Kat Abughazaleh said she’s sick of waiting for Democrats to act, so she’s launching a bid to represent Illinois’ 9th House District to unseat a veteran party leader.
Abughazaleh, who earned her bachelor’s in international affairs from the University in 2020, announced her congressional campaign late last month, posing a primary challenge to Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), who has held the seat for decades. The 26-year-old’s campaign takes aim at the areas she feels Democrats have “done nothing” to combat President Donald Trump’s actions in office.
She said she plans to distance her candidacy from the Democratic Party’s “old consultant strategies” by pushing for voters’ everyday needs.
“It’s comforting to think that someone’s going to come in and fix all your problems, but that’s just not the truth, and we’re all we’ve got,” Abughazaleh said in an interview.
Abughazaleh, who’s gained over 580,000 followers, across Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and X, formerly known as Twitter, has amassed popularity online since 2022 for creating videos railing against right-wing rhetoric. She moved to Chicago in 2024 but doesn’t currently reside within the boundaries of the 9th District, which encompasses Forest and Tower Lakes, northern Chicago and Evanston.
She said she and her partner had to move to the Chicago area on “very short notice” last year, and they “plan” to move to the 9th District.
Abughazaleh has honed her campaign around broad reform of the Democratic Party, like enforcing term limits for members of Congress and pushing against the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s “dismantling” of the federal government, as she said in her campaign launch video. She said she hopes to embody the change she wants to see in Congress, including being more “disruptive” in resisting the Trump administration and having a vision for the future of the country.
“Resisting Trump needs to be a lot more public, a lot more loud,” she said.
From 2017 to 2020, Abughazaleh worked as a staff writer, a contributing culture editor and then a research assistant for The Hatchet, which she said allowed her to travel throughout the District and talk to new people, reaching beyond the bounds of a “typical” college experience.
“I think GW allows for a lot of independence, and I think the culture section was perfect for that,” she said.
Her congressional campaign also states support for issues like climate change — including endorsing the Green New Deal — making education “affordable and accessible” and working to pass the Equality Act, which increases protections, like nondiscrimination policies across employment, housing, education and other “key areas of life,” for LGBTQ+ populations. Abughazaleh, whose father is a Palestinian immigrant, also pledged full support for all hostages kidnapped by Hamas to be released and a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
Abughazaleh’s bid for Congress tees up a primary contest against Schakowsky, an 80-year-old, longtime representative who was first elected to the seat in 1999 and has yet to announce her candidacy for the 2026 election — which Abughazaleh has highlighted as a pitfall of her opponent’s tenure. Schakowsky has been a consistent advocate for affordable health care and senior issues – including adding provisions in the Affordable Care Act to review nursing home quality protections.
A wave of younger candidates have announced primary challenges to longtime incumbent Democrats for the 2026 midterms so far, but Abughazaleh is the only member of Generation Z to announce a campaign so far.
“They don’t understand what it’s like to live like us, like they don’t understand they didn’t grow up with school shooter drills like you and I did,” she said.
Since her campaign’s debut in late March, Abughazaleh said her team has raised more than $400,000 from more than 11,000 donors. But she said instead of using donations to fund advertisements and consultants, like most political campaigns, she directs the money raised toward meeting people’s “direct needs” in the 9th District through food drives and recreational events, like concerts, that will be free for residents of the 9th District to attend during the campaign.
“Instead of spending a sh*t ton of money on consultants and glossy ads, what if instead, we put that to food drives? What if we instead made recreational activities like concerts and sh*t for the community,” Abughazaleh said.
Abughazaleh has hosted a few events since her campaign launched, including a knitting and crafts event this past Saturday in Evanston to “connect” with voters. She said she’s hosted biweekly “office hours” where constituents can meet with her at local restaurants to discuss issues that matter to them, like Trump’s tariffs policy.
“We had a bunch of different people coming in, like 10 of us at one point, just surrounding this little table talking about issues that mattered,” Abughazaleh said. “It was everything from unions to foreign policy to tariffs to cycling lanes.”
Abughazaleh said while she “fully plans” on winning, she knows her campaign will have a lasting and “net positive” impact on her community because of the mutual aid efforts they’re providing in the district, like donating to local food drives.
“The great thing about this approach of the community, mutual aid, direct action aspect of all this takes some pressure off of me because I know that win or lose, I am not wasting everyone’s money,” Abughazaleh said.
Sam Weinberg, Abughazaleh’s campaign manager, said “a lot” of young people are getting into politics now, especially after former President Joe Biden’s performance in the June 2024 presidential debate highlighted Biden’s age and underscored the “need” for young people in politics.
“Now we’re seeing multiple Gen Zers across the country of different backgrounds and different geographic areas and different ideologies running,” Weinberg said. “And I think that’s really important that younger people are running.”
Weinberg said Abughazaleh’s campaign was inspired by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), North Carolina’s attorney general Jeff Jackson, European Union politician Fidias Panayiotou and others, all of which he said have found “digital success” in creating political content for social media, drawing specific inspiration from AOC’s long Instagram livestreams to engage with constituents.
“That’s something that Kat and I are talking about doing a lot as well, where Kat already has done some explainer videos on running for office, trying to demystify the process, trying to explain to people the hoops you have to jump through, the people you have to talk with, the things you have to do,” Weinberg said.
Weinberg said the campaign has a “lofty” goal of knocking on every door in the district, and they plan to reach out to voters through YouTube ads, phone banking and community events.
“We want to send a message to voters, whether they are registered Democrats, whether they haven’t voted in 10 years, whether they live out in the far rural part of the district, we want to send the message that they are not being left behind by Kat, even if they are being left behind by establishment Democrats or by the Trump administration,” Weinberg said.
Jane Hall, an associate professor of journalism at American University who studies youth and politics, said Abughazaleh’s campaign signifies a shift in the Democratic Party and the upcoming midterm elections as a wave of younger candidates launch bids to challenge older, longstanding representatives. She said dissatisfaction among younger voters regarding Democratic leadership’s response to the Trump administration has prompted younger voters to run for Congress themselves.
“I do think there will be a number of challenges to the left from a lot of people who were unhappy with what they see as a lack of pushback and also just the need for a younger generation of voters,” Hall said.
Jennifer Igbonoba contributed reporting.
