In January, because the 2024 major season acquired below method, Consultant Ro Khanna stood in the midst of a spacious New Hampshire lounge and marveled on the dozens of Democrats who had crammed in. “What enthusiasm for President Biden!” Khanna mentioned as the group cheered. The California progressive wasn’t within the land of would-be presidents to advertise himself—at the very least circuitously. He got here right here to spice up his get together’s flagging 81-year-old incumbent.
Khanna represents Silicon Valley, however he’s misplaced rely of what number of instances he’s been to New Hampshire; an area Democrat launched him to the room as “the fifth member of our congressional delegation.” He advised me he initially felt “sheepish” about coming again after he stumped right here for Bernie Sanders 4 years in the past, frightened that folks would assume he wished to run for president. He’s gotten over that.
I spent a day driving throughout the state with Khanna as he made the case for Joe Biden as a write-in candidate. Earlier than voters and the cameras, Khanna was a loyal surrogate, hailing Biden as a champion for the center class, the local weather, and abortion rights, whereas insisting that the president nonetheless has loads of assist. Again within the automotive, nonetheless, his worries and frustrations spilled out. Khanna is 47, three a long time youthful than the 2 males set to be on the poll in November. He’s ready—not altogether patiently—for the decks to clear, for the Biden and Sanders era to lastly retire. “We haven’t been driving a transparent message,” Khanna advised me. “Now we have to have a greater message on the financial system, and we’ve to have a greater message on immigration.”
The proximate reason behind Khanna’s misery was the bipartisan southern-border compromise that was then rising from the Senate—and which, on the behest of former President Donald Trump, Republicans promptly killed. Khanna wasn’t a fan of the deal. He had wished Biden to offer a rousing speech about why immigration issues to America; as an alternative, the president was about to offer Republicans nearly the whole lot they wished. “You’ve acquired no affirmative case,” Khanna advised me. “There’s nothing. There’s a void.” What’s lacking, he mentioned, is “an aspirational imaginative and prescient.”
Right here’s Khanna’s. He needs to marry the forward-looking spirit of the businesses based in and round his district—Google, Apple, Tesla—with the standard middle-class values of his suburban upbringing in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. And he needs to encourage a “new financial patriotism” to rebuild America’s industrial base with climate-friendly know-how—a challenge that he hopes will carry manufacturing jobs again to the Rust Belt, and working-class voters again to the Democratic Get together.
A consultant from America’s tech capital is an unlikely avatar of nostalgia, however Khanna speaks with as a lot eager for the nation’s previous, and his personal, as any politician. He sees himself as a bridge between the nation’s pale industrial may and its digital future, interesting to a set of often-warring constituencies: progressives and pragmatists, tech capitalists and the working class, local weather activists and coal nation.
Khanna acquired his begin in politics working for Barack Obama, who clearly serves as a mannequin: a progressive who proposed transformative change with out alienating an excessive amount of of the nation. The divide that Khanna needs to cross extends past the factions of the Democratic Get together; it’s geographic, financial, cultural, technological, generational. And it’s wider than the one Obama confronted. The nation that embraced the previous president’s message is now much more polarized and dug-in.
Generally Khanna’s challenge appears naive, as if he’s making an attempt to be the whole lot to all people at a time when no one agrees on something. However he believes that to defeat Trump and construct a coalition that may survive past November, Democrats should provide an agenda that may excite the voters who’ve soured on the president and their get together. Khanna needs to run for president on his imaginative and prescient sooner or later—as quickly as 2028—however his extra pressing quest is making an attempt to get his get together to undertake it now. “Do I feel I’ve a compelling financial imaginative and prescient for this nation, for the get together? Sure,” he mentioned. “Do I thoughts if the president steals all of it? Completely not.”
If you acknowledge Khanna, you’ve most likely seen him on cable information; he advised me—and this was some extent of delight—that he goes on Fox Information greater than almost every other Home Democrat. Early in his presidency, Biden was so impressed with Khanna’s cable appearances that he requested Ron Klain, his chief of workers on the time, to schedule extra TV hits for Khanna. “Nicely, Mr. President,” Klain replied, “I feel he does a fairly good job getting on TV all by himself.”
Khanna’s willingness to interact the best has gained him an viewers that many Democrats have ignored—and the unofficial title of Congress’s “ambassador of Silicon Valley.” He steadily visits rural districts the place GOP members of Congress search investments from profitable tech giants. (Khanna isn’t shy about getting tech executives on the telephone. “I joke typically that I’m going to attempt to uncover the boundaries of Ro’s Rolodex,” Consultant Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who serves with Khanna on the Home choose committee on China, advised me.)
Khanna can be extra keen than different progressives to work on laws with Republicans, having co-sponsored payments with staunch Trump supporters and lawmakers who voted to overturn the 2020 election. Two months after the January 6 assault on the Capitol, Khanna appeared on Fox Information alongside Consultant Matt Gaetz of Florida and bragged about their laws to cut back cash in politics and finish U.S. involvement in “perpetually wars.”
Khanna “has a danger tolerance that I feel is uncommon for many members,” Gallagher, who’s resigning from the Home this month, advised me. He recounted a gathering that he and Khanna had with Elon Musk final 12 months, during which Khanna acquired the billionaire to host a dwell occasion with them on his social-media platform. “I’m undecided what number of Democratic members would be capable of do” that, Gallagher mentioned. Or be keen to.
Khanna occupies an ideological house to the left of Biden however simply to the best of progressives like Sanders and Consultant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who determine as democratic socialists. He helps Medicare for All, tuition-free public school, and tax will increase on excessive earners. However he additionally made loads of cash as a lawyer representing tech corporations, and Khanna will not be about to say that “billionaires shouldn’t exist,” as Sanders has. He defines himself as a “progressive capitalist,” and he believes progressives ought to body wealth as a function, not a bug, of the American system. “The progressive motion has to speak a couple of imaginative and prescient of manufacturing, a imaginative and prescient of wealth era,” Khanna mentioned.
The coverage that finest exemplifies that is Khanna’s push for federal funding in manufacturing applied sciences resembling inexperienced metal and clear aluminum, which he sees as a method of reindustrializing the Rust Belt whereas minimizing carbon emissions and air air pollution. After months of negotiations with environmental teams, labor unions, and producers, Khanna is planning a visit later this spring to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to unveil laws that may spend billions to construct metal crops in former business hubs. (The invoice may have at the very least one Republican co-sponsor from the area, he advised me.) He thinks it should “seize the creativeness”—a favourite Khanna-ism—of voters eager for America to reclaim its standing from China because the world’s nice producer.
“We’re residing in a time of huge concepts, of huge moments,” Khanna advised me. “And I feel we’d like a giant imaginative and prescient to fulfill the instances.” He’s frightened, although, that Biden’s ambitions are solely getting smaller. After two years of sweeping legislative accomplishments—a $1.9 trillion COVID-relief invoice, $1.2 trillion for infrastructure, essentially the most important local weather invoice in American historical past—Biden has, within the face of a extra hostile Congress, scaled again his domestic-policy objectives. Among the many aims that the president dwelled on longest throughout his latest State of the Union tackle had been combating junk charges and restoring the variety of chips in a snack bag—not precisely the stuff that captures imaginations.
No concern has examined Khanna’s skill to fulfill all of his get together’s factions greater than Israel’s army marketing campaign in Gaza. Khanna known as for a cease-fire seven weeks after the Hamas assault—a lot later than a few of his progressive colleagues, and far sooner than Biden, who resisted that demand till final week, when the U.S. allowed a United Nations decision backing a one-month cease-fire to move.
Seven weeks was too lengthy for a lot of of Khanna’s supporters. One in every of his prime political staffers resigned in protest in mid-October, and when demonstrators staged a sit-in at his workplace close to the Capitol, one in all Khanna’s interns joined them on the ground. By November, even his mom, Jyotsna, was getting on his case. “I wished him to declare a lot sooner,” she advised me.
Khanna continues to be not as important of Israel as some on the left; he doesn’t describe its marketing campaign in Gaza as “genocide” or “ethnic cleaning.” However as Palestinian casualties have elevated, he’s known as extra forcefully for Biden to demand that the Netanyahu authorities halt its shelling of Gaza. “Now we have a variety of levers that we haven’t used,” Khanna advised me.
In February, Khanna traveled to Michigan, making an attempt to steer the state’s giant Arab American inhabitants to assist Biden regardless of his personal reservations in regards to the president’s strategy to Israel. A couple of days after Khanna’s go to, greater than 100,000 Michigan Democrats—about 13 p.c of the first voters—marked “uncommitted” on their poll in protest of Biden’s Israel coverage. Khanna urged the Biden marketing campaign to take their message severely. The get together can’t afford to have the struggle nonetheless happening in the course of the Democratic conference, he advised me. “You’d have mass protests.”
The president’s advisers insist that the White Home has no downside with Khanna’s critiques. They see him as exerting stress in the best method—respectfully, not caustically—and serving as a conduit to youthful, extra progressive voters Biden must end up in November. “The truth that Ro sees some points in another way than the president makes him an efficient surrogate,” Klain advised me. “That offers him credibility.”
Some progressives see Khanna in another way, not as a bridge between generations however as an formidable politician cozying as much as energy brokers. “He walks a advantageous line,” one official with a distinguished left-leaning group advised me on situation of anonymity to keep away from criticizing an ally. For now, Khanna’s shut ties with the Democratic institution—Biden and Obama specifically—are politically helpful. However quickly, the official famous, many progressive voters will desire a sharp break with the 2 males, and Khanna’s proximity to his get together’s previous might value him.
Okhanna wasn’t visiting early presidential-primary states solely to advertise Biden. In between occasions in New Hampshire, Khanna met privately with leaders of the state’s largest labor union and a Democratic candidate for governor, individuals whose endorsements he may search in a number of years. Democratic activists alluded to his candidacy in 2028 as if it had been a certainty. Khanna isn’t about to announce a marketing campaign greater than 4 years out—“Who is aware of what the long run holds?” is his inventory reply to questions on his plans—however he does nothing to dispel the assumptions that he’ll run.
Once I requested get together activists which Democrats they had been excited to see extra of after this election, a few of them talked about Khanna. Extra usually, nonetheless, they cited greater names with greater jobs, resembling Governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, in addition to Vice President Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary. In New Hampshire, a number of Democrats even talked about Consultant Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Home minority chief. As a compelling speaker, Khanna would maintain his personal on a primary-debate stage, however might he make it into the highest tier of candidates?
Solely James Garfield went instantly from the Home to the White Home, and that was 143 years in the past. However Khanna appears undeterred. As he usually notes, his district accommodates some $10 trillion in market worth, giving him an even bigger platform than most representatives. “There are a variety of very, very high-profile Home members that I feel have an equal impression on the nationwide debate because the Senate,” he mentioned. “I feel the foundations of conventional politics have modified.”
Amongst many progressives, the inheritor to the motion Sanders created—and the dream presidential candidate—is AOC. “She occupies her personal house,” says Joseph Geevarghese, the chief director of Our Revolution, the political group began by veterans of Sanders’s 2016 marketing campaign. “Ro will not be fairly there but, however he may very well be.”
As Khanna tries to make a nationwide identify for himself, voters will hear as a lot about Bucks County, Pennsylvania, as they do about California. Khanna stays nostalgic for the America that welcomed his mother and father from India within the Nineteen Seventies. After graduating from the College of Michigan, his father grew to become a chemical engineer and settled in Pennsylvania. Other than two years in India, Khanna spent his childhood in a city about 45 minutes north of Philadelphia that provided him a quintessential middle-class upbringing—Little League baseball, Eagles soccer video games, well-funded public colleges. Khanna was one in all just some Indian American college students in a big, nearly completely white highschool, however he doesn’t keep in mind experiencing any discrimination. “My religion within the nation comes from right here,” Khanna advised me.
He insisted on giving me a tour of the county, now one in all America’s most intently watched political bellwethers. His workers had organized for him to talk at his alma mater, the place he took an hour’s value of questions from a few of the faculty’s extra politically knowledgeable college students. They requested about metal manufacturing, the specter of China invading Taiwan, and the way he reconciles his assist for support to Ukraine together with his votes in opposition to protection spending. The exchanges had been extra substantive than many congressional hearings.
A few college students pressed him on why the nation’s leaders, and specifically its two possible presidential nominees, had been so outdated. “There’s a variety of frustration with the gerontocracy,” he acknowledged. “There’s a necessity for a brand new era. I’m hopeful that can occur within the subsequent cycle, that we are going to see very, very proficient new voices emerge.”
Not one of the individuals I met in Bucks County who knew Khanna as an adolescent was shocked that he’d ended up in Congress. Two of his lecturers offered him with papers and clippings from his faculty days that they’d stored for greater than 30 years. We met Gretchen Raab, who taught Khanna’s ninth-grade English class, at an area diner, the place she recalled considering that he would turn out to be the primary Indian American president. (Khanna appeared embarrassed by this disclosure, however solely barely.)
Khanna was civically engaged by the point he began highschool, which he attributes at the very least partly to his household historical past. His maternal grandfather was lively in Mahatma Gandhi’s independence motion, serving time in jail earlier than changing into a member of the Indian Parliament. Khanna joined his faculty’s political-science membership and as soon as performed then-Senator Joe Biden throughout a mock foreign-policy debate. His opposition to U.S. army adventurism began round this time: Raab raved in regards to the op-ed that Khanna despatched, as a part of a category project in 1991, to the native newspaper arguing that President George H. W. Bush shouldn’t invade Iraq.
As an undergraduate on the College of Chicago, Khanna volunteered for the state-Senate marketing campaign of a lecturer on the regulation faculty, a 35-year-old Democrat named Barack Obama. A number of years later, when Khanna was considering his personal first run for workplace in 2001, he emailed Obama, who suggested him to keep away from working in a giant state. (Obama had simply misplaced a congressional major in Illinois.) Khanna ignored him and moved to California, the place he challenged a 12-term incumbent in a 2004 Home race. Like Obama, Khanna acquired crushed. He would go on to work for Obama’s administration earlier than lastly profitable a seat in Congress on his third attempt, in 2016.
After Khanna completed speaking with the scholars, he and I squeezed into desk chairs inside a small classroom and spoke with Derek Longo, one in all Khanna’s historical past lecturers. Longo described how a long-ago go to to the American cemetery in Normandy made him need to train historical past. Khanna requested him what he thought in regards to the rise of Trump.
Maybe Khanna was anticipating his instructor to speak in regards to the menace Trump poses to democracy. As an alternative, he revealed one thing Khanna didn’t know: Longo voted twice for Trump. He praised Trump’s enterprise background and advised us that he worries about city crime. In 2017, his daughter and son had been struck by a driver below the affect of heroin as they had been standing on a sidewalk in New Jersey. Longo’s son spent months in intensive care, and his daughter, who was seven months pregnant, didn’t survive. Below state regulation, prosecutors couldn’t cost the driving force with a double murder as a result of Longo’s granddaughter wasn’t born. The motive force pleaded responsible to a lesser cost of vehicular murder. He’s as a result of be launched from jail subsequent 12 months.
The tragedy hardened Longo’s views on crime and abortion. “I couldn’t vote for President Biden,” he mentioned. Khanna sat quietly as Longo spoke. “One of many challenges we’ve as a rustic is we’ve a mistaken stereotypical view of the Trump voter,” Khanna mentioned to us after the dialog had moved on. “The Trump voter consists of probably the instructor you most respect.”
Longo spoke extremely of Khanna, praising his slogan of “progressive capitalism” and his push to make use of know-how to create financial alternative. He even mentioned he may be capable of vote for Khanna sooner or later. “A Trump-Khanna voter!” Khanna marveled.
That second of exhilaration had pale by the point we acquired again to the automotive. Khanna conceded that Longo wouldn’t contemplate voting for him if he hadn’t been a former scholar. But he was precisely the form of voter, Khanna mentioned, that Democrats want to determine tips on how to attain—the Trump supporters who may reply to a progressive financial plan. That somebody like Longo, so turned off by the Democrats now in energy, will hearken to his message—and even contemplate voting for him—appeared like an affirmation of Khanna’s imaginative and prescient. That he nonetheless wasn’t offered on his cherished former scholar, nonetheless, may be an indication of its limits.
