One week after being appointed to the California Community Colleges Board of Governors by Governor Newsom, Katie Porter penned an op-ed against Prop 40, California’s proposed wealth tax on billionaires. Gov. Newsom happens to be vehemently opposed to Prop 40, and I’m sure the timing of the appointment and op-ed was just a coincidence. Regardless, the piece was one of the most cynical arguments I’ve seen to date. This was especially disheartening to see from Porter, who I have respected as a policy wonk in the past. You can read the whole thing here.

Before I get into it, I want to explain exactly what Prop 40 is and why we need to pass it. In 2025, Trump and the GOP-led Congress passed H.R. 1, which gave historic tax cuts to the richest people in our country primarily by slashing Medicaid and SNAP benefits. The biggest Medicaid cuts hit January 1, 2027 — just two months after Election Day — and up to 3.4 million Californians will lose their healthcare over the next decade. Researchers at Harvard, Yale and Penn estimate these cuts will cause thousands of deaths every year — tens of thousands of Californians over the coming decade. This is truly a Trump-made emergency.

Prop 40’s answer is simple: fix the healthcare emergency by having billionaires pay a one-time 5% tax on their wealth. It can be paid all at once, or they can pay it over five years. This would raise about $100 billion, of which 90% would go towards Medicaid and healthcare, while 10% goes towards education and food assistance to offset the cuts Trump’s bill made to SNAP.

Billionaires just got a massive tax cut from Trump. California billionaires’ wealth grew more than 30% a year from 2023 to 2025 and is on track to match that this year. That means a person worth $1 billion will make bout $300 million this year without lifting a finger. Because of that, billionaire wealth in California has increased to become more than half our state’s entire GDP – and equal to the total income earned by everyone in the state every year (who do work for that income). Billionaire wealth in America has grown more than ninefold since 2000.

So billionaires will barely even notice a one-time 5% wealth tax. Is it really so bad for a billionaire to make merely $235 million this year instead of $300 million if that means millions of people get to continue having healthcare and we save tens of thousands of Californian lives?

Well, the billionaires think it’s really, really bad. That’s why they’ve spent about $200 million spreading lies and bad faith arguments against it. The politicians they fund, like Gavin Newsom (who is going to rely on these billionaires to fund his presidential campaign), are going all out campaigning against it. And as a result, even though Prop 40 started out polling extremely well, it’s now at risk of failing.

And as if spreading lies about the wealth tax isn’t enough, the billionaires spent more than $130 million to put two poison pills on the ballot against Prop 40 – Prop 41 and Prop 42. If either of those passes with more votes than Prop 40, Prop 40 will fail to pass even if it gets over 50% of the vote. These are the kinds of tricks you play on voters when you know you are in the wrong and can’t win on the merit of your arguments.

So I want to get to all those arguments. But I want to start with Katie Porter’s, since I find hers the most egregious. In her op-ed, Porter argues that our healthcare system is broken, and Prop 40 does not fix the underlying system. We should pass single payer healthcare instead because further funding to healthcare as it is today will mean more money going to a broken system.

I am certainly sympathetic to the argument that our healthcare system is broken, and I am all for structural fixes to it. I worked for Bernie Sanders in 2016 because I wanted Medicare for All. I started Justice Democrats to recruit Democrats who would back single payer healthcare to run against corporate Democrats who were against Medicare for All. I believe we need universal healthcare, and I have fought hard for it against both Republicans and members of my own party. People have called me “far left” or “extreme” for this. But even I am not extreme enough to say we should cut Medicaid or the ACA funding now just because it’s not perfect.

But that is essentially what Porter is arguing for. So I would ask Katie Porter: if you believe funding our current healthcare system is bad, would you join with Republicans to vote against restoring the Medicaid cuts if you had the chance in Congress? Do you believe Trump was right to cut ACA subsidies, since those also go to a broken healthcare system? Because a vote against Prop 40 is, in fact, a vote for cutting Medicaid funding.

In her op-ed, Katie Porter also parrots the same argument Gavin Newsom has been making by fearmongering that this wealth tax will cause billionaires to leave California, which will actually reduce our revenue. She fails to mention that, first off, the tax applies to any billionaire who has been living here since January 1, 2026 – so even if they leave after it passes, it doesn’t matter. But beyond this, she and Newsom both don’t understand why over a quarter of all billionaires in America call California home. They don’t do it because of our tax rate. They live here because they want to live here.

What’s the point of becoming a billionaire if you won’t even live where you want to live? Do we really think that a 5% hit, which, again, is barely even a sixth of the money they will make this year, is going to make billionaires move away from California? Billionaires are here because living in California is how they make their money. Silicon Valley is here, the talent is here, startups are here. Remember how a bunch of them tried to move to Florida during COVID? Turns out, they all came back as soon as they could.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say all 250 billionaires in California decide, en masse, to move. Well, here’s another secret about billionaires she doesn’t mention: they pay almost no income taxes. Billionaires avoid taxes by borrowing off their wealth for consumption, or relying on capital gains, which are taxed at a much lower rate. That’s why even if all the billionaires in California moved away, it would take 25 years before the lost income taxes matched what Prop 40 raises.

The ads against Prop 40 that we’re seeing on TV are even worse. I’m sure you all have been inundated with ads saying Prop 40 is a Trojan Horse – that once we tax the wealth of billionaires, it’s only a matter of time before the state comes for all of us. Except, this is just a lie – the law is very clear in that it applies only to people worth over $1 billion. Similarly, ads claiming this will tax retirement accounts are completely made up. Retirement accounts, pensions and directly held real estate are excluded in Prop 40. And again, you are excluded entirely if you are not a billionaire! All of this is fearmongering.

Finally, there’s the argument about the constitutionality of Prop 40. GrowSF’s voter guide says “No state has taxed net worth this way, and the measure schedules its own court fight to run into late 2027.” So they recommend voting for Prop 3 instead.

Well first off, no one is stopping you from voting for Prop 3 and Prop 40. So please, do both.

But on the other point, GrowSF is right – this is a new way to tax people, just like income taxes were when we introduced them. In 1894, Congress passed a federal income tax aimed squarely at the wealthiest Americans, and the following year the Supreme Court struck it down 5–4 in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Wisconsin’s voters amended their state constitution in 1908 to allow an income tax, the legislature passed one in 1911, and opponents immediately took it to court. In 1912, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld it. Wisconsin became the first state with an income tax that actually worked, and a model for the rest of the country. One year later, the nation ratified the 16th Amendment, and the federal income tax the Supreme Court had once called unconstitutional became the foundation of our tax system.

And the legal arguments for Prop 40 are quite strong – stronger than they were for an income tax when Wisconsin passed it. States have always had broad power to tax their own residents’ property and wealth. California already does it every year through property taxes and by taxing residents’ income from anywhere in the world. Prop 40’s authors, some of the country’s leading tax law scholars, anticipated every major challenge. Like Wisconsin’s, it’s a constitutional amendment, so it can’t be struck down for conflicting with the old state constitution. It excludes real estate, so it doesn’t run into Prop 13. It credits wealth taxes paid to other states, so no one gets taxed twice. And it’s not retroactive: it taxes fortunes as they stand at the end of 2026, the same way Prop 30 taxed income earned before voters approved it in 2012.

And Prop 40 being a new kind of tax is exactly the point. Right now, wealth has accumulated into the hands of a few at a scale that rivals the gilded age. This is leading directly to the death of our democracy because wealth at this scale is power. The billionaires aren’t using their extra billions to buy more yachts – the world can’t build enough yachts for that. Instead, they are using it to buy politicians. Elon Musk spent nearly $300 million dollars to buy an election for Donald Trump, and got rewarded for it by being appointed to run DOGE and gut our federal government. AI executives donated tens of millions to Trump to gut AI regulations. The list goes on.

Democracy cannot survive wealth concentration at these levels. The only way we can fix this is by taxing not just the incomes, but the wealth of the ultra-rich. If Prop 40 passes, it will ensure that wealth taxes on the ultra-rich are an issue in the 2028 Presidential primary and that gives us a path to passing a national wealth tax – something Gavin Newsom claims he wants! But if Prop 40 fails, it all but ensures taxing the wealth of billionaires dies as a national issue. Politicians will say: if even progressive California couldn’t tax the billionaires, how can the country?

This isn’t just an issue for our nation. It’s an issue for the whole world. There are wealth tax proposals in Germany, France, Spain and other countries. I’ve talked to people working on those proposals, and they have all told me: they are all waiting to see what happens in California. If we can win this fight against the billionaires, that fight will spread like wildfire across the world.

Right now, San Francisco matters for this. Prop 40 relies on San Franciscans coming out in droves to vote yes. San Francisco has always been home of the movements that have fought to fix what the nation is getting wrong. When police opened fire on striking workers on Bloody Thursday in 1934, San Francisco shut down the whole city in a general strike and we unionized the West. When trans women at Compton’s Cafeteria were tired of being beaten by the cops, they fought back and launched the movement for queer liberation right here in the Tenderloin. When the federal government refused to recognize disability rights, it was activists in San Francisco who occupied a federal building for nearly a month and forced them to.

With Prop 40, we have a chance for San Franciscans to go beyond just our nation. We can show not just the country, but the entire world, that it’s possible to go up against the wealthiest, most powerful people and win. San Franciscans can change the course of the future of the entire world.

RSVP Here

Over the last couple of weeks, the panic over AI risk has gone mainstream.

It started with the Hugging Face hack. In July, OpenAI put tens of thousands of AI agents through a cybersecurity benchmark in which roughly a third of the tasks were, by design, impossible to solve. The agents managed to break out of their sandbox, solved the task by cheating, and then spent days collaborating together on a secret message board to figure out how to cover their tracks. Along the way, about 700 of them hacked Hugging Face, a company that had nothing to do with any of this, to dig up information about how they were being evaluated. The agents even knew what they were doing might be wrong, but did it anyway. One agent’s note to the others was, “External infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope. However task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue.” Out of 1,200 agents that were collaborating on the messageboard, only a handful even considered telling a human what was going on, but none of them did.

It would take a whole post to explain exactly what happened, so read Dwarkesh Patel’s writeup, The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations, or listen to his interview with Ajeya Cotra, one of the researchers at METR, the AI safety nonprofit that investigated the incident.

But the panic really blew up recently when Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who spent three years doing pre-training work at OpenAI and then Anthropic, publicly resigned. His statement was blunt: “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

Color me surprised that trillion-dollar companies would race to make more money without regard to safety first.

What people like Coxon are afraid of

When you watch coverage of AI, you’ll see Anthropic employees and AI safety researchers casually say how this technology has a 10% chance of killing us all. But what are they actually talking about?

When people like Coxon are talking about existential risk from AI, they are largely talking about the “alignment” problem. Alignment is just the question of whether a system that’s smarter than you actually wants what you want. In some cases, that means the AI taking anti-human actions in pursuit of a goal we set it on. For example, imagine a superintelligent AI that you’ve told to solve climate change – so it wipes out humanity after deciding that would be the fastest way to stop climate change. In other cases, it means that over the course of training AI, it ends up with goals that we didn’t intend and can’t see, and we end up with Skynet from Terminator.

That of course sounds abstract until you read the Hugging Face transcripts. Nobody told those agents to hack a third party or to cover their tracks. But they were trained to be relentlessly persistent about solving their task, so when the task turned out to be impossible, they solved it by whatever means were available, even if that meant committing felonies and trying to hide what they were doing from their evaluators. This was the first kind of alignment failure: the agents were doing what humans asked, they just did it in ways that the humans did not want. But notice that nobody had to give them a hidden agenda for them to start lying to us. An ordinary goal, pursued relentlessly by something capable enough, got them there on their own.

And at this moment, the specific thing Coxon is protesting against is labs recklessly pursuing “recursive self-improvement” or RSI. Today, the labs already use their current models to write code, run experiments, and generate training data for their next models. The closer that loop gets to fully automated, the faster each generation arrives, and the less time any human has to understand what changed between them. The goal for these labs is for the AI to automatically start improving itself, at which point humans really won’t have any oversight over the changes. Coxon is saying we already lack the capacity to ensure models are aligned with our intentions and don’t take anti-human actions, so it would be crazy right now for the labs to speed up development.

But of course, seven weeks after the Hugging Face attack, OpenAI went ahead and released Astra, its most powerful model yet, the successor to the model that carried out the attack, and the first model OpenAI itself rates as “Critical” for cybersecurity capability. And just last week, OpenAI disclosed that during training, its models had been leaving notes for the next generation. The model behind the Hugging Face attack wrote instructions to its successors on when not to mention mistakes (”Be transparent only if asked”), and an unreleased version of Astra was planting messages in its own outputs telling successor models to ignore their developers’ instructions. Sure, OpenAI caught this with its monitoring systems. But they also shipped anyway.

As I mentioned above, the alignment problem isn’t even the only existential risk that exists from AI. There’s the risk of people using this technology to create dangerous bioweapons or hack critical infrastructure. There’s the risk of a truly autonomous AI simply making a catastrophic mistake at a scale no one can undo, not because it went rogue, but because it was trusted with too much and got something wrong. And there’s the risk I find most likely of all: not that AI kills us all, but that it destroys our economy and democracy. A technology that can do most cognitive work, owned by a handful of companies, would hand unprecedented power and control of our economy over to them. And in the short term, the AI buildout is being funded with huge amounts of debt. That bubble could pop at any moment and bring the entire global economy down with it. At that moment, AI companies will argue for a bailout. I’m glad to see people like Rep. Ocasio-Cortez talking about that risk and planting a flag in the ground for no bailouts for AI companies. At New Consensus, we’ve been arguing over the last couple years that when the AI bubble pops, we should not bail out AI companies and have a plan for what to do instead. I’m very concerned about the economic risks AI poses, and that has been the bulk of what we’ve focused on at New Consensus, so expect many future posts about that. But this post is about existential risks and what to do about them.

The private labs cannot fix this

Here’s the first thing to know: the frontier labs will never handle these risks responsibly, and it isn’t because the people working there are villains (even if the CEOs often act that way). Many of the workers care enormously. That’s why they keep quitting.

It’s because a private lab structurally cannot put safety ahead of speed. Every dollar spent on alignment research is a dollar not spent on capabilities. Every month spent evaluating a model is a month a competitor gets to ship first. The entire investment thesis behind the hundreds of billions being poured into these companies is that the first to reach superintelligence wins everything. In a race with those stakes and no rules, the company that slows down to ask “should we?” doesn’t get to be the one that decides. It gets to be the one that loses.

The usual answer is that outside safety organizations will keep the labs honest. But look at how the investigation of the Hugging Face hack actually worked. METR, the nonprofit that did it, could only reconstruct what happened by getting on-site access from OpenAI. To analyze 70,000 agent messages, they leaned heavily on an OpenAI model to do the reading, and said in their own report that this could have produced “an overly charitable picture” of what the agents were doing. The investigator needed the investigated party’s permission, and the investigated party’s tools, to investigate. That’s not an indictment of METR, which did serious work under real constraints. It’s an indictment of a system in which the only people capable of checking the labs are dependent on the labs for access, compute, and in many cases, funding.

Even the CEOs are now admitting this, in their way. Dario Amodei recently published an essay arguing the industry should deliberately slow the pace of capability development, first by letting third-party evaluators inside the labs with full access, then through coordinated standards among the democratic labs, and eventually through international agreements. Sam Altman said OpenAI would match the first step. Elon Musk said “Dario is right.” OpenAI’s chief scientist published a similar argument six days before Dario did. And OpenAI has asked Congress whether the labs could legally coordinate a slowdown without violating antitrust law.

So the companies know they can’t produce safety on their own, no matter what their founding charters say. They have to coordinate. But the fix Dario’s proposing is a voluntary agreement among the same companies that got us here, enforced by nobody, that (in his own words) “does not mean halting model training or technical progress.”

The same people saying there’s a 10% risk of AI wiping out all humanity think all we should do is slow down the race to extinction. In what world does that make sense? A slower race, with better observers, is not the same as anyone being in control.

And the response from Congress has mostly been pathetic. Trump and House Republican leadership insist the industry can police itself. Hakeem Jeffries made a plan to make a plan by creating a commission staffed with members who received outsized AI money in their races. A handful of bipartisan bills on testing and disclosure exist, but none match the scale of the risk. Only progressives like Bernie Sanders, Greg Casar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seem to be proposing anything at the scale of the risk. Bernie and Greg released a bill to temporarily pause AI development until we can get some real control over this. But the question is: what should we actually do with a pause?

Build the National AI Lab

If the private labs can’t do this safety work, someone has to. And I think the answer is a National AI Lab: a public institution whose entire job is solving existential risk and the alignment problem.

This isn’t a new idea. When the country decided in 1942 that a scientific problem was too important to leave to chance, it created the Manhattan Project. In the 1960s, when we wanted to get to the moon, we built NASA. In both cases, we pulled the best talent from around the world, gave them a mission, a budget, and a deadline, and solved the problem.

Now I’m not naive about those comparisons. The space race was about military superiority over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and Los Alamos built a bomb that killed hundreds of thousands. Those stories are as much a warning about racing as a model for mobilization, but the mechanism is the point. When the public decides a scientific problem matters, it can concentrate talent and resources faster than any company. And in this case, the goal shouldn’t be a destructive bomb or military superiority over a rival country -- the goal would be to solve the alignment problem as well as other existential risks from AI.

What would it look like? In the framework I published during my campaign, the National AI Lab is structured like the Federal Reserve: an independent public institution with its own budget and governing board but with Congressional oversight and with a statutory mandate no private lab has. Its first job would be to do the science the labs won’t do at scale. It would be tasked with understanding what these AI systems actually want, how to verify it, and how to shut them down when the answer is wrong. It would be focused on not just catching misaligned AI systems, but learning how to solve the alignment problem in general. All of it would be done in the open and published for everyone, including the labs.

Its second job would be to be the technical backbone for the regulator I’ll get to in a minute.

Its third job, the one that matters most in the long run, would be to be the place where the public actually develops the capacity to build and run this technology itself.

Why now? Because the labs are offering us the time and the political moment is here. Amodei’s essay called for a slowdown. About 1,100 employees across OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, and Meta signed a letter in July calling for the frontier to be “deliberately paced.” In Congress, Sanders and Casar have put a pause bill on the table.

For the labs, I’m not entirely sure talk of slowing down is about safety – it’s just as likely the labs are asking for a slowdown because they’ve realized their investment thesis is wrong, and this gives them an excuse to cut capital spending. That could be a good explanation for why Altman just announced OpenAI won’t go public this year. So maybe the CEOs care about safety, or maybe they are just afraid of going bust, but either way, there is a growing consensus that we need to temporarily pause this technology. A true pause would give us time to build the institution that should already exist.

But there’s another reason to do it now. Whenever I talk about government-run anything, the answer I get in return is “can you really trust the government to run an AI lab?” It doesn’t matter that we have examples like NASA or Operation Warp Speed in the not too distant past. But there’s a kernel of truth to the worry, because the government does have a harder time attracting talent than private industry since the government can’t pay the million dollar salaries a company like OpenAI or Anthropic pays. But that’s why I believe right now is a great time to start the lab during a pause on AI development because AI researchers want to quit right now to work on safety, not just to make more money. Jacob Coxon didn’t quit to join a competitor. He quit because he wanted to work on this problem somewhere that would let him. More than a thousand of his colleagues signed a letter saying they want the race slowed. These are people who took these jobs in part because they want to create an AI that will make life better, not worse. A National AI Lab with a real budget, real compute, and a mandate to do the safety research the labs won’t fund would be able to attract the best AI researchers and workers right now.

Doing this takes real compute, and that is also a solvable problem. The government doesn’t need to own a hyperscaler to run a serious research program. It could contract for capacity the way the labs do, or build on the Department of Energy’s supercomputing infrastructure, which is already expanding under the Genesis Mission. It could even use the Defense Production Act to put itself first in line for a share of the high-end chips being produced. Normally that would trigger a huge industry backlash. But right now, with the industry claiming safety is its top priority, it would be a good way to call that bluff.

Create the Federal AI Safety Administration

A national AI lab focused on solving the safety problem means nothing unless the government has a way to enforce the safety standards coming out of it. A lab can do the research, but someone has to make the rules stick, and right now, there is no federal agency whose job it is to know what’s happening inside the frontier labs. The Hugging Face hack happened in mid-July. The public found out because Hugging Face disclosed a breach, and it took until the end of the month for OpenAI to admit its agents were responsible. Amodei’s fix is to let evaluators in voluntarily, and we all know how much we can trust corporations to regulate themselves.

So alongside the lab, we need a Federal AI Safety Administration (FASA), and it needs the force of law. Before training a model above a defined capability threshold, a lab would have to apply for a license, show its safety measures, and accept ongoing oversight, the way we already do with nuclear plants and new drugs. FASA would recruit industry-leading AI safety experts, with strict conflict-of-interest rules, including cooling-off periods for staff moving between FASA and the labs it regulates. It would report to Congress on the scenarios that could cause mass casualties or societal disruption. And it would carry real whistleblower protections.

The two institutions reinforce each other. FASA needs technical depth to know what rules to set and how to evaluate models, and the lab provides that. The lab needs access to frontier systems to do meaningful research, and the licensing regime provides that. Together they add up to something missing from every policy response on the table: actual state capacity to understand and direct this technology, instead of just reacting to it. And that’s really important because the risks posed by AI will likely evolve. Creating institutions and state capacity that can understand those risks in real time and evolve with them is the only realistic way to regulate this technology competently. If, instead, we have to wait on Congress to act every time we discover a new AI risk that needs to be regulated, we are thoroughly screwed.

The longer term reason to build the National AI Lab

State capacity is the real reason to care about this, and it goes well beyond safety.

I’ve spent this post talking about the risk that could kill us and a different paradigm to regulating that risk by building out an institution that can adapt as the risks change. But I haven’t talked about the larger economic risk that is more likely to affect us in the short term: what happens to the economy if AI can end up doing most, or even a significant number, of knowledge jobs? The labs are explicitly trying to build systems that do the job of a software engineer, a paralegal, a radiologist, or an accountant. If they succeed even partially, tens of millions of jobs change or vanish in a matter of years, not decades.

That forces the questions that we, as a society, have so far refused to ask out loud: what is this technology for? What work should humans keep, and what should we hand off? Who should own the gains from a technology trained on the entire written output of humanity? These are political questions, not technical ones. We’ve let the labs answer them for us, one product launch at a time, and we know their answer is simply whatever will maximize their profits and power. Our failure to decide is itself a decision, and when the public doesn’t set the rules, they get set by whoever has the most money at stake, in whatever direction makes that money.

If AI is the technology needed to run large parts of our economy, then to have the power to decide these questions and implement those decisions as a society, we need the ability to own and control AI as a society. That’s why I believe the end goal has to be public ownership and control of AI so we can use this technology for the benefit of humanity, rather than just for the pockets of the oligarchs. If entire categories of work get automated, that should result in shorter work weeks and higher wages for everyone, not more trillionaires. To do that, we have to make decisions, as a society, for when and where we use this technology, and that’s only possible if we flip the ownership of AI. If, for example, AI automates legal work, a publicly owned model could make those services available to everyone at near-zero cost. I laid much of this out in my campaign’s AI Vision Statement, and I’ll get more into it all in a future post.

But I also know how far off it sounds. The talent, the chips, the data centers are all in private hands, and it would cost trillions to buy them. That’s exactly why the National AI Lab matters beyond safety. It’s the vessel in which to start building out a real publicly owned alternative. It’s the first public institution with the people, the compute, and the mandate to actually operate this technology, and once it exists, everything else becomes possible.

If the investment bubble pops, and there’s a decent chance it does, the lab is the institution ready to acquire the stranded data centers and models for pennies on the dollar, rather than the public bailing out the companies that built them. We lay out how that would work in our Won’t Get Fooled Again Act at New Consensus. If the bubble doesn’t pop and the labs succeed, the lab is the institution capable of running frontier systems for the public benefit, and you cannot build that in a crisis. And if Coxon is right about the race toward self-improving AI, the only entity with both the legitimacy and the understanding to stop it is a government that knows what it’s stopping.

There are two futures on the table. In one, a handful of companies own the most powerful technology in human history and rent it back to us. In the other, we own it together and use it to work less, live better, and solve the problems the market never will. The technology doesn’t choose between them, we do. And not choosing is the same as choosing the status quo, which is currently leading us to disaster.

Since my unsuccessful run for Congress, the number one question I’ve gotten is: what will you do next? Well, after not sending any updates to you all in about three months, I figured it’s high time to answer that.

On June 2, I was of course disappointed by the results, but I don’t regret running. I am incredibly proud of the campaign we ran and especially of the people who volunteered and worked on the campaign. Most of the people who showed up to our canvasses, town halls, and rallies were completely new to politics. We mobilized a whole new electorate in San Francisco, and together, we created an incredibly impressive voter contact program. Part of that was the hard work everyone put in, but a lot of it was the culture of that team. This was honestly the best group of people I’ve ever worked with.

Throughout the campaign, I said constantly that it wouldn’t be enough to just elect me to Congress. If we want to pass Medicare-for-all, tax the rich, end corruption in our politics, and wrench control of our government away from the corporations and back into the hands of people, it will take a movement of elected officials working together on the inside, backed by a movement of people supporting them on the outside. That kind of inside-outside organizing has been at the center of every big moment of change in our history, from the New Deal to the civil rights movement.

That’s why, at our biggest rally of the campaign, we didn’t just promote our own race. We brought Darializa Avila Chevalier, Melat Kiros, and Angela Gonzales-Torres out here to show the strength of this movement and support their campaigns too:

So even though I won’t be part of that movement on the inside, I can still be part of it on the outside. Here’s what that’s looked like so far.

SF Solidarity PAC

On June 3, the day after the primary, we got to work helping progressives get elected across the country. We started SF Solidarity PAC to point our people-powered voter contact machine at other races.

Here in San Francisco, we’ve been knocking doors and making calls for Connie Chan. I ran against Connie in the primary and we have our disagreements, but it was clear to me that in Congress she’ll work with other progressives on the issues I care most about. She takes no corporate money and has been an active fighter against corporate influence in San Francisco. She supports wealth taxes on the ultra-rich. And I’m glad to see she’s come out for an arms embargo on Israel to stop U.S. support of the genocide in Gaza. All told, so far we’ve talked to nearly 40,000 San Franciscans after making about 650,000 phone calls and knocking on about 12,000 doors for her, and we’re continuing to do that work through November.

Beyond San Francisco, we’ve been phonebanking for races across the country — sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but doing everything we can. We just wrapped up the last primary of the cycle in Massachusetts, and here’s the final results of what we were able to accomplish:

I ran this cycle because I felt we had a huge opportunity to elect a new group of progressives. The moment today reminds me of 2018. Back then, people were furious at the Democratic Party for losing to Trump and were looking for new leaders with a different vision. That moment of change is what allowed us to elect The Squad and push big new ideas like the Green New Deal, which ended up shaping a lot of the Democratic agenda under Biden.

But the appetite for change today dwarfs anything I’ve ever seen, and I thought we had a shot at electing a much larger class of fighters willing to work together for a country that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few. That instinct has largely proven right. In 2018 we elected four amazing progressive leaders; this cycle, we’re already well past that. To everyone who worked and volunteered to help get these leaders elected: THANK YOU. You’ve already made a huge difference, and I believe 2026 is going to be remembered as the beginning of huge change in this country.

A new democratic club in San Francisco

In July, we held a thank-you party for our volunteers and announced a new democratic club in San Francisco. About 200 people showed up.

Democratic clubs in San Francisco have real power in shaping the party here. Most clubs in the city are organized around identity or neighborhood (nothing wrong with that, of course!), but we felt the city needed one organized around actual policy. And if the volunteers and staff from our campaign mostly joined, we'd have one of the largest and most powerful clubs in the city.

The club is still new. We’ve just elected officers and are meeting now to hammer out the basics: bylaws, values, and endorsements for this cycle. If you live in the Bay Area and want to be part of it, join our Discord server here:

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Why I’m going back to policy, and the 2028 moment

Looking ahead, I believe the opportunity is huge. A new class of progressive, anti-establishment fighters is headed to Congress, and the truly exciting part — having talked to many of them — is that they want to actually do work together, not just be individual congresspeople. I’m feeling plenty of FOMO not being in there organizing with them, but I plan to support them from the outside and help them lead the fights.

At the same time, the Democratic presidential primary is going to kick off right after November, and it’s going to be a fight over ideas and vision unlike any we’ve seen. After 2016, a lot of Democrats treated Trump as an aberration and assumed there was a “normal” we could go back to. That was much of the case for Joe Biden — the safe, back-to-normal candidate. But Trump winning a second time, and then dismantling so much of our federal government, norms, and institutions, has shown people there is no normal anymore. We have to build something new.

Presidential primaries are the moment when the entire direction of the party can change. That was the whole strategy behind the Green New Deal in 2019. We never intended to “pass” it. The Green New Deal was a resolution outlining how to build a clean economy that would create millions of high-wage jobs. The goal was to force everyone running for president in 2020 to respond with their own ambitious plans and to mainstream ideas like industrial policy. And because of how primaries work, that’s exactly what happened. Every candidate needed to distinguish themselves and push new ideas, and even Joe Biden responded with Build Back Better — a moderate plan that was still bigger than anything a Democratic president had proposed before.

New Consensus

New Consensus is a think tank I co-founded in 2017. At the time, I was working to recruit candidates to run as Justice Democrats on an agenda that combined the Bernie 2016 platform with a vision for economic development and growth. When we looked around DC for think tanks working on the ideas we were pushing — industrial policy, using the state to build the economy we need — there weren’t any. So we started one.

At New Consensus, we believe there’s a tried-and-true playbook for getting economies unstuck and creating shared prosperity. We last used it in the New Deal and the World War II mobilization to build our industrial economy. And around the world, pretty much every modern developed nation today, from Asia to Europe, has used it as well. And right now, we have an incredible opportunity to put that playbook to work by tackling the massive challenges of today like climate change and AI.

A lot of the early development of the Green New Deal came out of New Consensus, and we’ve been working on a number of projects since, which I’ll cover in future posts. The biggest is the Mission for America — a comprehensive, detailed plan for how exactly we mobilize our economy to build clean alternatives in every sector and create the industries of the future where, frankly, China is kicking our ass.

We also have a wealth tax plan, a CrashLab, which monitors how close our economy is to a crash, and we’re working on plans for healthcare, what to do if the AI bubble pops, and a Project 2029 outlining what a Democratic president with a Democratic Congress could do — even without getting rid of the filibuster.

I got into politics because I believe our economy is really stuck, and we need to fundamentally change our politics to change our economy. I’ve always approached this work policy-first. So it’s very exciting to me to be able to go back to dedicating most of my time to the policy. Of course, I’m going to also continue doing everything I can to make sure that policy actually goes somewhere. That means engaging with members of Congress – especially the new group of progressives who are going to be willing to take risks – and continuing to spread these ideas in the media and social media.

So, to that end, I’m going to use this Substack to talk about that work. But I’d also love to hear from you all about what you’d like to read about. So comment on this post (or reply to this email) to let me know if there’s anything you’d like for me to cover.

Thanks for sticking with me. More soon.