Eliana Melmed
Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh
I met Kat Abughazaleh and her campaign manager at Nobody’s Darling, a queer-friendly “Nina Simone-styled lounge” in Andersonville, one of the Chicago neighborhoods in Illinois’s sprawling Ninth Congressional District. At first, we were the only people in the bar, but gradually it filled up with young Chicagoans looking to unwind at the end of the workday. As the volume inside rose, I had to lean in to hear Abughazaleh speak.
“Every authoritarian movement has thrived most when their opposition has stopped being opposition,” Abughazaleh said in a voice that rose above the din. “Appeasement, if you haven’t heard, historically doesn’t work.”
Abughazaleh, a video journalist known for her takedowns of right-wing media figures, started her campaign for Illinois’s Ninth District with the goal of unseating the long-standing incumbent, Jan Schakowsky, who has served since 1999, the year that 26-year-old Abughazaleh was born. In just one week as a candidate, she raised more money for the race, over $378,000, than Schakowsky did in the entire 90-day quarter. And on Wednesday, reports surfaced that 80-year-old Schakowsky would announce her retirement on May 5. Abughazaleh sent out a press release thanking Schakowsky for her service and encouraging others to jump into the race.
The entry of Abughazaleh has coincided with a debate about Washington gerontocracy and whether younger automatically means better in politics. Without an octogenarian incumbent for contrast, Abughazaleh will now face a younger, hungrier field of challengers, and she’ll need to compete by offering an agenda for voters, perhaps through a different fault line among today’s Democrats: the willingness to fight.
THE DISTRICT ENCOMPASSES CHICAGO’S northernmost neighborhoods and a good chunk of its northern and northwestern suburbs, including the campuses of Northwestern University and Loyola University of Chicago. Those tens of thousands of college students bring down the median age in the district to 40, which is right around the national median.
Abughazaleh’s early campaign events have catered to this young, liberal, college-educated demographic. At one event, Abughazaleh collected 5,600 period products instead of cash donations to the campaign. Just last week, she hosted a knitting circle where she worked on a patchwork sweater and answered questions from constituents.
It’s clear that Abughazaleh isn’t trying to fit the mold of a traditional politician. Instead, she poses for photos with her cat, Heater, and ratios right-wing men on X with pictures of her out partying. She’s young, energetic, slightly broke, and openly critical of Democratic leadership.
But I was skeptical that youth alone could get her elected, especially in a district that had elected Schakowsky 14 times, presumably for good reason. I asked her whether she sees age as the defining factor in a politician’s ability to govern their constituents.
“I think it is less about age and more about these experiences that are different,” Abughazaleh said. “The average age of Congress is 58, the average American is 38. Most of our congressmembers didn’t experience school shooting drills growing up, or even their children didn’t experience school shooting drills growing up. They haven’t had to worry about housing in a very long time. They don’t have to worry about out-of-pocket medical costs.”
Abughazaleh has been through her fair share of these Gen Z experiences, with some twists (not every twentysomething has lost their job because Elon Musk sued their company, as happened to her at Media Matters). Born in Texas to a Palestinian father and sixth-generation Texan mother, she grew up in a conservative Republican family.
When she was a freshman in high school, Abughazaleh’s conservative conceptions of the world eroded after the family moved from Dallas to Tucson, Arizona. There, she saw poverty for the first time and realized that people didn’t end up on the street due to a lack of personal responsibility, as she had been taught growing up, but because government and society failed to provide for people. One of her closest friends in high school couldn’t attend college due to her financial situation, and Abughazaleh was flabbergasted. “She was much smarter and more talented than I was, and she just couldn’t go to college. She had to help take care of her little brother because both of her parents worked multiple jobs.”
To be a twentysomething today is to have your life measured out by overlapping crises and political upheaval. Abughazaleh was a toddler during 9/11, a preteen for the global financial crash and the Great Recession, started college as Trump entered office for the first time, and graduated into the COVID-19 pandemic. Layered over it all was climate change and a rising cost of living.
Now, as she runs for office, the crisis of the moment is the threat of authoritarianism and fascism under Trump’s second term. And Abughazaleh has lost all confidence in traditional Democratic leadership to handle it.
“I’ve seen Democratic missteps over and over again in my career, and they’re not good at navigating this modern landscape. It’s always reacting to the far right,” she said.
ABUGHAZALEH IS CERTAINLY NOT THE ONLY ONE who thinks that Democrats aren’t up to fighting Trump. In February, communications strategist Meredith Shiner announced that she was launching an exploratory committee to unseat Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) in an article titled “Primary Every Democrat” in The New Republic. Durbin announced his retirement the same day as the Schakowsky news broke, with some speculating that Abughazaleh’s strong start and the focus in Illinois on age in politics led to his decision.
Shiner’s argument reminded me of Abughazaleh’s: Having old politicians isn’t in and of itself a problem, but the complacency and apathy of our current gerontocratic Democratic leadership certainly is.
David Hogg, the 25-year-old Parkland mass shooting survivor and vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, feels similarly. Last week, the PAC he co-founded, Leaders We Deserve, announced that it would funnel $20 million to younger candidates taking on House incumbents in safely blue districts. Hogg did name two older Democratic incumbents that were exceptions: former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Schakowsky. Hogg called them “fighters who are delivering” and said that Leaders We Deserve wouldn’t intervene in those primary challenges. Schakowsky has made that decision moot.
The retirement announcement somewhat upends Abughazaleh’s strategy for the race. State Sen. Laura Fine (58) and progressive Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss (47) are expected to announce for the now-open seat. But candidates can still stand out by vowing to fight back against Trump.
I asked Abughazaleh what she thinks Democrats should be doing, and her answer was that our leaders need to be louder, angrier, and more difficult, instead of being stuck in old rules and norms of politeness.
“They, at the very least, need to be loudly, publicly using their positions of power to resist this. I mean, any legislative or parliamentary procedure they can use to gum up the works is important,” she said. “You need to be holding your colleagues accountable. That matters because your voice has an outsized impact compared to most of your constituents, unfortunately.”
Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Rep. Jan Schakowsky, whom Abughazaleh had intended to challenge in Illinois’s Ninth District, plans to retire from Congress.
Taking on the right wing was Abughazaleh’s career for a while. After graduating from George Washington University in D.C., she got a role at Media Matters, a nonprofit that monitors and fact-checks conservative media. Her job? To watch nearly everything Tucker Carlson put out, correct it, and make fun of it for an online audience. The day he was fired from Fox News, she told me, was one of the best days of her life.
But in 2023, Elon Musk sued Media Matters over an article that exposed how X was placing advertisements next to pro-Nazi content. The article led to an exodus of major advertisers like IBM and Apple from X, costing Musk and his company millions. Musk announced that X Corp. would “be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters, and he did just that. As a result, Media Matters had to lay off a dozen of their staffers in May 2024. Abughazaleh was one of them.
The analysis she did for the company has stuck with her, though, and gives her an insight into the right that most Democrats don’t have, she argues. Growing up in a conservative family, she said, also means that she knows how people on the right think.
“I think that a lot of people, or a lot of Democratic leadership especially, or people that have been lifelong Democrats, don’t realize how strong propaganda is. I mean, there’s a reason that people like Rupert Murdoch invest billions and billions of dollars into it every single year,” she said.
“While there are people out there that are just racist or sexist or cruel, there are a lot more that are scared,” she said. “And this entire system has been geared to make them rely on the fascist strongman to make them see that as the sense of safety without them even realizing it. And so I think that there’s a lot of potential in just, like, talking to people like human beings.”
Talking to people like human beings is part of what has made her video explainers so popular online. After the Nazi march in Charlottesville, Abughazaleh made a video breaking down Trump’s comments. She unpacked his response neutrally, minute by minute, with some jokes thrown in. She told viewers they could be mean to her as long as they watched the video all the way through.
The comments were telling: “Some of them were like: ‘I still like him, but what he said was screwed up.’ And then some were like: ‘This kind of punctured this view I had. And so I’m gonna do more reading,’” Abughazaleh recounted. “When you talk to people like that, when you recognize their concerns, and when you talk about things on a personal level, it resonates a lot more than just constant demonization.”
ABUGHAZALEH HERSELF DOESN’T YET LIVE in the district, but is in a different Chicago neighborhood, after having moved to the city last summer. She’s planning to relocate to a neighborhood like Andersonville or Edgewater this summer.
Throughout the campaign, she’s hoping to continue reaching people where they are, whether that’s at a knitting circle in Evanston or an online video criticizing Trump. Only time will tell if her approach will resonate. But she has a sense of where she doesn’t want to take the campaign.
Kamala Harris’s campaign, with its focus on catering to the right rather than the Democratic base, marked another moment of political awakening for Abughazaleh. It all came to a head during last summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which she attended as a credentialed creator. The whole thing felt wrong from the get-go, she told me: “I felt like a token. Like, the token Palestinian creator.”
But she really lost faith in Democratic leadership on the third night of the convention. While she was waiting for her Uber to leave the United Center, delegates from the Uncommitted Movement—a group advocating for Palestinian rights and an end to the genocide in Gaza—were staging a sit-in outside of the convention hall to push for a Palestinian American speaker to take the stage at the DNC and elevate the Palestinian cause to the Democratic platform. As soon as she heard about the sit-in, Abughazaleh returned to the United Center and joined them. She eventually spent the whole night on the cold concrete.
In the end, despite talks between the protesters and the Harris campaign, Democrats did not make space for a Palestinian American speaker. It was a move that Abughazaleh saw as both racist and politically ineffective.
“It just felt so clear that my basic humanity didn’t mean much to a lot of people in power. And taking away the feelings of it all, it’s just bad electoral strategy when you have millions and millions of people saying, ‘This matters to me,’ and especially in swing states, and you’re not even listening. It felt not just wrong but dumb,” she said.
After we spoke for three hours at Nobody’s Darling, she introduced herself to the bartender and handed him a cat sticker from a pile of dozens that she pulled out of her bag and spread out on the bar. She leaned in toward him: “I’m Kat, I’m running for Congress here.”
It’s a long haul until the 2026 midterms. But Abughazaleh has enough anger at the status quo to fuel her.
“This willingness to not only ignore your voters but capitulate to authoritarianism, it’s pathetic, and I just got sick of waiting around for someone else to do what I think should have been done long ago.”
