Ro Khanna
Ro Khanna, a Democrat who has represented California's 17th congressional district in the U.S. House since 2017, faces Republican Ritesh Tandon, a tech executive, in his 2026 reelection race.
2026 Races & Market Forecast
Live TruthIndex™ and prediction market consensus for races contested by Ro Khanna.
- Born
- September 13, 1976
- Birthplace
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Education
- Council Rock High School (1994)
University of Chicago (Bachelor of Arts in economics, 1998)
Yale Law School (Juris Doctor, 2001)
Biography & Campaign Analysis
Background
Ro Khanna was born Rohit Khanna in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 13, 1976. His parents immigrated to the United States from the Indian state of Punjab in 1968; his father is a chemical engineer and his mother is a former schoolteacher.
Raised in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Khanna graduated from Council Rock High School in Newtown in 1994. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in economics from the University of Chicago in 1998, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 2001.
Career
After law school, Khanna clerked for federal appeals judge Morris S. Arnold and then practiced intellectual property law.
President Barack Obama appointed him deputy assistant secretary of the United States Department of Commerce, a post he held from 2009 to 2011, and he later joined the Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
He was a visiting lecturer of economics at Stanford University from 2012 to 2016 and in 2012 published Entrepreneurial Nation: Why Manufacturing is Still Key to America's Future.
Khanna lost a 2004 Democratic primary challenge to Tom Lantos and a 2014 general election to fellow Democrat Mike Honda in the 17th district. He defeated Honda in 2016 by 61% to 39% and was re-elected in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2024, defeating Republican Ritesh Tandon in 2020 with 71.3% of the vote.
Khanna co-chaired Bernie Sanders's 2020 presidential campaign and founded the Congressional Antitrust Caucus.
In the 119th Congress he serves on the Committees on Armed Services and on Oversight and Government Reform and on the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.
2026 race
Ro Khanna is seeking reelection in California's 17th congressional district, where he was re-elected in 2024 with 67.7% of the vote. In the top-two primary he finished first with 62.30%, and Republican Ritesh Tandon, a tech executive and perennial candidate, placed second with 14.85%.
Republican Jennie Ha Phan, Democrats Ethan Agarwal and Mike Katz, and Libertarian Joe Dehn were eliminated. The general election on November 3, 2026, is a rematch of Khanna's 2020 race against Tandon.