@katmabu oh hey I’m back #fyp #foryoupage #news #politics #america #trump #elonmusk #tesla #doge #democrats #democrat #woketok #janschakowsky #chicago #chicagotiktok #evanston #illinois #domore ♬ original sound - Kat Abughazaleh
On Monday, Kat Abughazaleh announced her candidacy for Congress with a YouTube video. “What if we didn’t suck?” she asked.
The “we” she was referring to was the Democratic Party.
“Unfortunately, this party has become one where you have to look to the exceptions for real leadership as the majority work from an outdated playbook,” she said to the camera.
Abughazaleh is a 26-year-old content creator who lives on the North Side of Chicago. She cut her teeth at the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, where she monitored right-wing media and has continued to make left-leaning videos and social media posts after she was laid off last year.
She’s challenging an incumbent Democrat in the solidly blue state of Illinois, in the solidly blue 9th Congressional District, which covers part of Chicago’s North Side as well as a smattering of nearby suburbs, including Democratic strongholds Evanston and Skokie.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky has been the congresswoman there since 1999 (the year Abughazaleh was born) and has not lost an election since.
In an earlier election cycle, a campaign like Abughazaleh’s would have been written off as a publicity stunt. Some people still question her intent; she is, for example, almost certainly the first congressional candidate in history to post a selfie on Bluesky wearing a Pokémon onesie.
But some voters are taking her seriously. Within three days after she uploaded her “Why I’m Running for Congress” video to YouTube, her campaign had raised more than $275,000 from over 7,000 individual donors.
“I’m already feeling really, really good about this,” her campaign manager, Sam Weinberg, 24, said Thursday. “And the response over the past 50-something hours has shown that a lot of people are feeling the same way.”
Abughazaleh’s candidacy is exceptionally well-timed. She’s taking on an 80-year-old incumbent after Joe Biden’s aborted presidential campaign raised questions about age and governorship. She’s a loose-lipped digital native campaigning in the shadow of Kamala Harris’ much-publicized aversion to media access. She’s challenging party norms on the heels of a public rift caused by Sen. Chuck Schumer’s last-minute accession to the GOP’s Trump-friendly budget. And she’s aggressive in her condemnation of Trump and his party, differentiating herself from the Democratic establishment’s polite paddles and pink protest tactics.
In short, she’s running when more and more people are questioning doctrinaire Democratic politics and asking whether this is her party’s version of 2010, when a new crop of “tea party” candidates unseated incumbent Republicans and pushed the party further to the right.
“People say the Democrats are really good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” Abughazaleh said from her home in Chicago, seated at the same desk where she recorded her campaign announcement speech. “I think we saw that with the 2024 campaign.”
As she sees it, the Harris campaign started strong, judiciously capitalizing on Brat summer and coconut memes. But that soured after Harris hired a battery of veterans from the Obama and Clinton campaigns.
“It felt like we were going to get something new, and then when all these old consultants came in, it was ‘no daylight, kid,’” she said, a reference to Harris realigning with Biden’s foreign policy agenda.
In conversation, Abughazaleh (pronounced AH-boo-guh-ZAH-lay) speaks as she does in her videos: She’s direct, she swears, she makes occasional jokes and trusts the listener to know when she’s kidding.
The fact that she’s so comfortable on social media is particularly compelling for Democrats who worry that their party is ceding the “manosphere” to Republicans.
Tommy Vietor, a co-host of “Pod Save America” who has worked with Abughazaleh on the Crooked Media podcast “Terminally Online,” thinks she is particularly well-suited for today’s political climate.
“She has been one of the sharpest observers of conservative media for years now, and then has also just been someone who’s been able to cut through the noise and clutter of the internet,” he said. The former Obama staffer praised both the content of her takes and her ability to get people to hear them.
“I think that’s something a lot of Democrats miss,” he said. “They spend a lot of time perfecting the exact words in a speech or in a statement but don’t think enough about how to get people to actually hear it.”
Abughazaleh began working at Media Matters in 2020. She monitored Fox News coverage, with Tucker Carlson being a frequent target of her reporting. She was laid off in 2024 after Elon Musk sued Media Matters over a report it released documenting antisemitism on X. Abughazaleh uses the fact that she was deposed by Musk as a campaign selling point.
Since her layoff, she’s continued to make content criticizing the right. But she’s also critical of Democrats. Three weeks ago, Abughazaleh uploaded a video titled “Why Are Some Democrats Trying to Be Republicans?” that railed against strategies espoused by moderate Democrats, calling their ideas “Republican lite.”
Abughazaleh, who grew up in what she describes as a conservative family in Texas, considers the moderate wing of the Democratic Party to be too focused on winning over voters from the right.
She also thinks the Democrats haven’t been forceful enough in their response to Trump. She would have liked to have seen Democratic lawmakers standing “arm in arm” in front of the Treasury to block Musk’s entrance. She specifically called out Schumer for “cowering to Trump” and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for “lecturing his colleagues” who had stood up to the president.
“I get not wanting to have infighting in the party,” she said. “But if the party isn’t doing its job, then you should be fighting for a better party.”
Had she considered jumping ship and running as a third-party candidate?
“As cool as it would be to have a bunch of different parties, that is not a possibility,” she said. “Right now, the opposition party is the Democratic Party, and I am opposed to Trump.”
Abughazaleh describes her political ideology as a progressive flavor of libertarian “leave people alone” ideals supported by a social safety net. “There is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t be able to afford housing, groceries, and health care with some money left over,” she said in her first campaign video.
On the “Issues” page of the katforillinois.com website, under the heading “Humane Foreign Policy,” Abughazaleh also writes in bold orange text: “I am a proud Palestinian-American, but people of all backgrounds and ethnicities should be disturbed by our government’s complicity in Israel’s 58-year-long illegal occupation of the West Bank and the ongoing attacks on Gaza.”
Abughazaleh is straightforward about her positions regarding the war in Israel. “As I’ve said many times, hostages: bad. They should be freed,” she said, giving a double thumbs-down gesture.
“War crimes: bad. I’m anti-war crimes,” she said, thumbs down. “And Schakowsky has been much better on this issue than most of her peers for most of her career. She’s never taken AIPAC money. I don’t really think that this is a huge issue.”
Schakowsky declined through a spokesperson to respond to Abughazaleh’s comment, but offered this statement regarding Abughazaleh’s campaign: “What makes our community, and our country, so great is that we welcome all voices and ideas. I have always encouraged more participation in the democratic process, and I’m glad to see new faces getting involved as we stand up against the Trump Administration. Right now, that’s what I’m focused on: fighting back against this extreme MAGA regime.”
“Representative Schakowsky is one of the most progressive members of Congress,” said Rachel Janfaza, who writes about Generation Z and politics for her newsletter, the Up and Up. “I think the fact that Kat’s politics are probably not too different from hers just goes to show that there really is an appetite and hunger from young people to challenge the status quo.”
Janfaza added that according to her research, for Gen Z voters, the age of a candidate isn’t as important as their messaging. “When it comes to young challengers, I think they’re going to have to differentiate on both policy and personality, not just on age.”
So far, Schakowsky and her challenger have both been publicly respectful to one another. But Abughazaleh is differentiating herself as a candidate by eschewing pricey fundraisers in favor of campaign events that are open to the public. She also promises to avoid “scammy” fundraising text messages.
If elected, she says she’ll bring greater focus to constituent services, including online resources to help people navigate government bureaucracy. She also wants to create a web-based chat function for constituents rather than relying on phone calls and voicemails.
Part of her campaign’s social media plan also includes how-to content for other potential first-time candidates who feel intimidated by the process of running for office.
Eric Zorn, a Democrat and former columnist for the Chicago Tribune who has been writing about Chicago politics for nearly 40 years, isn’t sure that there’s much local appetite for Abughazaleh’s message.
“My sense is that, although many Democrats are looking for fresh voices and energy, those in Jan’s district will not be all that keen on a very young candidate easily labeled a carpetbagger,” Zorn wrote via email. Abughazaleh moved to Chicago in July 2024. She currently resides just outside of the boundaries of the 9th District, in which she is running, but is in the process of finding a home, according to her campaign manager.
Zorn added that even if Schakowsky were to step aside, he suspects that the local Democrats would “get behind a more established candidate with better local bona fides and greater experience in government.”
It’s still too early to know whether Abughazaleh represents a formidable threat to the Democratic incumbent she’s challenging (Schakowsky still hasn’t even formally announced her own candidacy). And it’s still too early to gauge whether Abughazaleh’s campaign is a fluke or a canary in the coal mine.
But it’s not too early for the right-wing media to take notice. A clip from Abughazaleh’s campaign announcement video played on “Jesse Watters Primetime” last Monday, during a segment about the perils and pitfalls facing the Democratic Party. “This new generation gets going, it’s going to get ugly,” Watters said.
For Abughazaleh, this was happy news: “Jesse Watters talking about me the first night, I was touched, frankly,” she said. “I thought it would take a lot longer for Fox to talk about it, but they just couldn’t help themselves.”
