silicon Valley before shifting gears. Post Harvard, after a brief stint on Wall Street, Chakrabarti went to California, where he co-founded Mockingbird, a web design tool, and then built up the product team at the payment processor Stripe.
But in 2015, he left the tech space and went to work for Bernie Sanders. After graduation, Chakrabarti wanted to start his own company, Politico says, but he was slowing getting disillusioned by the industry. “You have to decide to create the society you want to create,” he told Politico, “and that’s done through politics.”
On his decision to join Sanders’ campaign, Chakrabarti told Rolling Stone that while he wasn’t “entirely sure he [Sanders] had all the right solutions,” he knew “he was talking about the right problems.” It was at Sander’s campaign that Chakrabarti met Alexandra Rojas and Corbin Trent. All three ended up on the campaign’s “Distributed Organizing Team.” Chakrabarti told Rolling Stone that the team’s responsibilities included “harnessing any and all of the volunteer energy that existed beyond the early primary states.” They traveled around the country canvassing and leading phone-banks.
After Sander’s campaign, Chakrabarti, along with Rojas and Trent, cofounded the progressive political action committee Justice Democrats, and served as its executive director. Justice Democrats joined hands with Brand New Congress, also cofounded by Chakrabarti. Together, they aimed to recruit 400 candidates by asking people to nominate individuals from their own communities. According DC Beat, “party affiliation didn’t matter; candidates had to want health care for all, a living wage, and to want money not to rule all in politics.” They ended up with 12,000 applications, out of which 12 ran for primaries, and one won a seat in Congress: Ocasio-Cortez.
Chakrabarti told Rolling Stone that caring too much about a win ratio is part of the reason he believes the Democratic Party would never have recruited Ocasio-Cortez. “We’re OK losing 90 percent of our races, if it means that the ones we win cause the kind of shift in thinking about what’s possible — like Alexandria’s race honestly did,” Chakrabarti told the magazine. “So that’s a different way of measuring success.”
He has big policy dreams, like a “Green New Deal,” which, Politico says would tackle everything from mitigating climate change to transforming the American economy, and criminal justice reform. He wants to lay the groundwork now to make them realities. “Another thing to really do over the next two years is to basically show the American people what will be possible if the Democrats win the House, the Senate and the presidency in 2020, and that means putting our best foot forward,” Chakrabarti told Politico.“It means putting the most ambitious, the boldest, the biggest things we can, and then just build a movement around that.”
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