Sara Jacobs Could Be The Next Nancy Pelosi

By Will Huntsberry, the Voice of San Diego

5 hours ago

During Sara Jacobs’ run for Congress in 2020, people pegged her as a centrist Democrat. Not only was she a billionaire’s granddaughter and thus a presumed agent of the country’s most well-established interests, the party’s center was rallying around her. Meanwhile, leftist icons like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed her opponent, then-City Council President Georgette Gómez.

Jacobs destroyed Gómez that November, with the help of roughly $3 million in family money. But when she arrived in Washington, it became evident she was not who she had seemed.

In September 2021, Republicans proposed raising the military budget by roughly $24 billion — even though the Pentagon hadn’t asked for the increase. Jacobs helped lead an attempt from the House floor to roll it back.

She noted that America’s military operations in Afghanistan — which started when she was in middle school — had ended just three weeks earlier.

“And yet, what some are concluding from that, is what we need is more war, more weapons, and billions of dollars more than even what the Pentagon themselves are asking for,” Jacobs said.

Jacobs did the unthinkable for a San Diego politician. She voted along with 37 other members of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party against that year’s defense budget, which included billions that would benefit San Diego companies and interests. No other representative in San Diego’s delegation, Republican or Democrat, voted against the bill.

Jacobs left-of-center record hasn’t stopped there. She rates only three spots behind AOC in voting for progressive legislation, according to Progressive Punch, a website that tracks congressional voting records.

Money, it turns out, has played a role in shaping Jacobs as a United States representative, just not in the way people thought. It gives her shelter from big pharma, big banks, big oil and all the other big money forces that dominate Congress.

While her voting record allows her to legitimately claim to be part of a new generation that supports serious reform, Jacobs is also, more quietly, a student of power. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi took an interest in Jacobs right away. During Jacobs’ first term, Pelosi made her the freshman representative on a powerful steering committee that helps decide committee assignments and House priorities. Since then, Pelosi has mentored Jacobs in how to wield power in Washington.

Pelosi told me that most people come into Congress wanting the spotlight, but that Jacobs entered in an “inquisitive mode.” For Pelosi, that was an immediate good sign. Having power in Congress requires coalition building, which requires knowing what other people want and a willingness to help them get it.

“People [in Congress] want opportunities for themselves… [They] like to amass titles,” Pelosi said. “Sara has been discerning enough to prioritize opportunities for others, while also knowing what is important to herself.”

Jacobs, who is currently the youngest member of the House Democratic leadership team, is on a path to rise. She sits in a safe Democratic seat and could hold it for the rest of her life. If she can fuse alliances between the Democratic Party’s left wing and its center, while also working with Republicans, Jacobs may become San Diego’s most powerful politician in generations.

Step One: Find a Lane

Sara Jacobs was a 12-year-old middle schooler on Sept. 11, 2001 and yet the military and foreign policy decisions made in the years following the 9/11 attacks are, she said, among the biggest reasons she ran for Congress.

“I remember being in ninth grade and arguing with my friends about the war in Iraq and why I didn’t think it was good idea. I wish there had been members of Congress then who had been thinking about how this would impact my generation,” Jacobs said. “Those decisions didn’t age very well.”

When Jacobs first ran for Congress in 2018, people called her foreign policy chops into question. Jacobs had tried to get a position as a foreign policy adviser on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. At the time, she had a master’s degree in international relations and roughly 28 months of professional experience, including as a contractor at the State Department, the Union-Tribune reported.

Jacobs was getting no traction with the Clinton campaign, until a major fundraiser stepped up on her behalf. The U-T unearthed a series of emails on Wikileaks that showed Mary Pat Bonner, an influential fundraiser, repeatedly lobbying top officials for Clinton’s campaign to bring Jacobs on as foreign policy adviser, even in an unpaid capacity. At first, one official denied the request, but after Bonner persisted, Jacobs finally got a position.

The U-T story implied that Jacobs made it onto Clinton’s campaigns through favors and nepotism, not experience. Top Clinton officials, including John Podesta, said that wasn’t true, but Jacobs’ opponents in the Congressional race seized on her lack of experience. Jacobs finished third in the primary, meaning she did not advance to the general election. (Rep. Mike Levin eventually won the seat.)

Now, in Congress, Jacobs makes it a point to be so prepared before she walks into any room that no one could question her right to be there. In internal meetings with staffers, Jacobs sweats the details, while also trying to consider all the long- and short-term implications of a decision.

“Like me, she is a bit of a perfectionist,” Jacobs’ chief of staff Amy Kuhn told me. “She takes [the job] very seriously.”

When Jacobs’ preparations are at their most intense, staffers sometimes joke around and call her Hermione — referring to the smart, relentless and occasionally annoying character in the Harry Potter books.

“We make the jokes that she has BHE,” or Big Hermione Energy, Kuhn said.

New members of Congress can sometimes fall victim to their grand ambitions, Kuhn told me. By trying to tackle everything all at once, they end up tackling nothing. Congressional veterans, accordingly, advise all new members to find a lane. Jacobs, rather than be deterred by the previous attacks on her foreign policy experience, chose international affairs. She pushed for assignments — an important Congressional currency — on the armed services and foreign affairs committees.

By knowing her lane, and knowing her fellow Congressional members, Jacobs has been able to successfully broker deals.

She has co-sponsored bills on military housing and child care with Republicans. And she also co-sponsored a bill that would make it easier for U.S. Agency for International Development money to go to local groups in foreign countries, as Vox noted in a piece titled, “Congress Can’t Get Anything Done. Except on Foreign Aid.”

In foreign affairs, however, Jacobs has not only stuck to views that are as traditionally popular and bipartisan as, say, better housing for the military. She has focused much of her attention toward Africa and serves as the ranking member of the Africa subcommittee. She has spoken out on everything from drone strikes to mass atrocities in Sudan’s civil war.

In an opinion piece for Foreign Policy, Jacobs argued that the U.S. counterterrorism strategy in Africa has failed miserably. By training and equipping security forces that commit human rights abuses, Jacobs wrote, the U.S. has made terrorism worse, not better. A better foreign policy would prioritize diplomacy and good governance “not guns,” she wrote.

The Recipe for Power

Not all leaders who rise in Congress have the same skill sets, but there are some common qualities. Money is not least among these.

Members of Congress can either be givers or takers. The same way the NBA has developed a “net rating” — it judges how many points ahead or behind a team plays when a given player is on the floor — Congress has its own unofficial net rating: It judges, in the negative, how much money a representative needs or, in the positive, how much they bring to the table.

Jacobs’ rating is in the highest of percentiles. For one, she represents a very safely Democratic Congressional seat. People in more competitive districts — like, for instance, Rep. Mike Levin in North County — can end up costing the Democratic Party money. Those people have to fight hard for their seats, sometimes every two years.

Jacobs could potentially keep her seat for the rest of her life — even if her family weren’t rich. And over all that time, she wouldn’t cost the party a dime. Instead, she’d bring massive amounts of money to the table.

Jacobs’ family, by itself, has enough money to make powerful donations. Her family also has the connections to bring in other major donors. Someone like Jacobs can help carry the Levins in the party.

Money by itself though is not enough. Relationships are also an important currency. Take Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, who is almost universally hated in the Senate.

“If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a fellow Republican, once famously said.

Since congresspeople are elected to leadership positions by their peers, having relationships is vitally important for those who want to lead. Pelosi has emphasized this to Jacobs. Building relationships means listening to people, knowing what they want and not bullshitting them.

Pelosi said she was impressed during an early meeting of U.S. House members, when everyone was going around and telling their back stories. Many people spoke of coming from a working-class background, being the first in their family to go to college and needing to work multiple jobs to make it possible. That was not Jacobs’ story.

“She just stepped up to the plate and said, ‘My path here was different. My path was one of privilege and opportunity… and therefore the responsibility I feel is very great,'” Pelosi remembered. “They so respected her for taking the subject head on.”

Jacobs has managed to build relationships in Congress, she said, by being honest about who she is and where she stands with her colleagues on both sides of the aisle.

“I’ve spent time trying to get to know members personally. I don’t assume we disagree because of what they say on TV,” she said. “I find areas where there is common ground and try to do big things on it.”

She brought up Rep. Matt Gaetz, a far-right Republican, who is allied with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Jacobs and Gaetz worked together on multiple issues, including an amendment that would have blocked the U.S. from sending cluster munitions to Ukraine. (It eventually lost.) Jacobs — who has a sibling who is transgender — has also blasted Gaetz in public for his stances on transgender people serving in the military.

Disagreeing fiercely and working together “are not mutually exclusive,” Jacobs said. “If you remain open to finding areas of common ground, you can get big things done.”

Progressive or Not?

On April 20, Jacobs faced one of her most difficult votes in Congress. A bill was on the table that would send billions of dollars in aid to different regions around the world — including Gaza — but also billions in military funding to Israel, which would bolster its crushing offensive in Gaza.

Only a small corner of progressives, as with the war in Iraq, were against it.

Jacobs, who is Jewish, has more history in the region than most members of Congress.

She spent multiple summers in Israel as a child. Her aunt, as well as multiple generations of cousins, live in Israel. One cousin and her child are currently living with Jacobs’ family in San Diego “because [the cousin] doesn’t want her child to be sleeping in a bomb shelter every night,” Jacobs told me.

She is also possibly the only member of Congress who has been to Gaza. Her parents sponsored a program to bring Israeli Jews and Arabs together. As part of their desire to understand the region and the people, they went to Palestine in 2000, when Jacobs was 10 or 11 years old. (She has also been in a relationship with Ammar Campa-Najjar, whose father is Palestinian, for several years.)

“I remember even then noticing how many people there were in such a small place and it has only gotten worse,” Jacobs said.

Weighing all this, Jacobs had to decide where she would come down.

She didn’t think Israel’s war was making the country any safer, but she also didn’t want to withhold aid to Gaza and other countries.

Jacobs had visited a camp for Sudanese refugees in Chad a month earlier. People told her the camp would be out of supplies by the end of April if the U.S. didn’t provide more aid.

“We rarely get easy votes here,” she said. “People talk in the abstract about being for this or for that. But that’s usually not the question. The question is, are you more for this than that.”

Thirty-seven members of the progressive caucus (of which Jacobs is a member) voted against the bill, but Jacobs wasn’t one of them.

A little more than a week later, another vote tested her political and personal identity.

Republicans were pushing a bill called the Antisemitism Awareness Act. The bill equated “criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism,” the American Civil Liberties Union wrote, “and would likely chill free speech of students on college campuses.”

Most Democrats supported it.

“Since the heinous terrorist attack on Israel, there has been an explosion of antisemitism, violence and intimidation at home and around the world — especially on our college campuses,” said Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat, who co-sponsored the bill.

Jacobs, however, thought the bill was “incredibly in bad faith,” she said. She accused Republican members, who had supported White supremacists on other occasions, of now trying to “weaponize Jewish pain.”

This time 70 members of the Democratic Party’s left wing voted against the bill. Pelosi voted for it, as did each of San Diego’s Democrats — except Jacobs. She voted no.

Jacobs attended Columbia University, which had been an epicenter of student protest that, in part, led to the antisemitism bill. I asked her how she felt about the protests. Instead of mentioning any alleged increases in antisemitism, she spoke with nostalgia about the campus’s history of activism, including hunger strikes in the 1960s to change Columbia’s curriculum.

“In my read of history, young people tend to be right,” Jacobs said. “We should be listening.”

‘If the system is working, it would be working‘

Most Americans believe Congress is broken. Lawmakers have proven incapable of dealing with issues a strong majority of Americans agree on, such as cannabis, taxing billionaires or getting dark money out of politics.

I asked Jacobs what is the point of compromise and small, bipartisan deals when the whole system seems paralyzed. Like any talented politician, she gave an answer that changes depending on how you look at it.

“If the system is working, it would be working,” she said. “I’m constantly trying to remind my team we can’t buy into the system as it is, even though we’re operating it.”

Then again.

“We can’t give into cynicism, because that’s what the other side wants. Democracy can still deliver and do big things,” she said.

I still wanted to understand exactly the pressure point at which Jacobs decides to compromise on any given piece of legislation, so I asked her about last year’s debt ceiling fight.

At the time, Republicans and Democrats were playing a game of chicken. If the House didn’t raise the debt ceiling, the federal government would shut down. Millions of government workers would go without a pay check — for starters. Eventually, the U.S. would default on its debts, which could have led to a cascading economic crisis. Republicans said they were willing to let that happen, unless Democrats gave into their demands to limit domestic spending and create new work requirements for people on food stamps.

Jacobs knew that would be bad for the people she came to Congress hoping to help.

Progressives said not to take the bait. A federal government shut down would show Republicans for who they really are — if they were even willing to follow through with their threats. In the brutal game of politics, not supporting the GOP compromise would be the best long-term strategy for a more just future, the thinking went.

Forty-six members of the progressive wing of the party voted against the bill — but Jacobs wasn’t one of them.

“I always try to think about how my decisions will impact the most vulnerable, and to be honest, the most vulnerable would have been impacted a lot by a catastrophic default on our debt,” Jacobs said. “That to me weighed more heavily than the other things.”

The progressive narrative says that congresspeople tend to vote towards the middle because of the nefarious influence of big money in politics. It seems equally plausible that the Democratic Party’s left wing is pushed towards its center by fear. Jacobs admits she didn’t like this year’s Israel defense bill or last year’s debt ceiling package, but she voted for them anyway. The point at which she will compromise appears to be the point at which she becomes truly afraid — though she did not put it that way — of the short-term fallout for vulnerable people.

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