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Why do you think AOC is refusing to endorse her former Chief of Staff Saikat Chakrabarti for Nancy Pelosi’s open seat even though she's endorsed other progressive candidates in 2026?

Nancy Pelosi is retiring and the San Francisco CA-11 race is now a proxy war for the Democratic Party. Saikat Chakrabarti is running as a progressive insurgent, which is significant because he was a key architect of AOC's 2018 primary challenge to incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley. Saikat essentially built the Justice Democrats infrastructure, co-wrote the Green New Deal, and served as AOC's first Chief of Staff in Congress. However, AOC has consistently declined to endorse Saikat's congressional bid, despite enthusiastically endorsing and backing other 2026 progressive challengers like Junaid Ahmed in Illinois and Analilia Mejia in New Jersey. Today, AOC was asked directly by Drop Site News about Saikat and refused to give an endorsement: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DXNNsjhCTYG/ She not only refused an endorsement, she completed the entire interview without saying anything positive about him. The personal history between AOC and Saikat is deep but complicated. They were once a super close singular unit, but Saikat left her office in 2019 after his aggressive "outside game" tactics, including tweets comparing moderate Blue Dog and "New" Democrats to segregationists, created a political liability for her. In one heavily criticized tweet, Saikat called moderate Kansas Dem Rep. Sharice Davids (a naive American) a white supremacist: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/13/us/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-democrats.html AOC specifically distanced herself from those tweets, calling them "divisive:" https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/456706-ocasio-cortez-distances-herself-from-ex-staffers-controversial/ There are rumors that AOC actually "fired" Saikat after his inflammatory tweets, instead of him leaving on his own: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/us/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez.html The race dynamics in San Francisco add more friction. Saikat is a tech centimillionaire from being an early engineer Stripe and is currently self-funding his campaign with millions of dollars. This creates a disconnect with the grassroots brand they built together. Meanwhile, he is running against CA State Senator Scott Wiener, an establishment albeit generally progressive powerhouse. On his end, Saikat seems to have no bad blood with AOC and frequently invokes being her former Chief of Staff and an architect of the Green New Deal. He praises her constantly. Is AOC refusing to endorse because she has transitioned to an "inside game" strategy that doesn't include Saikat's brand of friction? AOC has been harshly criticized from the far-left for abandoning her progressive firebrand roots and "playing nice" with "establishment" Democrats. Is there weight to that accusation, or is AOC just playing the normal political game? What do you think is going on? submitted by /u/Original-Can-2367 [link] [comments]