“I thought I could use tech to make the world a better place.”

Saikat Chakrabarti said it as a joke Thursday night at his “Change the Party” rally. But that’s more or less what happened. He made his money at digital payment company Stripe, where he was employed as its second engineer. Now a centimillionaire, he’s using his wealth to run for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat — a seat that hasn’t been open since he was a baby growing up in Texas. The June 2 primary will determine which two candidates advance to a November runoff for California’s 11th Congressional District, a seat held by Pelosi since 1987

Not everyone who showed up Thursday seemed thrilled about Chakrabarti’s wealth. But they came anyway.

Before the program began, attendees mingled with Corona Lights in hand. Katie Johnson, a Piker subscriber for four years, said she had signed up before knowing he would attend. When she found out, she called it “the icing on the cake.”

“SF politics feels a little conservative sometimes,” she said. “Saikat is the first person in a while who has gotten me excited.”

The event had generated buzz before a single person walked through the door. Former San Francisco Supervisor Matt Dorsey authored a resolution for the San Francisco Democratic Party calling on Chakrabarti to “publicly acknowledge Hamas to be a genocidal terrorist organization” and to explain why his views did not align with those of Piker, whom he described as ‘anti-American, anti-Semitic, terrorist coddling, hate-espousing.’

Increasingly, Piker is being called on to rally for progressives and mobilize younger voters across the country - but his presence at the heart of Democratic politics is causing pushback. Jonathan Cowan and Lily Cohen of the moderate Think Tank wrote recently (opens in new tab)that, “No left-wing agitator is more influential and extreme than Twitch streamer Hasan Piker… He is anti-American, anti-women, anti-Western and anti-Semitic. No Democrat should engage with him.”

Ezra Klein, in a recent essay (opens in new tab) for the New York Times took issue with this characterization and wrote of Piker, “He has called antisemitism “gross,” “immoral” and “a hate crime.” He has promoted Jon Ossoff, a Democratic senator from Georgia who is Jewish, as a 2028 presidential possibility. I have deep disagreements with Piker, but he isn’t a “Jew hater.” He’s an anti-Zionist.”

Piker, when he took to the floor, noted that not a single person had turned up outside the venue to protest his presence.

Chakrabarti — who is competing against state Sen Scott Wiener and SF Supervisor Connie Chan — has framed his campaign around a lesson he says he learned after working on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign: Beating Republicans is not enough if the Democratic Party itself remains controlled by leaders unwilling to fundamentally challenge wealth and power. In his telling, watching Sanders get sidelined by the party establishment in 2016 convinced him that changing politics would require taking on Democrats directly.

Before Piker or Chakrabarti took the mic, the program moved through a lineup of congressional candidates from outside the city who cycled through familiar progressive refrains: The rich do this while working people struggle with that; real change takes all of us; the Democratic party has lost its way. 

Jamaal Bowman — the former New York congressman censured by the House in 2023 after pleading guilty to pulling a fire alarm in a Capitol office building, and who lost his primary the following year — worked the crowd like an emcee. Except for the F-bombs he dropped as he encouraged the crowd to join him in refrains of ‘Fuck ICE’ time and again. And they did.

Then Piker came on: more relaxed, and simultaneously more awkward, than anyone who had preceded him — like someone for whom public speaking both came naturally and still felt vaguely uncomfortable. He was the smooth but shy football player; Chakrabarti was the valedictorian he’d been copying homework from.

Someone in the crowd yelled, “Fuck Israel,” and Piker said that he had to behave himself. On the podcast Pod Save America; he had recently defended earlier comments calling Hamas “a thousand times better” than Israel, saying he would vote for Hamas “every single time.” His slogan for Thursday night’s event: “We can let a thousand Zohrans bloom.” 

Chakrabarti followed Piker and cycled through his stump speech (corporate America and tech billionaires shouldn’t control politics; Medicare for All, affordable housing, clean energy…), but with more emphasis on the need to start a movement to reassert progressive values at the heart of the Democratic Party.

Among the mostly young-ish crowd, Israel was the hinge for more than a few. Nathan Selk, 27, said he’d switched his vote to Chakrabarti after Wiener declined to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide at a recent debate — Wiener has since changed his position. For this crowd, Wiener might be fine for governor, where housing politics dominate; for a national seat, they cared about foreign policy.

Ani Lopez, 20, a USF student, said she doesn’t believe in electoral politics but is supporting Chakrabarti because he’s “the best option we have.”

Nearby, friends Megan Roche, 27, and Ryan, 28 — who declined to give his last name because he works for the federal government — were ready to vote for Chakrabarti over Wiener, but declined to claim Chakrabarti was any kind of hero because of his background.

“I care about his policies,” Roche said.

“I don’t think someone with a hundred million dollars is a functioning human being on the same level as me,” Ryan added. “He’s not a real person.”