Wiener, Chakrabarti, Chan Drive Pelosi Succession Race
Scott Wiener has moved into the succession race for Nancy Pelosi's seat in California's 11th Congressional District, joining Saikat Chakrabarti and Connie Chan in a contest that will stretch past the June primary. Pelosi is vacating the seat after nearly 40 years, and two of the three main candidates are almost certain to advance to the November runoff.
The district is almost entirely San Francisco, turning the race into a test of which coalition can assemble citywide support. With 11 candidates in the field, the June primary will not settle the seat.
Wiener's Castro District pitch
Wiener is trying to turn his state legislative record into a congressional argument. At a coffee shop in the Castro District, he invoked a long list of California Democrats: “Nancy Pelosi, Phil Burton, Jackie Speier, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, Willie Brown … Jerry Brown too.”
He followed that with a description of the city's political style: “The politics here are intense and brutal at times, and so San Francisco is an amazing training ground to do hardball politics, and San Franciscans demand that their elected leaders fight hard and deliver.”
His campaign also rests on policy fights already on his record. Wiener passed legislation in 2024 to crack down on pharmacy benefit manager middlemen, and this year he is carrying one of the main bills in the state legislature to prevent anticompetitive conduct from Big Tech. He also endorsed a bipartisan housing bill that some abundance types have opposed.
Chan's labor backing
Connie Chan, a San Francisco county supervisor, has built her campaign around a different set of alliances. She has endorsements from the California Teachers Association, National Nurses United, the state Working Families Party, the San Francisco Labor Council, the California Federation of Labor Unions, and the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club.
Those endorsements place Chan inside the organized labor and progressive lane of the race, while Chakrabarti is running as a progressive co-founder of Justice Democrats. The contrast matters because the field is not just choosing Pelosi's successor; it is sorting through competing views of government and who should carry San Francisco's interests in the House.
Housing, Big Tech, money
Wiener has also tried to define himself on housing. He has supported housing legislation in California that won support from the abundance faction, while expressing discomfort with investor purchases of housing. “The more we move toward mass mega-ownership, you really do get into situations where you have Wall Street pressures that end up screwing renters,” he said. “The humanity is immediately stripped out.”
That message sits alongside a financial reality in the race: Wiener has a cryptocurrency mogul running a super PAC on his behalf, while Chakrabarti is drawing on his own fortune gained from being an early-career employee at Stripe. The money, the endorsements, and the policy split now point toward a runoff fight that will decide which two candidates get a final chance to claim Pelosi's seat.
