First posted on Instagram
Rep. Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, said on Friday that he is considering running for president in 2028, telling a Democratic gathering in Denver that he is travelling the country to test whether his message resonates. "I'm certainly considering it," Khanna said. "I'm going around the country seeing whether the message will resonate."
Khanna spoke at the Democrats' "What's Next" conference in Denver, where he also said he supports House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries for speaker.
The remarks come days after allies launched a draft effort to push Khanna into the race. The "Run Ro" committee, co-chaired by former Rep. Jamaal Bowman, was launched on November 8, and former Biden White House chief of staff Ron Klain is reportedly advising him. Khanna told Politico he would decide with his family after the holidays whether to run or support someone else. He had already signalled his interest earlier in the year: he told NPR in August that he was "thinking seriously" about a run, and told Reuters in July that he was "strongly considering" one after a trip to the West Bank, where he was detained for over an hour by armed Israeli settlers.
The 2028 talk comes as Khanna faces questions over Nvidia stock sales by his household. His wife's trust sold Nvidia shares on September 4 and October 7, each in the $1,000 to $15,000 range reported in congressional disclosures, according to figures from Capitol Trades cited in reports this week. Nvidia's shares hit an all-time high of $239.24 on October 6 and have fallen about 26 percent since, after Nvidia's board opened an independent investigation on November 8 following chief executive Jensen Huang's admission of an extramarital affair with Alice Huang, a business executive U.S. intelligence officials suspect of passing information to Beijing.
The timing of the sales has drawn questions about whether Khanna or his household traded on advance knowledge of the Nvidia scandal. The reports raising those questions present no evidence that they did. The trades were made through a trust run by a third-party trustee, which Khanna says he does not direct, and his household also bought Nvidia shares between June and September, so the sales were not a clean exit from the stock. Khanna has asked for a classified briefing for Congress on the national-security issues around Nvidia. He sits on the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party and on a House Armed Services subcommittee on cyber and innovative technologies, and he has long pushed to bar members of Congress from trading individual stocks while in office.
Khanna, 50, represents California's 17th District, the heart of Silicon Valley. He has pointed to the wealth concentrated in his district as the case for his economic message, telling NPR in August that his district holds $20 trillion, about a third of the nation's wealth. His office says companies within a 50-mile radius of the district hold more than $18 trillion in market capitalisation, including five companies worth more than $1 trillion each: Apple, Google, Nvidia, Broadcom and Tesla. The Instagram post put the figure at $25 trillion; the figure Khanna himself has used publicly is $20 trillion.