Battle of the exes: Former Hill staffers take on incumbents

WASHINGTON — Anger toward Donald Trump’s aggressive second-term moves — and the relatively subdued opposition mounted by many Democrats — has inspired dozens of new candidates to run for Congress. That includes a handful who know the place well: former Hill staffers.

With 2026 midterm elections still 18 months away, at least four ex-aides have already launched congressional campaigns. In California, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, looks to take on former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, while further south Rep. Brad Sherman faces a primary challenge from his onetime deputy communications director, Jake Rakov. In Illinois, Jason Friedman, once an intern under Sen. Richard J. Durbin, is running for the seat currently held by Rep. Danny K. Davis, who has yet to announce whether he will run for a 16th term. And in Maine, Jordan Wood, who was Katie Porter’s chief of staff before she left the House, hopes to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

The ex-staffers share a few aspects in common. They are all Democrats and, except for Wood, challenging an incumbent Democrat in a solidly blue district. They’re all young, at least by congressional standards. Wood, Rakov and Chakrabarti are under 40, while Friedman is the oldest at 51, still below the House median age of 57 and much younger than Davis, who is 83. And they all say that, after seeing how Washington operates up close, they want to come back to change the place.

“The main thing my time in Washington taught me is that the current Democratic Party and its leaders are not at all prepared for what is going on right now,” said Chakrabarti. “We had chief of staff meetings every Friday. I remember going to the first one thinking, ‘We’re going to come up with a strategy to take on Trump.’ And instead it was, ‘Hey did you fill out your TPS reports?’ and ‘We’re hearing complaints from the members about there being too many staff in the elevators,’ and I was like, ‘WTF.’”

During his few months as a staffer in Sherman’s office, Rakov said he came to view his boss as someone out of touch with the voters back home, too comfortable with the status quo in Washington. “My experience with working on the Hill for him, [I saw] how stuff actually gets done, and who’s there, and how to really work with other offices. He hasn’t been able to do that,” Rakov said.

The ex-aides are trying to stand in contrast to firmly entrenched incumbents who have long been eligible for Social Security. Sherman, at 70, is the youngest. He, Davis and Collins were all first elected to Congress in 1996, and Pelosi in 1987. Democrats’ relatively poor performance with younger voters in 2024 has led some Democrats to call for new blood.

A recent survey of Democratic activists by Our Revolution found huge majorities supported primarying incumbents, and other polls suggest it’s Democratic voters’ disappointment with their own party that’s driving their poll numbers into the ground. Our Revolution’s executive director, Joseph Geevarghese, said it’s not so much about age — the group that grew out of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign remains very fond of the 83-year-old Vermont senator — but fight. It just so happens, though, that a lot of the Democrats who don’t have the fire inside them have been in Washington for decades.

“People are angry with the leadership of the party for driving the party, and ultimately, our democracy, into a ditch, and they don’t feel like Democrats as currently constituted are waging an aggressive pushback against the MAGA movement,” Geevarghese said. “People want a real fight, and they don’t want the incumbents to get automatically supported. They want new blood, new energy, new leadership.”

‘Exact same talking points’

It’s not just a matter of not fighting hard enough, Rakov and Chakrabarti say. It’s that Sherman and Pelosi — who hasn’t yet said if she’ll seek a 20th full term next year — aren’t fighting effectively. Like old generals, they are stuck waging the old war of public opinion, the challengers say, making lengthy floor speeches to an empty House chamber and filling journalists’ inboxes with mostly-unread press releases, instead of talking directly to voters at in-person events and online through social media, podcasts and YouTube.

“Looking after Trump won again and seeing [Sherman] use the exact same talking points that I helped draft for him back in 2017 during Trump’s first term, and still have the same mentality about how to communicate on social media and how to advocate, he was still doing the same outdated things,” Rakov said. “This is a guy who is such a shining example of the systematic problems with our party.”

“If you give a 30-minute floor speech on Friday afternoon to an empty chamber, and you call that ‘standing up and fighting,’ you are way more out of touch than I even thought,” Rakov added.

Chakrabarti said he wants to “fix issues that led to the rise of Trump in the first place, like the stagnation of wages that’s been happening for 50, 60 years now.”

“The party thinks their main job is fundraising all day, and not fixing real problems for voters. And that won’t change unless there is a change in who makes up the party,” he said.

Friedman, who declined an interview request, has spoken fondly of his early days interning on the Hill. In a written statement, he focused on stopping Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk, saying they “are a threat to our democracy and working families, sticking people with higher costs and cutting critical protections and jobs.”

As for Wood, he isn’t challenging another Democrat, though he will almost certainly face a competitive primary. Still, he sounded similar tones, talking about living “paycheck to paycheck” as the son of a teacher and pastor. “I’m tired of waiting for the same establishment politicians to fix these problems, and I think we need new leadership.”

Some Democratic strategists have argued that the party largely failed to reach voters through new media, even as Republicans took to Joe Rogan’s podcast and other avenues to blame persistently high inflation on Joe Biden.

The politician-as-influencer persona isn’t very popular among the older set of Democrats. Senior House Democrats have often chafed at the attention Ocasio-Cortez has gotten since arriving in 2019 after unseating Joe Crowley, one of Pelosi’s top lieutenants on the caucus leadership team. Many of them rose incrementally through the political ranks, starting at some local office and learning the ins and outs of lawmaking along the way.

“Whoever serves in Congress from this district should show what they can do by community involvement or holding other elective office,” Sherman said. “Nobody who’s actually involved in the civic affairs of my district runs against me. The only people who run are [guys like Rakov who] just got off the plane from New York and rented a place in my district and announced his candidacy.”

Pelosi’s office declined a request for comment. Davis did not immediately respond, while a spokesman for Collins’ campaign said they didn’t know Wood but “look forward to debating our very different visions for Maine if he is the nominee next year.”

Implicit in Chakrabarti and Rakov’s arguments is the idea that Democrats in super-safe seats need to do more at the national level to win over voters nationally while the party remains out of power, beyond simply touting their fundraising prowess.

“I disagree with the strategy Democrats and Pelosi have, that every Democrat should run their own local race. It sounds good in theory, but the reality is that the right has a national message that is, ‘If your quality of life is down, if you can’t get a good-paying job, if you can’t afford a house, it’s because of immigrants, and Democrats focus on people like them, people not like you,’” said Chakrabarti.

“We need a national message; that’s the way to defeat the far right,” he said, adding that Democrats need to quickly deliver for voters once back in office to prove that democracy still works. “I don’t think Democratic leaders like Pelosi believe it is possible to improve Americans lives that dramatically, so we don’t even try.”