Candidates Vying for Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco House Seat Hold First Debate

The race to represent San Francisco in the U.S. House of Representatives is truly competitive for the first time in 38 years, after longtime congresswoman Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi announced her retirement. As the battle to represent the famously blue city heats up, the top three candidates, all Democrats, are starting to draw faint lines differentiating themselves from one another in a bid for frontrunner status.

State Sen. Scott Wiener, Supervisor Connie Chan and former tech engineer Saikat Chakrabarti took the stage on Wednesday night in the first debate in the race to win California’s 11th Congressional District seat.

The three candidates, all liberal by national standards, were in sync on many issues, from the need for more housing to stronger protections for LGBTQ people and immigrants, to better health care access and taking on MAGA Republicans.

But a few major differences and details about how the candidates would approach solving those issues emerged.

Chakrabarti, who served as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff and was part of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, gave a sharp presentation as the relative outsider of the three candidates. He supported creating a national public bank to finance HIV treatment and other priorities more sustainably.

“This is not about appropriation and funding that you have to keep fighting back and forth over. We need a permanent source of funding,” Chakrabarti said.

The San Francisco Working Families Party, the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club and the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club hosted the event. Co-moderators and journalists Joe Eskenazi of Mission Local and Cynthia Laird of the Bay Area Reporter asked the candidates how they would defend LGBTQ rights and health care.

Wiener, the only openly gay candidate, has been an outspoken advocate for gay and trans rights, having authored bills protecting trans youth at the state level. In Congress, he said he’d focus on addressing the aging population of HIV survivors and queer foster care youth, who face higher rates of homelessness.

“The federal government has been pulling back on every form of HIV funding,” said Wiener, who is considered the most moderate of the three candidates. He added that he would also push for federal civil rights for LGBTQ people. “That would be a high priority for me to make sure these programs are funded and that we stop with the contraction.”

Chan, who currently represents the Richmond District, said she would target President Donald Trump’s attempt to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and attacks on trans youth in school systems.

“We need to make safe learning environments for the trans and LGBTQ community,” said Chan, who was born in Hong Kong and moved to San Francisco’s Chinatown as a child.

Referencing her work as the city’s budget chair, Chan said she would also seek more funding for schools and community health clinics as “additional options other than health care giants.”

Each candidate listed housing as one of the top three issues they would focus on in Congress, if elected. Slight differences in their approaches to building more housing surfaced in the debate.

Wiener has developed a reputation as a housing advocate at the state level by championing several laws in Sacramento to make it easier for developers to build housing even in the face of pushback from cities. His supporters, which include groups like Yes In My Backyard, have celebrated his efforts to boost housing production, while critics have bemoaned the housing mandates he’s backed and progressives say increasing supply alone doesn’t solve affordability issues.

“We need a lot more housing of all varieties. Period. Full stop,” the former San Francisco supervisor said. “The federal government used to play a large role in housing in this country, and then it stopped right as homelessness boomed.”

Chan, who has gained support from labor groups, took a swing back at Wiener, saying there needs to be a focus on building affordable housing in particular, rather than luxury condos and other market-rate developments.

“We have to figure out how to amend and repeal the Faircloth Law… and build more middle-class and workforce housing,” said Chan, referring to a 1998 federal law that capped public housing stock and has limited funding for expanding federal housing subsidies.

The supervisor recently went to bat at the local level to preserve rent-controlled units as part of the city’s recent rezoning plan, which increased height and density limits in primarily residential parts of San Francisco. Her amendment, which aimed to prevent any rent-controlled units from demolition, failed. However, the plan does exclude buildings with three or more rent-controlled units from demolition.

“One of the best ways to solve homelessness is to make sure people can stay housed and preserve the rent control housing units we have,” said Chan, a progressive Democrat.

Chakrabarti, who, like Chan, also has the attention of progressives, also called for repealing the Faircloth Amendment and touted his own national housing plan, which he said emphasizes streamlining financing and stockpiling construction supplies in order to build the kinds of affordable housing that cutting red tape alone won’t solve.

“The first step of this is financing. I mentioned the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, this is an agency that could provide low-interest loans to developers to make sure housing gets built,” he said. “Beyond that, it could do things like stockpile lumber and steel to reduce inflation. It did that during the New Deal era. And more than that, it could actually spin off public developers to build housing that private developers aren’t gonna build.”

The starkest difference between the three candidates arrived at the very end of the debate during a round of lightning questions. While the three all agreed on banning members of Congress from owning or trading stocks, Medicare for All, and building the state’s high-speed rail without federal funding, they splintered on foreign affairs.

When asked if Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, both Chan and Sakrabarti said yes. Wiener, who is Jewish, did not raise his sign with a “yes” or “no,” eliciting boos and roars from the live audience and in online chat forums.

The candidates have six months before the primary election in June, and a general election between the top two candidates, regardless of party, will take place in November 2026.