Meet Kat Abughazaleh
Yesterday, Kat Abughazaleh launched her campaign for Illinois’ 9th congressional district which stretches from Evanston and Chicago’s North Side west into Lake and McHenry counties. Jan Schakowsky (who’ll be 81 in May), a reliable progressive, has held the seat since 1999. Schakowsky hasn’t announced whether she’ll run again next year. The district is safely blue— D+19, where Trump only managed to win 31% of the vote and where Schakowsky was reelected with 68.4%.
Abughazaleh, a political commentator with a big Tik Tok following, is 26 years old. Covering the launch for Rolling Stone, Tessa Stuart wrote that the candidate “is a normal person— with a rental lease she can’t break before it’s up, financial pressure bearing down on her, and prescription medication that she needs to function properly and that has been challenging to obtain since Elon Musk went after her employer [Media Matters], and she and many of her colleagues were laid off. And when she looks to Congress, not only does she not see enough people who are concerned with the practical day-to-day challenges she and so many of the people she knows are struggling with— the costs of housing, health care, groceries, transportation— she also doesn’t see anyone confronting with any level of seriousness the peril of our current moment, two months into Donald Trump’s second term. ‘We are in an emergency,’ Abughazaleh says. ‘Right now, the answer to authoritarianism isn’t to be quiet. It’s not matching pink outfits at a state address. It’s not throwing trans people under the bus. It’s not refusing to look at the party at all and see where it could be better. The answer is to very publicly, very loudly, very boldly, stand up. The only way to fight fascism, and this has been proven over and over and over again, is loudly, proudly, and every single day.’”
Abughazaleh doesn’t have anything against Schakowsky, acknowledging she’s “had a pretty great track record on her voting. She’s been a good congresswoman, but I want to be better.”
Forgoing her income and insurance to run for office, she says, “is scary, but like, are we just gonna leave our government to the people who continually fail us?”
As for her campaign, Abughazaleh says she wants to do things differently. “As idealistic as it might sound, I want to try to not do all of the things I hate,” she says.
That means no catering to corporations or bowing and scraping for donations from the ultra-wealthy. Instead, she’s planning free public events working with mutual aid groups and local businesses. Instead of money, everyone who attends her first event, she says, will be asked to donate a box of tampons to a collective that distributes purity period products among shelters and institutions across Chicago. (She’s well aware that the Fox News segment writes itself: ”I know— and maybe, you know, trans men will use them. Oh, scary!”)
She is planning to document every step of the campaign process on all her platforms in hopes of inspiring others, especially those who would be interested in primarying Democrats, to run for office too. “I want my candidacy to get other people to be candidates, and I want to highlight their candidacies.”
There is clearly an appetite: Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something recently told Rolling Stone that since Election Day, more than 27,000 people have signed up with the organization, a figure that far outstrips the pace of sign-ups the organization saw in 2017 and 2018, and which almost exceeds, in the first three months of this year, the total number of sign-ups in those years.
“There’s no reason every American should not be able to afford housing, groceries, health insurance, public transit (ideally), and then still have enough money to save and take your kid to the zoo or go to the movies with your friends. There’s just, there’s no reason— we are the wealthiest country in the world,” Abughazaleh says. “The idea that that’s unrealistic or idealistic or naive or even called childish, I think that’s sucky.