The 26-year-old Chicagoan is betting that empathy and righteous anger can remake Democratic politics.
By Amanda Becker for The nineteenth
It’s 2 p.m. on a Friday earlier than a protracted weekend and as Kat Abughazaleh sits down on the tamales store close to her marketing campaign workplace on Chicago’s North Facet, she laments that the day has been so busy that she’d solely managed to scrounge up a single saltine with some scorching sauce.
Saltines and scorching sauce have change into a go-to snack for the 26-year-old Democratic congressional candidate. Operating for the Home of Representatives has confirmed to be consuming, and the combo all the time appears to be readily available.
Already that day, Abughazaleh had woken up early for a remedy appointment (that she’d forgotten to schedule), taken her cat to the vet, arrived on the workplace for an all-day workers retreat to debate their signature-gathering efforts to get on the poll and took part in a photograph shoot for this story. She up to date her broadly adopted social media accounts alongside the way in which, teasing a forthcoming video that might spotlight how the combat for employees’ rights in Chicago helped set up the approaching Labor Day vacation.
Thursday had been a late night time — the marketing campaign had hosted a punk present at a Wrigleyville bar. Punks for Progress featured three bands: Impolite Echoes, The First Rule and Malört & Savior. In between units, the native slapstick comedian Steve Tapas cracked that he knew the $5 he spent for the Abughazaleh marketing campaign sticker on his drink cup “was not going to Democratic consultants” and blasted get together leaders for being feckless when it got here to standing as much as Republican President Donald Trump.
Kat Abughazaleh sits outdoors a restaurant close to her marketing campaign workplace within the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago on August 26.
“What did you say? You didn’t like Chuck Schumer’s resistance? What? You don’t think the DNC, that took over $1.5 billion to lose the last campaign, is doing enough?” Tapas stated to jeers from the group.
The vibe within the bar was righteous fury. Attendees in earplugs — accessible totally free within the rear of the room, on the merchandise desk — nodded their heads as Tapas stated, “The price of eggs is $9 and my trans friends are scared to walk down the street.” They have been wearing “Tax the Rich” t-shirts, and in American flag pants, and in denim jackets with patches for the punk bands Minor Menace and Bikini Kill and one other that urged “Protect Trans Youth.” There have been songs about American imperialism and lyrics about how “nothing lasts forever, even one’s country.” There have been reminders to tip the bartender, a navy veteran. Particular visitor DJ Jayleigh, who spins for drag and burlesque reveals, joined The First Rule on stage for his or her track “Dictator (We Elected A…),” written after Trump’s first election, when Abughazaleh was not but sufficiently old to vote.
Kat Abughazaleh does a shot of Malört with the bands Malört and Savoir throughout “Punks for Progress,” on August 25 in Chicago.
Abughazaleh wore a black leather-based jacket over a “Make Nazis Afraid Again” t-shirt, denim cutoffs, fishnet stockings and black high-heeled boots. Periodically, she would cease skanking — a sort of moshing related to ska music — and take the microphone to speak about inexpensive housing, groceries and well being care, a trifecta she known as “basic human rights.” She gleefully advised the group that she had simply texted a good friend: “There’s a keffiyeh in the mosh pit!” She and members of Malört & Savior took photographs of the band’s namesake anise-flavored liquor, notorious to Chicago.
Folks collect at G Man Tavern in Chicago for “Punks for Progress,” a fundraising occasion for Kat Abughazaleh on August 25.
Looming over the occasion was Trump’s current intimation that the town could possibly be subsequent on his checklist to ship federal regulation enforcement. “Are we pissed the fuck off?” Abughazaleh known as out. “Yeah!!!” the group responded. “Can I get a ‘fuck ICE!’ in here? Can I get a ‘fuck Trump!’ in here?” she continued.
“This is not just about me getting into Congress — I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life,” Abughazaleh advised them of her marketing campaign. “I’m 26 and this is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done, it is the most exhausting thing I’ve ever done. How do people do this for decades and decades? The conclusion I’ve come to is that they stop doing it right. And what we need right now is representatives that talk to people, that listen to them, that flex empathy like a muscle, and then leave this job … for the next generation.”
***
When Abughazaleh launched her bid to characterize Illinois’ ninth District on March 24, her twenty sixth birthday, she joined a rising cohort of younger Democrats who’ve concluded the stakes for democracy are so excessive — and the get together’s outdated guard is so reluctant to surrender energy — that they should push their manner into the political area, even when they’re met with resistance.
Kat Abughazaleh listens to the bands with pals and supporters throughout “Punks for Progress.”
On the time, the closely Democratic district’s present consultant, Jan Schakowsky, had not introduced plans to retire, so Abughazaleh’s candidacy meant that she was difficult an incumbent who had held the seat because the 12 months she was born, 1999. Abughazaleh defined that whereas Schakowsky was a reliably liberal vote in Congress, the final presidential election — when Kamala Harris changed Joe Biden on the ticket on the eleventh hour and in the end misplaced to Trump regardless of elevating and spending $1.5 billion in a whirlwind marketing campaign — underscored the necessity for proactive generational change.
Abughazaleh’s marketing campaign slogan is a query: “What if we didn’t suck?” The “we” are Democrats. In a direct-to-camera launch video, she says, “Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dismantling our country piece by piece and so many Democrats seem content to just sit back and let them. So I say it’s time to drop the excuses and grow a fucking spine.”
Although Trump’s approval ranking is underwater and sinking, a sequence of opinion polls launched over the summer season additionally portend critical points for Democrats as they try to take again management of the Home, Senate or each within the 2026 midterm elections. Indignant Democratic voters spent the summer season at city halls pleading with their representatives to do extra to counter Trump and his agenda. Pundits have began asking whether or not that is the Democrats’ “Tea Party” second, likening it to the grassroots conservative takeover of the Republican Social gathering in 2010 after the election of President Barack Obama.
Kat Abughazaleh sits for a portrait in her marketing campaign workplace within the North Facet neighborhood of Rogers Park on August 26 in Chicago.
Abughazaleh defined that the query of Democratic succession is “less about age and more about the fact … that you’re legislating on ideas that are completely abstract to you as a person.”
“Most of our members of Congress didn’t go through school shooting drills or didn’t have kids that went through school shooting drills; they don’t have to worry about out-of-pocket [health care] costs or paying rent because they own their house, and that’s good for them, but it makes it really difficult when you’re legislating about corporate landlords or about universal health care or about gun control,” she stated.
Abughazaleh famous that she “could have, from day one, been like, ‘I’m a third-generation Chicagoan,’” to quash early criticism within the Home race that she was a carpetbagger who had moved to the town simply months earlier than. “But I think that’s kind of toxic, how we look at politics, and I don’t think that should make someone vote for me. There are a lot of refugees in our own country that are coming here, whether it’s because you or your kid is trans, or you’re trying to protect your reproductive health,” she stated, including that after she begins attempting to have kids, for instance, she received’t be snug spending time in Texas resulting from its restrictive abortion legal guidelines.
A roll of stickers for Kat Abughazaleh sits on the entrance of “Punks for Progress,” at G Man Tavern.
“One of the cool parts of the campaign is learning specifics about my family history here,” Abughazaleh continued. “I knew my grandfather came here for college. He went to George Williams, when it was still in Hyde Park, then went back to the Middle East and opened the first Western-style supermarket in Kuwait. We have a lot of really cool volunteers who have kind of gone into archives. They found this picture of my grandfather in his yearbook … it’s like ‘Taher Abughazaleh, an ardent advocate for the rights of the people, reads his Quran in traditional costume.’”
The transfer to Chicago meant Abughazaleh was on the bottom for final summer season’s Democratic Nationwide Conference. She bought credentialed as an unbiased creator to cowl it. When it grew to become clear that get together leaders wouldn’t permit a Palestinian speaker as Israel’s battle in Gaza raged on, dividing the get together’s base, she joined a bunch of uncommitted delegates outdoors to protest. They slept there; the expertise was overwhelming. “I heard slurs that I never heard before, aimed at us, and I am a Palestinian kid who grew up in Texas after 9/11,” she stated. However there was additionally kindness: Colleagues at a podcast she was contributing to despatched tea, espresso, nicotine and snacks.
“I still had hope till the end of the DNC. I was, like, maybe there’s a chance to turn this around. And then they didn’t; she didn’t,” Abughazaleh stated of Democrats and Harris. “Then a bunch of people who haven’t won an election in a decade or more came in and gave the same shitty advice that’s lost us elections unless we had a literal global pandemic.”
On election night time, Abughazaleh went to mattress early as Collins continued to observe returns. When she wakened briefly within the early hours of Wednesday and noticed that it was shaping as much as be a close to clear sweep of swing states for Trump, she thought, “Fuck it, I’m going to run for something.”
Then she went again to mattress.
***
It took Abughazaleh a number of extra months of tallying up what she thought was fallacious in Democratic politics earlier than she definitively determined to problem Schakowsky. The ultimate straw was watching get together leaders at Trump’s inauguration, then, them “pushing through his fascist appointees.” She recalled pondering, “They’re not going to do anything, are they?” Someday in February — “I don’t remember the exact breaking point, but there’s a note in my planner” — she advised herself: “OK, I guess I’m running for Congress now.”
However she would run a really totally different kind of marketing campaign.
Abughazaleh has centered on mutual support and is utilizing her marketing campaign’s fundraising prowess to inject sources into the district. The value of “admission” to her launch occasion was donated menstrual merchandise, which got to an space shelter. Backpacks crammed with provides have been stacked in a nook of the marketing campaign’s workplace from a current back-to-school drive. Throughout the backpack drive, the marketing campaign booked a preferred barbershop for the day, offering $2,500 value of free haircuts, principally for youths. Sam Weinberg, Abughazaleh’s 24-year-old marketing campaign supervisor, stated he was drawn to work for her, regardless of not having conventional marketing campaign expertise, due to the “vision of the campaign she had,” which “wasn’t awful and soul sucking.”
If elected, Kat Abughazaleh could be the youngest girl, the primary Gen Z girl and the second Palestinian American girl ever elected to Congress.
Litman stated the largest spikes in curiosity that Run for One thing noticed have been within the two weeks after Trump beat Harris; in February, after the primary wave of firings of federal employees by Trump’s so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity, or DOGE; when New York Metropolis progressive Zohran Mamdani received the mayoral main; and in March, when Senate Minority Chief Chuck Schumer “caved” — Litman’s phrase alternative — throughout a congressional standoff over a spending invoice and labored with Republicans to avert a authorities shutdown. As one other spending combat looms, liberal commentators are questioning whether or not Schumer and different leaders have to embrace extra obstructionist ways.
“The thing we’re hearing that’s different this time around is that people are saying, ‘I’m done waiting for my turn,’” Litman stated of the inflow of candidates. “They’re particularly furious at the party leadership and they want to see that the leaders are as mad as they are.”
She stated in case you plot Democratic candidates on two axes, combat versus fold and remodel versus return, when it comes to the path of the get together, it’s “the people on the fight and transform, they’re breaking through.”
On the federal stage, these candidates face actual headwinds: Taking up an entrenched incumbent requires tenacity and financial sources. However it has been executed earlier than. In 2018, now-Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat then-Rep. Joseph Crowley of New York, who was seen as a possible successor to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Within the years since, she has constructed a nationwide profile by way of her savvy use of social media and membership within the Squad, a bunch of progressive Home lawmakers who’re principally ladies of colour. They’re a frequent goal of right-wing media and politicians, whereas additionally typically enjoying the position of left-of-center antagonists to their very own get together. Their stances on nationwide and worldwide points — a minimal wage hike, elevating taxes on the rich, common well being care, the battle in Gaza — carry immense weight with the Democratic base.
Kat Abughazaleh sits underneath a bridge within the North Facet neighborhood of Rogers Park on August 26 in Chicago.
Ocasio-Cortez is now seen as a possible challenger to Schumer. Across the time that the minority chief canceled his e book tour throughout uproar from Democratic voters concerning the government-funding battle, Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont packed tens of 1000’s into venues for his or her Preventing Oligarchy Tour.
“AOC is absolutely an inspiration,” Abughazaleh stated. “She created a permission structure for people like me to be able to run, and I wanna create a permission structure for even more people.”
Abughazaleh identified, when drawing contrasts between herself and her Democratic main opponents, that she comes into the race already having a large social media following and is likewise already accustomed to weathering assaults from outstanding far-right figures — a lot of them virulently misogynist.
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These younger candidates make the case, in kinds that vary from offended to humorous, that it’s time for these in energy to step other than the damaged system they’ve constructed and make room for a era that has by no means skilled anything, however insist a distinct, higher Democratic Social gathering is feasible. They consider that exhibiting they’re prepared to combat to guard weak individuals’s rights, whereas providing an financial plan that appeals to the center and dealing courses, isn’t an both/or however a each/and endeavor.
“Trans people have kitchen tables. People that love trans people have kitchen tables. Immigrants have kitchen tables,” Abughazaleh stated. “Democrats have been messaging on this issue, which is basic human decency, wrong this entire time. It’s a two-pronged thing. When it comes to extremism, if you’re constantly ceding ground that trans people don’t deserve to exist, or that there are carve-outs for that … it never stops with the people that you deem inhuman, it will always come to you.”
At a Delight Month occasion, Abughazaleh gave anti-LBGTQ+ protesters the center finger throughout a conflict, prompting outrage on-line from the political proper. “Yes, I did flip off some bigots for telling children they’d go to hell and, no, I’m not going to apologize,” she stated in a video response. The marketing campaign designed a “Kat isn’t sorry” t-shirt together with her picture, center finger raised. The shirt urges individuals to “stand up for trans kids.”
Abughazaleh famous that the far-right makes use of a playbook of division so their assaults “resonate with people whose material needs aren’t being met.” She cited Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “war against queer people” as a modern-day instance. She additionally pointed to how “when the Nazis came to power in Germany, one of the first things they did was burn down the library of gender and sexuality.”
Abughazaleh doesn’t settle for company PAC cash and has pledged to supply would-be constituents better entry to her, one thing her marketing campaign is already doing with weekly “office hours.” Throughout one such workplace hour in July, as she waited for her first visitor to affix, she fielded a query from the web chat about what she would do after serving her self-limited 5 phrases. She instantly responded: “Hang out with Heater, obviously.” Heater is the cat Abugazaleh adopted with Collins final 12 months after she gifted him a go to to a Brooklyn cat cafe, although she is allergic to cats. She has embroidered Heater’s likeness on a pair of denim overalls. The orange cat can also be depicted on a favourite set of earrings.
Kat Abughazaleh walks with a marketing campaign staffer within the Rogers Park neighborhood on August 26 in Chicago.
Abughazaleh stated that when she made preliminary calls about taking over Schakowsky, “I had people literally hang up the phone when I said there was an incumbent.” She noticed it as additional proof of a damaged system the place you may “literally be blacklisted” by the get together and disadvantaged of its equipment and assist. After Schakowsky, the incumbent, determined to retire, the ninth District’s main grew crowded. The sphere now contains fellow front-runners Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, a one-time Democratic gubernatorial challenger to present Gov. JB Pritzker, and state Sen. Laura Fantastic, who has title recognition however trails them each in fundraising.
Abughazaleh joked that for a break up second after shopping for tamales for herself and a marketing campaign employee, she anxious the cost wouldn’t undergo as a result of she was behind on submitting her bills for reimbursement. She has been open about seemingly being one of many “poorest members of Congress” if she is elected, solely lately secured medical health insurance and sometimes talks concerning the “paywall” that retains individuals out of politics.
“I think that competitive primaries are great. If we win, I want someone to try a primary the next [cycle], because I think that if you truly are the best candidate, you shouldn’t be worried about a little competition,” she stated.
“When Biden was in power, it was like, ‘Well, we have to keep up a strong front, so you can’t challenge the party.’ And now that Trump’s there, it’s like, ‘Well, we have to show we’re united, so we can’t challenge the party.’ If now is not the time to challenge who is in power, when will there ever be a time?” she requested.
