Six months in, Liccardo reflects on new role

Six months into his new job in Congress, U.S. Rep. Sam Liccardo, D-San Jose, is right in the midst of political turmoil, deep party divisions and continuous concerns from his constituents about America’s potential slip-slide into authoritarian governance. 

Like any Democrat at this political juncture, he’s an automatic and forceful part of the anti-Trump resistance, doing what he can amidst MAGA’s majority grip on both houses of Congress and, it goes without being said, the White House. 

He’s held press conferences denouncing Trump’s mobilization of the national guard in Los Angeles and press conferences urging the Trump administration to restore grant funding to Pacifica’s collapsing coastline. He’s introduced bills to examine the impact of Trump’s tariffs, to hold White House officials accountable for blocking Congress-appropriated funds, and to target officials — like Trump — profiting from meme coins. 

At the same time, Liccardo, a former San Jose mayor, is also falling back on his pragmatic Silicon Valley roots to focus on the tangible. 

“I'm trying to stay in my lane and focus on what I can accomplish,” he said. 

In one capacity, that looks like working to bridge the widening gap between his party and his district’s technological innovators, who’ve become increasingly wary of the Democratic establishment and have the Republican campaign contributions to prove it. 

“I feel like my role is around trying to see how we can better articulate a vision for Democrats around supporting innovation we critically need if we're going to combat climate change and tackle huge gaps in education and skills,” he said. 

Private-sector innovators and technology companies are not endeared to what they view as vague and continually-changing regulations, anti-trust laws and nebulous proposals to tax unrealized gains, Liccardo said. 

He’s interested in a future where big-time Silicon Valley donors — who, for the first time in more than two decades last election, poured more money into the Republican party than the Democratic — can once again comfortably align themselves with Democrats. 

“We shot ourselves in the foot in a lot of ways, and we didn't need to,” he said. “We could be very consistent with Democratic values and still be pro-innovation.” 

For constituents in the coastside area of San Mateo County that he represents, many part of the farmworker and immigrant communities, Trump’s promises of mass deportations and anti-immigrant rhetoric is of particular concern. 

Liccardo acknowledged the increasing fear many immigrants and allies across the country are harboring, and said he was hopeful that even amidst that alarm, common-sense immigration policy that focused on working immigrants might be legislatively possible. 

“The idea being, let's allow Donald Trump to declare victory over the border and let everybody praise him for whatever it is he wants to claim to have done at the border,” he said. “And say, now, this is the moment for us now to have a fair and sensible immigration policy that enables people to work and enables the American economy — that depends so heavily on immigrants — to actually be able to function.” 

And as an affordable housing advocate during his time in San Jose, he’s also focusing on the housing issue as one that could garner bipartisan support, on its face somewhat of a rarity amongst the deeply divided house. 

“On the housing front, we're working on several bills trying to get Republican support for ideas around expansion of housing supply, because I know I'm not going to get Republicans supporting things like, ‘hey, let's get more Section 8 vouchers,’” he said. “But one thing we can both agree on, Democrats and Republicans, is the imperative of getting more housing supply.”  

Liccardo has been leveraging his position on the Financial Services Committee — which oversees housing-related issues — to work on making the financing process for building accessory dwelling units easier, for example. He also sees the possibility of working together with Republicans on converting commercial developments to housing. 

But with many of his ambitious campaign-platform legislative goals unobtainable and a significant amount of time and energy solely dedicated to supporting constant judicial challenges and beating back a forceful Trump and largely acquiescent Congress, one eye always remains on the 2026 midterms. 

Winning back at least three House seats is absolutely integral to the Democratic Party’s mission, Liccardo stressed, and that, too, comes with tangible and actual steps — like campaigning, organizing and making phone calls. 

“The most important tool we have in democracy is an election,” he said. “At the very minimum, we have to win those elections, because if we don't win, then we have no right to claim we can change anything.” 

While he’s cognizant that, as he quipped, he’s not getting any requests from senior Democrats to “take the lead on communications for the next year,” one thing he is sure of is that the party’s message needs to be more than anti-Trump, he said. It also needs to come through to constituents amidst a constant media barrage of negative news. 

“I think the critical challenge for us is how we can communicate through the cacophony, and sometimes that is going well and sometimes poorly,” Liccardo said. “It's got to be about much more than simply put, highlighting all the failures of Trump, we need to be crafting a very positive message about what we can do to help Americans tackle their biggest challenges right now.” 

That means Democrats must be more diligent in focusing on issues that undecided voters care about, he said. 

“We have to focus our message on those persuadable Americans,” he said. “It's not going to be about, necessarily, what I care about, what people in our community care most about. It's going to be about what they care about, and that requires a lot more discipline, a lot more focus, than the Democratic Party has demonstrated in recent years.”