While it's still Scott Wiener's race to lose, the relative newcomer to San Francisco politics, progressive candidate Saikat Chakrabarti, is apparently gaining traction.

You may have seen one of the many TV spots or online ads purchased by the campaign of Saikat Chakrabarti, the 40-year-old centimillionaire and former tech engineer who has been doing his utmost to gain some name recognition in San Francisco.

He was seen as yet another unknown, longshot challenger to Nancy Pelosi when he announced his candidacy just over a year ago, albeit one with his own money who worked closely with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. By the time he officially launched his campaign in October, Pelosi was still a couple weeks from announcing her retirement, and he had succeeded in getting out ahead of things alongside state Senator Scott Wiener — who may have been pushed by Chakrabarti's early maneuvers to launch his own campaign without waiting for Pelosi's announcement.

Wiener still remains a favorite to win Pelosi's seat, but the two candidates in November may end up being Wiener and Chakrabarti, not Wiener and SF Supervisor Connie Chan, as many had predicted until now.

As Mission Local reports, a poll that was commissioned by Chakrabarti's own campaign, conducted only in English, has Chakrabarti trailing Wiener by just five percentage points — 33 to 28 — ahead of the June primary, with Chan trailing far behind at 13 percent.  Chan could still fair much better than that when the primary actually occurs, but the poll of 537 likely primary voters still shows that Chakrabarti's significant ad spending and message about changing Democratic party leadership seems to be doing him some good.

As Mission Local notes, the poll, conducted by Data for Progress in the first week of April, has Wiener with an even more commanding lead among Democratic voters — 47 percent to Chakrabarti's 26 percent. And in only polling English speakers, it excludes the monolingual Chinese population who are a big part of Chan's base.

Chakrabarti, who grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, made his money as an early employee of Stripe, and was said last year to be worth around $100 million. He got into politics working on the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2015, and later became campaign manager for AOC and then her chief of staff. As he touts in his ads, he helped to write the Green New Deal while working for her, and he left her office in mid-2019 to work further on the Green New Deal with New Consensus.

Don't be surprised if the race for Pelosi's seat becomes a progressive-versus-moderate fight between Chakrabarti and Wiener!