Saikat Chakrabarti

“Yes, climate change is an existential threat, but there's also kind of this existential issue of why is it that as our society is progressing... things seem to be regressing and getting worse for a large number of people? Why is that happening? How do we fix that?”

“What the Bernie campaign showed us was that you could out-raise a well-funded opponent with grassroots donations, and you could out-voter-contact them, too.”

“You have to decide to create the society you want to create, and that's done through politics.”

“My personal belief in doing Brand New Congress is that the movement needs something to focus on that's constructive.”

“The reality is, our problem isn't that more people are voting Republican than Democrat - our problem is most people who would vote Democrat aren't voting.”

“Progressives think the way to win is mobilizing and convince people to vote for something.”

“For background, Brand New Congress was created in the summer of 2016 with the goal of recruiting 400 candidates to run for Congress with a national campaign and a clear set of policies they would advocate for. It was an attempt to create, as per the name, a brand new Congress.”

“Bernie is great, but we've got to keep this political revolution going.”

“We think climate change is important enough to get its own select committee. It would be in addition to the Energy and Commerce Committee's jurisdiction.”

“The job of an elected official is to communicate, to talk with constituents, to talk with the people of America, and I think Alexandria is excellent at doing that.”

“Having presidential candidates say they are supportive of the concept of doing something like the Green New Deal is amazing, but it's not sufficient.”

“It's not at all a secret that I was one of the co-founders of Brand New Congress, and we've never tried to hide our goals.”

“Similar to how 'Abolish ICE' rang the bell on this huge crisis on immigration, unifying around not taking corporate-PAC money gets everybody to pay attention to big money in politics.”