Joining the list of younger Democrats running against older congressional members of their party in 2026 is gay politico Jake Rakov of Studio City in Los Angeles County. The 37-year-old is aiming to oust from office Congressmember Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks), whom he briefly worked for eight years ago as his deputy communications director.
Sherman, 70, has served in the House since first being elected in 1996. His 32nd Congressional District includes much of the San Fernando Valley, including Pacific Palisades that was devastated by a wildfire earlier this year, and westside communities of Los Angeles such as Bel-Air, Brentwood, Encino, Malibu, and Topanga.
After spending years working for Democratic politicians and candidates, such as Tom Steyer’s 2020 presidential campaign, Rakov is now seeking elected office himself for the first time. A main message of his candidacy is that the district needs a different kind of representative in Congress and that House members should be limited to serving five two-year terms.
“This isn’t partisan or generational, it is operational,” Rakov told the Bay Area Reporter during a recent phone interview, though he was quick to point out that he “was 8 years old when (Sherman) got elected the first time.”
He said voters are craving “new ideas and new energy to get Congress to actually work again.”
Sherman’s campaign did not respond to the B.A.R.’s request for comment. In early April after Rakov announced his candidacy, Sherman told Politico he is “fit as a fiddle” and didn’t have much direct interaction with Rakov when he worked for him.
He hasn’t faced a serious opponent since 2012, when he defeated fellow Democrat Howard Berman by roughly 20% that November. Ever since, Sherman has faced a series of Republican challengers he has easily trounced.
It is exceedingly rare for an incumbent congressional member to be ousted by another candidate from the same party. Even with California’s open primary system, where the top two vote-getters regardless of party advance to the general election, no LGBTQ candidate to date has toppled an incumbent from either the Republican or Democratic parties.
It appears that Rakov is the first LGBTQ House candidate in California to officially launch a 2026 campaign, though incumbent gay Congressmembers Mark Takano (D-Riverside) and Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) are expected to seek reelection next year. After twice falling short to conservative Congressmember Ken Calvert (R-Corona) in the last two elections, gay Palm Springs attorney Will Rollins (D) recently confirmed he won’t run a third time in 2026.
So far, two other Democrats have also pulled papers to run against Sherman, including Tarzana resident Christopher Ahuja who landed in fourth place in the 2024 primary for the Southern California House seat. Rakov believes he has a strong shot of making it through next June’s primary to take on Sherman in the fall race, though he knows he faces a tough road to victory running against a candidate already sitting on nearly $4 million in his campaign account.
“I am fully aware of the uphill struggle we are going to face,” said Rakov. “I have worked in this industry a long time; I know the odds of it and how strongly the party protects incumbents.”
It remains to be seen what support Rakov is able to attract to his candidacy from Democratic elected leaders and party activists. Or if he will be one of the up-and-comers supported by the new group Leaders We Deserve run by Parkland high school shooting survivor David Hogg, who is aiming to raise $20 million to support the “next generation” of Democratic leaders.
In fundraising pitches for the group’s political action committee, Hogg, who was elected by party members to be vice chair of the Democratic National Committee earlier this year, makes similar arguments as Rakov has in explaining his own campaign.
“This isn’t personal – it’s a strategic disagreement,” wrote Hogg in one recent email. “We believe that every Democrat should be standing up and fighting Trump and the MAGA agenda with everything they’ve got, but too many of them are simply failing to meet the moment right now. This isn’t ‘out with the old and in with the new.’ It’s about replacing the ineffective politicians with leaders who will fight like hell for our democracy against Trumpism.”
In one of his emails seeking donations, Rakov wrote, “I’m running for Congress because we need a new generation of Democrats to step up if we want to get anything done in Washington. We can’t keep sending the same people back and expecting a different result.”
It is also a message that Ahuja has been making for months, writing in one Instagram post, “Here’s the truth: The real radicals are [Donald] Trump, [Elon] Musk, and JD Vance – And the Democrats like Brad who are too weak, too timid, too impotent to fight them. 30 years in Congress and he still doesn’t understand the stakes.”
San Francisco ties
Rakov, who took his husband Abe’s last name when they married in 2023, grew up in San Antonio, Texas as Jake Lewis. The younger of two sons, Rakov graduated from the University of Texas, Austin in 2011 with degrees in government and theater.
He then headed to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. While tending bar in West Hollywood and working as a cater waiter, the closest Rakov came to booking a part was in a play. But he lost out on the role for being “too tall” at 6 feet, he said.
His contacts he made led him to pivot to politics in 2013, landing a job on Wendy Gruel’s campaign for Los Angeles mayor. By the end of the year Rakov had moved to Washington, D.C. where he worked various jobs until starting with Los Angeles-based consultancy J&Z Strategies in 2018 as a political campaign strategist and production director.
In July 2019 he joined Steyer’s presidential campaign as its national press secretary, leading him to move to San Francisco for a year. He rented a room in Pacific Heights, though he spent much of the time traveling across the country with the candidate.
“I loved SF. I had a great time for that year,” recalled Rakov, who plans to speak with Steyer about his House bid. “It was the honor of my life to work for him. I would gladly take his endorsement.”
(Ahuja also has ties to San Francisco, having married his wife, Maggie Nguyen, in 2010 at St. Dominic's Catholic Church in the city’s Lower Pacific Heights neighborhood. Now a talent agent, Nguyen grew up in the city, graduated from UC Berkeley in 2004, and worked part-time for the San Francisco Film Society while in college.)
Post the Steyer campaign Rakov worked for several other candidates in Texas and New England, until moving back to the Golden State in 2023 with his husband, who also had worked for various congressional members and is now executive director at End Citizens United/Let America Vote. The couple have a nearly 5-year-old Pointer and Great Pyrenees mix named Kip that Rakov rescued as a 3-month-old pup.
A former steering committee member of the Los Angeles Stonewall Democratic Club, an LGBTQ-focused political group that is one of the state’s largest Dem clubs, Rakov at the moment is unemployed and focused full-time on running for Congress.
“A unique thing of my challenge is it is literally me and my husband doing this mom-and-pop style,” said Rakov, though he is planning to hire on campaign staff.
Asked where he falls politically within the Democratic Party, Rakov said he is progressive on social issues but more moderate when it comes to government regulations. Up until last November, he told the B.A.R. he hadn’t considered running for the House seat.
But things changed with the election of Republican Trump to a second term. He began to consider seeking elected office and became more committed to doing so as he grew increasingly disappointed with how Democrats were responding to Trump and his administration as it attacked LGBTQ rights, dismantled federal agencies, and launched a trade war that has rocked the stock market.
“I wasn’t planning on running a year ago. It really was the last couple of months and really since November when Trump won a second time,” said Rakov. “I saw a lot of people, Democrats, go to lick their wounds, contemplate what happened, and drink too much vodka over the holidays to drown it out. I saw our party not engaging and not having the conversations we needed to have to move it forward.”
Now, in his House district, Rakov is giving voters a choice for who they want to be leading that fight on their behalf on Capitol Hill, he told the B.A.R.
“We will do everything we can to get out there and knock on doors in the old fashioned way of politicking, and show people we do have a choice,” he said. “We do not need to have the same person in elected office for three decades.”
Web Extra: For more queer political news, be sure to check ebar.com Monday mornings for Political Notes, the notebook's online companion. This week's column reported on a lesbian education official opting not to seek a third term in 2026.
Keep abreast of the latest LGBTQ political news by following the Political Notebook on Threads @ https://www.threads.net/@matthewbajko and on Bluesky @ https://bsky.app/profile/politicalnotes.bsky.social.
Got a tip on LGBTQ politics? Call Matthew S. Bajko at (415) 829-8836 or email [email protected].
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