This Junior Congressman Thinks He Knows How Biden Can Win. Will Anyone Listen?

It seems voters (and, certainly, reporters) are so done with this year’s Biden-Trump 2.0 zombie matchup, despite its truly existential stakes, that they’re already looking to who may step up in 2028. That’s especially true on the Democratic side, where plenty of non-octogenarians are bidin’ (hah!) their time while still trying to suck up power and publicity.

Who’s next up from the dugout, then? Could it be one of those popular (white) governors—Phil Murphy, Gavin Newsom, Tim Walz, Jared Polis, J.B. Pritzker, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer—eagerly transforming their states into anti-Trumpist bulwarks? Could it be one of the party’s Black stalwarts—New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, Vice President Kamala Harris, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock—looking to the South Carolina primary and hoping to stanch Democratic disapproval among nonwhite voters? Or could it be someone else entirely, an unexpected leader with an unconventional résumé: a Philadelphia-born son of Indian immigrants and educators, a volunteer for Barack Obama’s first run for office and eventual undersecretary in his administration, a onetime technology attorney who advocated for affirmative action before the Supreme Court, a “progressive capitalist” on the Hill who has befriended and worked with everyone from AOC to Joe Manchin to Matt Gaetz? Could it be Silicon Valley Rep. Rohit “Ro” Khanna?

If you, like many Americans, have been tuning out from politics these days, you may not know much about the congressman from California’s 17^th District. But Ro Khanna is actually everywhere, talking about any topic in just about any region. Immigration, inflation, student debt, artificial intelligence, climate change, unionization, TikTok, Puerto Rican sovereignty, campaign financing, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cryptocurrency, young voters, the Trump trials, antitrust, cybersecurity, swing states, China, Ukraine, Yemen, manufacturing, Israel and Palestine—whatever it is, he has spoken on it. Perhaps while in South Carolina, partnering with historically Black universities; or outside the Washington Post’s headquarters, while literally standing with striking staffers; maybe while in Iowa, with a delegation of tech leaders in tow, promising new tech jobs to the postindustrial Midwest and earning an honorary local-media label as the state’s “fifth congressman”; in Wisconsin, stumping for the local Democrats hanging on to power by a thread; in Nevada, talking about voter education with university administrators; in New Hampshire, ensuring that President Joe Biden got those write-in votes for the Democratic primary; or in Michigan, to listen to the Arab voters Biden has been losing. It’s a real “everything, everywhere” approach.

Having a heightened profile is one thing. Doing something with it is another. “A lot of articles tell you about me being prolific on media or TikTok, but they miss the central theme, which is why,” Khanna tells me, calling from an Amtrak train while on his way to visit his parents (he was taking his father to a Phillies game). “The why of it is, this is what I think is necessary for national reconciliation and healing, to listen and engage people in different places where they are, to try to have some common understanding. Then, at a more and less philosophical level, it’s also what we need to do to get the message out to have President Biden win.”

Indeed, as Khanna will repeatedly tell you, he’s all in on Joe Biden’s reelection. The 47-year-old California congressman is often the one most prominently telegraphing the president’s underappreciated accomplishments, making an “affirmative” case in favor of Biden and the Democrats in 2024—not just relying on the Orange Man Bad strategy. No need to press Khanna about his down-the-road plans, by the way. He brushed away early speculation that he would run for the Senate seat vacated by the late Dianne Feinstein (who, he had repeatedly stated before her death, should have resigned much earlier) and instead helped steward the ultimately unsuccessful campaign of fellow California progressive and legendary anti-war hero Barbara Lee. But he won’t object when the Atlantic claims he “wants to be the future of the Democratic Party.” And he certainly won’t deny the endorsement of his “friend” Geraldo Rivera, when the longtime anchor pronounces on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation show that he’s “all in for Ro in 2028” and “believes he’s the future.” This, coming right after Cuomo himself reiterates that Khanna is the “now and future leader of the Democratic Party.”

Khanna may not seem like his party’s most obvious choice. He’s been in Congress only since 2017, the year everything about Washington politics as we knew it broke apart and continued to suffer major shocks (COVID, the racial justice protests, Jan. 6). He represents—and still proudly touts—the capital of Big Tech, an industry that has long lost its once-overwhelming public favor. He carries less national name recognition than his other competitors for the post-Biden Democratic crown, many of whom were jostling for the top job on the national stage back in 2020. He positions himself against the typical D.C. elites but (in classic fashion) has very much benefited from that machine. He espouses the values of working and communicating across the aisle at a moment when the other side is openly spouting its plans to undermine American democracy itself. And he presents himself as a staunch progressive and Bernie Sanders surrogate at a time when the past potency of his famous colleagues in the “Squad” has been somewhat dulled, both by the Biden administration’s co-optation (and simultaneous axing) of their agenda items, and by institutional backlash to their support for criminal justice reform and Palestinian Arabs. More formidably, Khanna continues to embrace his left-of-center position while eschewing Sandersian “democratic socialism” in favor of capitalism, and while loudly ridin’ with Biden for the 2024 campaign. At this point, he’s all but acting as “a quasi–Biden campaign official” working to “steer frustrated voters”—including college students and tech-world leaders—to the unpopular incumbent, as USA Today puts it.

It’s a delicate line he’s straddling, one only bound to become more so. There’s a lot at stake for democracy this year, something Khanna very much recognizes—but also, to put it bluntly, there’s a lot at stake for Khanna’s own burgeoning career. Because it depends on the health, power, and effectiveness of the Democratic Party he’s pitching to a disillusioned public. It also depends on whether his genuinely unique strategy of holding on to techno-lefty ideals while building bridges with disaffected voters and breaking bread with unexpected allies can hold together, to make modern-day liberalism appealing to those who are increasingly rejecting the very concept.

Ro Khanna’s parents are the embodiment of a couple who were able to achieve the so-desired “American dream”: They were part of the wave of new settlers granted entry to the U.S. by Lyndon Johnson’s immigration act, arriving at the tail end of the New Deal era. It was the next few decades that shaped the young Khanna, in a country where manufacturing jobs were decimated and shipped overseas, where formerly comfortable middle-class career paths were jumbled beyond belief, where safety nets and social support for families and everyday Americans were slashed to pieces, where capitalism was cut free of the leash of restraint and responsibility that so many old-time liberals had worked to implement.

It was also an America with some portentous innovations. It was the golden age of Wall Street, which found more and more creative ways to squeeze money out of anything. It was a post–Fairness Doctrine age, which allowed fringe far-right voices to steadily infect the national conversation. It was an America that was finally figuring out that something weird was going on with the climate and that, uh, maybe it had to do with human activity. And it was an America that made celebrities out of tech wizards like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Marc Andreessen, who all did their part to usher in a world that was more computerized and networked than ever before.

Khanna ascended through this marked by his sheer ambition—and his canny ability to figure out where the wind was blowing, networking early on with those who already were or would soon become the leaders of the Democratic Party. As Bloomberg’s Joshua Green chronicled in a 2013 profile, Khanna was inspired to look into politics as a college student at the University of Chicago, when a local community organizer told him to trek precincts with a state Senate candidate who already had “a lot of buzz around him as the future mayor.” (It was Barack Obama.) After landing an internship “fetching Diet Cokes for then-Vice President Al Gore’s chief of staff” (as the Mercury News put it), earning a degree from Yale Law School, attaining a clerkship with a Reagan-appointed judge (Morris “Buzz” Arnold, whom Khanna credited to me as helping him to “be challenged by the other side” and “become a much better writer”), and securing a Bay Area gig working in intellectual property law, Khanna made his entry into the national political sphere in a similar way to a lot of young early-aughts liberals, like Obama: protesting the invasion of Iraq, the expansion of the surveillance state, and the politicians who supported it.

In the mid-2000s, Khanna launched a primary challenge against Rep. Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor whose blue district included part of San Francisco. He lost, but his brash progressive insurgency appeared to endear him to Lantos himself, who helped Khanna extend his political network: introducing him to one Nancy Pelosi and establishing him as a local Dem fundraiser, especially in activating California’s significant South Asian American population. Obama certainly remembered Khanna after he ascended to the presidency, and he appointed the lawyer to positions in the Commerce Department and the White House Business Council, where Khanna played roles in advancing Obama’s trade deals and his burgeoning investments in green energy, with the hopes of partnering with the tech industry to advance the manufacturing of renewables and electric vehicles at home.

Khanna stayed in the Obama administration for just a couple of years. Once he left, he continued to establish a flourishing public and private network, taking positions just about anywhere: tech-industry feeder Stanford University, activist-hotbed San Francisco State University, an amply moneyed Palo Alto law firm, a Southern racial justice nonprofit, California Gov. Jerry Brown’s bureaucracy. With the backing of Obama insiders, and plenty of local buzz (as well as substantive campaign funds) from attuned Silicon Valley residents, Khanna vied again for Congress in 2014, challenging longtime Rep. Mike Honda.

Though he lost that race, he tried again in 2016, this time emphasizing his youth and embracing the growing appeal of Sanders’ economic populism. He finally beat Honda and made it to Congress, at a strange time to arrive in Washington. He earned some attention as a member of a record influx of Indian Americans elected to Congress, including fellow Californian Kamala Harris, Washington’s Pramila Jayapal, and Illinois’ Raja Krishnamoorthi. (Jayapal, for her part, fully believes that Khanna is running for president, “and we all know it.”) At the same time, Khanna’s election fell under the shadow of Sanders’ bitter dispute with Hillary Clinton, and her subsequent loss to Donald Trump.

Still, like many of his fellow freshmen from both parties—Jamie Raskin, Andy Biggs—Khanna would quickly learn how to leverage power through his position on the vanguard and a special attention to the power of media appearances. He linked with the burgeoning Justice Democrats, ascended the ranks of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, made headlines by introducing “job opportunity” legislation (a job-guarantee bill in all but name), pushed for social spending increases after Dems took back the House in 2018, endorsed the Green New Deal, earned more headlines as a steadfast voice against the Saudis’ war in Yemen, produced a privacy-focused “Internet Bill of Rights” for digital consumers, built up a network with Hollywood celebrities, and kept appearing on pretty much every network show from CNN to CNBC to Fox News to tout his brand of progressivism. On Fox, he even engaged with otherwise-reliable liberal enemies like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Dana Perino—garnering both praise and controversy for, on one hand, unapologetically pitching universal health care and, on the other, proclaiming that Both Sides could meet on common issues like bringing back manufacturing jobs. “Just like I view economic opportunity as central to bring this country together, to benefit communities that are left out, I think talking to people in different media environments is central,” Khanna says.

If there’s one message Khanna has continued to impart in the Biden era, it’s that you can be progressive and pragmatic. That it’s possible to boldly align with lefty ideals and policy planks, emphasizing the need to transform politics as usual, while still working across the aisle, finding areas of agreement, and fighting, ultimately, for the working people of America. He’ll cite the world-changing tech inventions and economic impacts of his Silicon Valley district, but he won’t shy away from proposing antitrust enforcement and wealth taxes. He’ll press Fox News about the benefits of “Medicare for all”—by citing Trump’s own book passages that endorse universal health care. He’ll quote Frederick Douglass and speak to the need of “recognizing” the United States’ historic sins while still remaining “patriotic” about “the greatest country in the world”—especially in affirming its multicultural democracy as a counterexample to Europe’s innovative and economic stagnation and a needed barrier to China’s industrial dominance and calcified autocracy. To that end, he’ll emphasize the need for a secure border while insisting we celebrate and champion immigrants—like his own parents—who came here “legally” (and will request that we take in asylum seekers, despite Biden’s recent moves to restrict their entry). He’ll insist on the Biden administration’s need to rethink its support of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, and also personally ask that angered young Arab voters turn out for Biden come fall. And he’ll recognize the nature of the new media landscape, making appearances on left-wing comedy podcasts, right-wing Twitter/X Spaces, and politically unorthodox Twitch streams, while still making plenty of room for a TV spot or a newspaper op-ed.

Indeed, there’s nary a media space that Khanna appears not to have visited. Forget his accounts on YouTube or TikTok (the latter of which Khanna did not wish to ban, despite his China opposition). The man has chopped it up with Pat Robertson’s son on The 700 Club, talked about his grandparents’ involvement in the Indian independence movement with Bishop Robert Barron, discussed digital assets on X with the Crypto Council for Innovation, contributed an essay in favor of student debt cancellation to the loudly “anti-woke” Free Press, and calmly debated former Republican presidential candidate (and fellow Indian American) Vivek Ramaswamy over foreign policy. Indeed, there’s seemingly no one with whom Khanna won’t break bread or, should things have gone sour, patch things up. Ask Marc Andreessen, who initially supported Khanna’s failed 2014 congressional run, spurned the candidate after he embraced Bernie Sanders during his successful 2016 race, and has now befriended Khanna again in the midst of his amply funded lobbying blitz.

“My media appearances are more about listening than talking. I consider myself much more an active listener than a talker,” Khanna claims. “When I’m going on Instagram, my interest is, what are people commenting? What are people stitching? When I go on podcasts, I often get feedback. That, to me, is the essence of how we should be building a democracy in such a diverse, messy place where we have so many different perspectives.

“If you listen to a lot of my TikTok livestreams or Instagram Lives with folks,” he says, “one of the first things they’ll say is, Wow, it’s so neat to be talking to a member of Congress. We didn’t know you could do that.”

It’s a somewhat old-fashioned strategy, and that seems to be the point: operating a competitive, proud liberalism of yore that nevertheless embraces the future. Tech jobs for the heartland, unions for electric cars, strengthened safety nets as a form of adaptation to climate change. Pair that with his willingness to work with whichever allies are at hand while at it, no matter how noxious their other positions may be, no matter how little friends on both left or right would support a fuller-fledged vision of his “progressive capitalism” were there an opportunity to install it. His desire to work across differences can come off as slightly Pollyanna-ish (“I think we can have progressive policy without demonizing innovators and entrepreneurs, but inspiring them instead to be part of the solution”) yet also aspirational—indeed, what if we can?

“Disney once said that any story needs a good villain,” Khanna said. “But I think it’s wrong to make Bob Iger the villain. Why not involve Iger in figuring out economic development across America, how do you work with labor and business to do that? I think so much of our politics has become one of grievance-filled demonization as opposed to aspirational coalition building, which still has accountability.”

Inevitably, should his national run manifest sooner than later, the coalition alliances he’s made in this moment cannot, will not hold. Allies on the left already look with suspicion on his support from deep-pocketed district donors, as well as his wife’s stock holdings (which he has repeatedly addressed), even as he otherwise rails against super PACs, Congress members’ stock trades, and the government’s general fealty to big money. They also find it difficult to square his staunch endorsement of Biden with his opposition to the destruction of Gaza, and struggle with his courtship of A.I. insiders, his advocacy for industry-favored crypto legislation, and his encounters with nationalist Indian politicians. Meanwhile, liberals find his continued appearances on Fox News disquieting, especially at a moment when we have ample evidence of its election-related lies. And Khanna may assume a friendly rapport with the likes of Hugh Hewitt and Shannon Bream right now, but they’ll knife him if he ever gets to a point where he’s a presidential candidate—simply by virtue of being a Democrat. Think of what happened with Khanna’s former boss Obama, who early on impressed several then-influential conservative thinkers (e.g., Rich Lowry, Charles Krauthammer) and earned their respect, only to receive their nonstop contempt during his actual presidency.

“I have no illusion that in many of these media platforms, when we go on them, that somehow they will be supportive. But I think that the dialogue is important, even if the dialogue is criticism,” he tells me. “Not all media platforms act in good faith. Sometimes they’re trying to undermine you. But I think in politics, the best shot we have of trying to build a majority and trying to bring this country together is being willing to go into the kitchen, take the heat, and be open to criticism.”

It’s a tricky, delicate strategy. His future is currently riding on a lot of factors Khanna may not have that much power to affect—that is, whether voters heed his praise for the Biden economy, whether Biden gets a second term come fall, whether the visible rifts in today’s Democratic Party can be sealed by young bridge-builders like himself, and whether conservative media continues to pay him even basic respect. Ro Khanna has built out an admirable path to power. Whether he can sustain it once he gets onto the bigger stage will be the real test.