Both Corrupt Party Establishments Are In Well-Deserved Jeopardy
“Stefanik,” reported Hans Nichols yesterday, “was crushed and scrambled to reverse Trump's decision before he announced it on Truth Social… But for Trump, the margins were too close for comfort.” And it was he who handpicked the bizarre sociopath, Randy Fine, who is on the verge of losing the massively red district (R+14) to a young Berniecrat who the DCCC refuses to even acknowledge. “In explaining his decision,” wrote Nichols, “Trump undercut the NRCC line that there was no risk of the GOP losing any special elections this year. ‘With a very tight Majority, I don't want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise's seat,’ Trump said on Truth Social. Republicans are ‘afraid they will lose the special election to replace her,’ Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Thursday. Stefanik's congressional staff has mostly resigned. She surrendered her slot on the House Intelligence Committee and had one foot out of Washington… She'll have to slink back to the House and reintegrate herself into Johnson's leadership structure, even as Trump dangled the possibility of joining his administration down the line.”
Politico reported that “The decision to pull Stefanik’s nomination came as Republicans grew increasingly anxious about the race to fill the seat of National Security Advisor Mike Waltz on April 1. Polling in the district, which Trump carried by 30 points, had tightened, and the president himself is hosting a tele-town hall there to try and bail out Republican Randy Fine. An internal GOP poll from late March showed Democrat Josh Weil up 3 points over Fine, 44 to 41 percent, with 10 percent undecided, according to a person familiar with the poll and granted anonymity to discuss it. Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s pollster, conducted the survey. That result spooked Republicans and spurred them to redouble efforts to ensure a comfortable win in the district, according to two people familiar with internal conversations. Some Republican strategists said it’s not worth taking the risk of losing Stefanik’s sprawling northern New York seat, which Trump won by 20 points in 2024.”
A Josh Weil win in FL-06, Ron DeSantis’ old district, would send congressional Republicans into absolute fear mode and would end the party’s extreme reverse Robin Hood plans. Dismantling Medicaid and the Department of Education— 2 glaring examples— would suddenly be missing plenty of votes and Trump’s whole agenda would be in jeopardy. And the message to the Democratic establishment would be nearly as earth-shattering. The reactionary DCCC adamantly refused to get on board in Florida and Suzan DelBene whispered, serpent-like, to the media that a progressive like Weil has no chance to win. If he does win next Tuesday— or even comes close— Jeffries will be forced to consider shitcanning her and replacing her with a more mainstream Democrat, something he should have done after her abysmal performance in the 2024 cycle.
Yesterday, Seamus Kirst reported how Saikat Chakrabarti is ready to help lead progressives to assert themselves against the corporate Democrats who have taken over the Democratic Party and, astonishingly, lost to Trump and the MAGA movement. Chakranarti told him that after the 2024debackle he had expected the defeated Democrats “to have a big realization that, ‘Oh my Gosh. We did something wrong. We’ve got to figure out what that was. Especially when they’re confronted with the fact that Trump increased his vote share amongst a bunch of working-class coalitions and demographics.”
Instead, just days after the election, he listened to his representative in Congress, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, do a podcast interview with the New York Times where she argued against the idea that the American electorate had rebuked the Democratic Party.
“She basically made the case for how the Democrats don’t really need to change,” Chakrabarti says. “You know, that they ran a great race, did their best, and nothing needs to change. That was the first warning sign to me. I really feel like the Democrats actually need to become a party that’s fighting tooth and nail for the working class and middle class right now.”
Chakrabarti is no stranger to American politics, especially those of insurgents. The 39-year-old tech millionaire, who was a founding engineer at Stripe, first entered politics by working on Sen. Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign. He then went on to help start Justice Democrats, a progressive Super PAC, before working as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff.
Two months after hearing that Times interview, Chakrabarti watched as Trump came into office and began delivering on the far-right agenda he promised his supporters.
“My second concern right now is that Trump is sort of doing the coup that he’s been promising he’s going to do all through the election, that the Democrats warned us he was going to do all through the last election,” he said.
Chakrabarti said the muted Democratic response to Trump’s actions so far quickly made him realize, “Oh the Democrats actually don’t get it.”
He views their overall plan as waiting to rely on growing backlash to Trump and hoping the pendulum swings back in their favor so they can secure some sort of victory in the 2026 midterms or 2028 general election.
“I really believe at the end of the day, for most people in America, their lives have just been getting harder and harder,” he said. “Wages have been stagnating or barely creeping up for decades. The big expenses— housing, health care, education, child care— that stuff has been skyrocketing in cost. And the combination of these two factors has made people feel stuck for a long time. It’s making people feel like their kids are not going to have a life that’s as good as theirs, or their life’s not going to be as good as their parents.”
That feeling of stagnation and decline, Chakrabarti said, has led people to vote for change candidates in most presidential elections since 2008.
If the Democrats can’t counter with an actual transformative economic vision, Chakrabarti predicts that even if the pendulum may swing back their way next time, it will likely swing back toward Republicans the time after that, with even more extreme results.
That’s why he says he decided to primary Pelosi, who led Democrats in the House of Representatives for two decades, in California’s 11th congressional district.
“Leadership doesn’t know how to act right now tactically to stop the coup, and leadership doesn’t know or doesn’t believe that we should even have any sort of a vision to pitch to Americans for how to make their lives better,” says Chakrabarti. “And, actually, I don’t even know if they believe everything I was just saying about how, for most Americans, their lives have been getting harder and harder.”
Despite his critiques of the party and its leaders— he says explicitly that the current leadership team is not the right leadership— Chakrabarti is still quick to state how respects Pelosi’s service and accomplishments.
“I’ve talked to so many people in San Francisco now who respect Nancy Pelosi for her career, and the glass ceiling that she shattered, but they can’t believe she’s running again,” he said. “They really feel like it’s time for something new.”
Rising anger at Democratic leaders for failing to stand up to Trump is beginning to generate conversations about a potential Tea Party-esque anti-incumbent movement on the left. As such, Chakrabarti believes Democratic voters are more open to somebody new, and to change more broadly, than they would have been even two or four years ago.
Nonetheless, Chakrabarti knows this is not going to be an easy race— which he says is why he announced his campaign so early. Pelosi is a fundraising powerhouse with national name recognition and has been serving in Congress for nearly four decades.
Chakrabarti sees the length of her congressional career as a liability.
“When Nancy Pelosi first got the seat back in 1987, that was when I was one-years-old,” he says. “You could rent a place in San Francisco for a few hundred bucks a month.”
He also points out that at that period of time, the gulf between mainstream Republicans and Democrats on major issues was often much more narrow than it is today, and the overall tenor in Congress was much less polarized.
“I think Nancy Pelosi and a lot of Democrats from that generation, they grew up in that political environment, and so, they still believe any day now their Republican colleagues are going to come around and they’re going to come to their senses,” he says.
All of this, Chakrabarti argues, has left many of the Democratic leaders, including Speaker Pelosi, as being “completely out of touch” with the realities of the political environment we find ourselves in today.
…The only way forward, for Chakrabarti, is massive transformational change.
To make that argument, he harkens back to the 1930s when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was also politically battling against an authoritarian far-right, defeated their movement for decades by improving the lives of everyday Americans through the New Deal’s expansion of the social safety net.
“That’s what we need to be doing now,” Chakrabarti states before laying out a list of policy priorities— including universal guaranteed health care, raising the minimum wage, and making childcare affordable.
Beyond that, he says the bigger piece of what FDR did that often gets missed is that through a mobilization for World War II, America built up and expanded its massive industrial base.
He sees the modern day version of that as being the response the United States could be having to climate change.
“There’s this transition that’s happening globally, with or without us, towards clean technology,” he said. “It’s a $100 trillion global transition that’s going on, and it would be absolutely insane for us not to be a big part of that.” Trump, of course, wants to remove the United States from that clean energy transition.
Chakrabarti is desperate for a wave of leaders who will send the country on a shared mission to fight the climate crisis the same way FDR sent the country on a mission to both win World War II and defeat the Great Depression.
“I think Democrats need to really transform people’s economic lives, not just make people a few extra bucks,” he says.
He continues: “We need people to run all across the country who are interested in a sort of a transformative economic vision. Right now, I’m in a place where I’m just calling for people to run and to get in touch with me.”
To that end, his campaign website has a “Run With Me” tab, where he is trying to recruit and build a progressive wave.
His vision is to have a presidential candidate who runs in 2028 on a big vision who is backed up by dozens, if not hundreds, of people running for Congress on this shared vision.
“We need something new,” Chakrabarti says.
One New Deal Democrat running on the opposite side of the country is Lukas Ventouras, Nick LaLota’s Long Island opponent. “This era is ripe for a new movement, similar to what FDR ushered in,” he told us yesterday. “We live in an era where, according to United Way of Long Island, 32.5% of Long Island households fall below the set income threshold needed to live and work, equating to 184,307 households in Suffolk County, who are struggling with paying for basic necessities on a consistent basis. It is unconscionable for a society as rich as ours, to allow the average American to struggle with an unforeseen 400 dollar expenditure. Long Islanders should never have to choose between paying for medication, and putting food on their table. A New Deal like movement would empower working people nationwide, ushering in stability through a strengthened social safety net, federal jobs guarantees, Union protection through the PRO act and Card Check, and paid leave, to name a few policies.”
Ventouras explained that “This would have a transformative impact on the lives of everyday Long Islanders. The issue for Suffolk County however, is that it is mostly Represented by Nick LaLota, who, along with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, is seemingly doing everything he can to make the cost of living crisis on Long Island that much worse. Lalota is silent as Elon illegally hacks into our treasury, and cancels social security payments, and cuts VA spending for an already woefully underfunded Northport VA. He has begun to take out ads complaining that seniors and vets are being duped, and that he never voted for measures empowering this behavior (he did) but the proof is in the pudding; the man who mentions his military service, as much as he breathes, has repeatedly sold out his veteran brothers and sisters, because he simply is too selfish and too spineless to ever stand up to Trump or Elon. I respect and admire anyone who served. I understand the sacrifices a person in the military makes to keep their citizens safe. What I don’t respect is a person who, given the experience, goes out of their way to make the lives of these same people as difficult as possible. He is an empty suit, who will never do the right thing. The CR passed, which he voted for, cut cancer research for children, medicaid and medicare, affordable housing development, all things which were providing relief to struggling Long Island families. He also loves to tout the money he has brought into this district, conveniently neglecting to mention that when the bills which provided this funding were up for a vote during the Biden administration, he proudly voted no each time. He is a complete freeloader, which is ironically what his buddies in congress claim people collecting medicare payments are. Long Island’s patience with LaLota has worn thin, and his time in office is ticking. The movement we are building on Long Island, people powered, energetic, scrappy, and based solely on bettering people's lives, which represents the grit of Suffolk county, stands in stark contrast to the Billionaire backed, swampy DC elitist focused Nick LaLota, who claims he’s about working people, but is all talk.”
As Truman said, all the great progress made for Americans was due to progressives, anathema to the likes of Nancy Pelosi. Women’s rights, civil rights, social security, Medicare, unions, child labor laws, environmental protections, you name it - all things progressives fought long and hard for. Too bad national health insurance never made it across the finish line.