Saikat Chakrabarti

Saikat Chakrabarti is the chief of staff to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the U.S. Representative from New York's 14th congressional district representing portions of The Bronx and Queens in New York City. He was named to the Politico Playbook power list to watch in 2019.

Early life and education

Chakrabarti was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas. He attended Harvard University, graduating in 2007 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in computer science.

Career

Chakrabarti worked on Wall Street, followed by eight years in Silicon Valley at a number of start-ups and founding a web design tool called Mockingbird and then serving as a founding engineer at payments processing company Stripe.

Bernie Sanders campaign and Brand New Congress

In 2015, Chakrabarti "dropped everything" to join join the early stages of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders' presidential bid. Of that decision, Chakrabarti told Rolling Stone, "I wasn't entirely sure he had all the right solutions but I knew he was talking about the right problems."

Chakrabarti became the Sanders campaign's Director of Organizing Technology and was part of the effort that created technology for grassroots supporters to collaborate on organizing events. The software helped volunteers find other volunteers who lived nearby and helped coordinate "millions" of volunteers to call into battleground states, multiplying the effort of local volunteers and staff. Chakrabarti's technological edge is credited with being "a major component in the success of Sanders’ presidential run."

In the Sanders campaign Chakrabarti worked closely with Alexandra Rojas and Corbin Trent to stage campaign events around the country. Charkrabarti told Rolling Stone that he often heard voters express strong concerns about Congress: "people would say, ‘How’s he going to get anything done? We just saw what Congress did to Obama for the last eight years, they’re gonna do the same thing to Bernie.'" As a result, in the spring of 2016, Chakrabarti (together with Rojas and Trent) co-founded the Brand New Congress political action committee, to recruit 400 new candidates for Congress. Chakrabarti told Rachel Maddow in 2016, the goal was to have unified fundraising of small donors modeled on the Sanders campaign in hopes of politicians who work for their voters rather than spend their time seeking donations. The group received many applications and supported 12 candidates, of whom only Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won a seat in Congress.

Justice Democrats

In early 2017, after Trump's election, Chakrabarti, Rojas, and Trent became less involved with Brand New Congress, and became co-founders of the Justice Democrats. Justice Democrats targeted an entrenched "corporate Democrat" in Joe Crowley. Hearing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's dynamic speaking ability sealed the deal to make her the challenger the group would support. Activist strategies mobilized by Justice Democrats contributed greatly to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's primary win, according to The Intercept.

“From day one, these volunteers started knocking doors and reaching into their own networks to expand this volunteer army, allowing us to go into election day with over a thousand volunteers willing to mobilize voters. We buttressed door-knocking with a heavy digital, phone calling, and texting strategy that targeted progressive voters in five different languages. Through this, we built a multiracial, progressive coalition of voters who had been hearing our message for a year and were excited to turn out to vote on June 26."

Before Al Franken resigned, Chakrabarti went on record to push for his resignation and expressed his support for Keith Ellison as his replacement.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chief of staff

Following Ocasio-Cortez's unexpected primary victory, Chakrabarti became her campaign manager. While her victory in the general election in a heavily Democratic district was assumed, Chakrabarti leveraged Ocasio-Cortez's spotlight to campaign for other progressive candidates across the country. After she won the November 2018 general election, she appointed him as her chief of staff.

Green New Deal

Chakrabarti led the Ocasio-Cortez staff and several progressive groups in writing the Green New Deal legislation submitted to the House of Representatives by Ocasio-Cortez and to the Senate by Ed Markey February 7, 2019. The New Yorker quotes him as saying, "We spent the weekend learning how to put laws together. We looked up how to write resolutions."

Chakrabarti expressed a vision of what Democrats should try to do while Republicans hold power in the Senate and Presidency:

“Don’t expect them to back down . . . 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. It means putting the most ambitious, the boldest, the biggest things we can, and then just build a movement around that.”

Relating that to the policies Ocasio-Cortez proposes and supports via Twitter, Chakrabarti told Brian Stelter on CNN's "Reliable Sources":

"She's able to do things very quickly because she has a pulse on where the people are."

Campaign finance issues

In February 2018, a conservative group known as the National Legal and Policy Center filed a complaint asking the U.S. Federal Election Commission to audit and investigate the group's argument that the campaign to elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the U.S. Congress in 2018 skirted campaign-finance laws by paying large sums of money for "strategic consulting" services to Chakrabarti's corporation without precise accounting of how the money was spent. David Mitrani, the attorney for the Ocasio-Cortez campaign, the political action committees with which Chakrabarti was associated, and Chakrabarti's company, said that while the payment methods may have been unconventional, that they "fully complied with the law and the highest ethical standards".

Amazon HQ2 withdrawal from Queens

In February 2018, Chakrabarti appeared as a guest on Bloomberg Business News to clarify Ocasio Cortez's role in Amazon, Inc. decision to pull its planned HQ2 from Long Island City, Queens based upon any specific animus toward the company. He stated that AOC's goal had been to see the local community more involved in discussions, but once community members joined the discussion Amazon made the decision to withdraw. Chakrabarti elaborated further that that Amazon would be welcomed to return to the negotiating table under the condition that the company engages adequately with the local communities to be impacted by the project.

Personal life

Chakrabarti has homes in the West Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan and in Maryland.

See also

• Indian Americans in New York City
• Political activism