Kat Abughazaleh’s punk-rock House bid

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — It is 2 p.m. on a Friday before a long weekend and as Kat Abughazaleh sits down at the tamales restaurant near her campaign office on Chicago’s North Side, she laments that the day has been so busy that she’d only managed to scrounge up a single saltine with some hot sauce.

Saltines and hot sauce have become a go-to snack for the 26-year-old Democratic congressional candidate. Running for the House of Representatives has proven to be consuming, and the combo always seems to be on hand.

Already that day, Abughazaleh had woken up early for a therapy appointment (that she’d forgotten to schedule), taken her cat to the vet, arrived at the office for an all-day staff retreat to discuss their signature-gathering efforts to get on the ballot and participated in a photo shoot for this story. She updated her widely followed social media accounts along the way, teasing a forthcoming video that would highlight how the fight for workers’ rights in Chicago helped establish the imminent Labor Day holiday. 

Thursday had been a late night — the campaign had hosted a punk show at a Wrigleyville bar. Punks for Progress featured three bands: Rude Echoes, The First Rule and Malört & Savior. In between sets, the local stand-up comedian Steve Tapas cracked that he knew the $5 he spent for the Abughazaleh campaign sticker on his drink cup “was not going to Democratic consultants” and blasted party leaders for being feckless when it came to standing up to Republican President Donald Trump. 

“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 said to jeers from the crowd. 

The vibe in the bar was righteous fury. Attendees in earplugs — available for free in the rear of the room, at the merchandise table — nodded their heads as Tapas said, “The price of eggs is $9 and my trans friends are scared to walk down the street.” They were dressed in “Tax the Rich” t-shirts, and in American flag pants, and in denim jackets with patches for the punk bands Minor Threat and Bikini Kill and another that urged “Protect Trans Youth.” There were songs about American imperialism and lyrics about how “nothing lasts forever, even one’s country.” There were reminders to tip the bartender, a military veteran. Special guest DJ Jayleigh, who spins for drag and burlesque shows, joined The First Rule on stage for their song “Dictator (We Elected A…),” written after Trump’s first election, when Abughazaleh was not yet old enough to vote. 

Abughazaleh wore a black leather jacket over a “Make Nazis Afraid Again” t-shirt, denim cutoffs, fishnet stockings and black high-heeled boots. Periodically, she would stop skanking  — a type of moshing associated with ska music — and take the microphone to talk about affordable housing, groceries and health care, a trifecta she called “basic human rights.” She gleefully told the crowd that she had just texted a friend: “There’s a keffiyeh in the mosh pit!” She and members of Malört & Savior took shots of the band’s namesake anise-flavored liquor, infamous to Chicago. 

Looming over the event was Trump’s recent intimation that the city could be next on his list to send federal law enforcement. “Are we pissed the fuck off?” Abughazaleh called out. “Yeah!!!” the crowd 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 told them of her 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 represent Illinois’ 9th District on March 24, her 26th birthday, she joined a growing cohort of young Democrats who have concluded the stakes for democracy are so high — and the party’s old guard is so reluctant to give up power — that they need to push their way into the political arena, even if they are met with resistance.  

At the time, the heavily Democratic district’s current representative, Jan Schakowsky, had not announced plans to retire, so Abughazaleh’s candidacy meant that she was challenging an incumbent who had held the seat since the year she was born, 1999. Abughazaleh explained that while Schakowsky was a reliably liberal vote in Congress, the last presidential election — when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden on the ticket at the eleventh hour and ultimately lost to Trump despite raising and spending $1.5 billion in a whirlwind campaign — underscored the need for proactive generational change.

Abughazaleh’s campaign slogan is a question: “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.”

Though Trump’s approval rating is underwater and sinking, a series of opinion polls released over the summer also portend serious issues for Democrats as they attempt to take back control of the House, Senate or both in the 2026 midterm elections. Angry Democratic voters spent the summer at town halls pleading with their representatives to do more to counter Trump and his agenda. Pundits have started asking whether this is the Democrats’ “Tea Party” moment, likening it to the grassroots conservative takeover of the Republican Party in 2010 after the election of President Barack Obama.

Abughazaleh explained that the question 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 said.

Abughazaleh’s path to being a congressional candidate has been surprising to herself as much as to anyone else: She was supposed to be monitoring right-wing politicians for Media Matters for America, the liberal nonprofit newsroom where she got her first non-service industry job after graduating from George Washington University in 2020. But after Musk sued the organization over their reporting on antisemitism on his social media platform X, Media Matters was forced into layoffs and Abughazaleh lost her job. She joined her partner, Ben Collins, in New York City for a time and then did a stint freelancing as a “digital nomad” while she figured out how to leverage the large social media followings she had built across platforms. Her longtime bio on X, formerly Twitter, was: “I watch Tucker Carlson so you don’t have to.”

When Collins moved to Chicago to become chief executive of the satirical newspaper The Onion, Abughazaleh saw it as a chance to explore another geographic “cornerstone” of her family. Abughazaleh’s maternal grandmother was a prominent GOP operative in Texas; she was raised in a household where President Ronald Reagan could do no wrong. She grew up in Dallas, spent summers in a tiny Colorado town and moved to Tucson halfway through high school. Chicago, though, was where her father spent much of his childhood. His own father settled there after fleeing The Nakba, an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” that describes the mass, forced displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. 

Abughazaleh noted that she “could have, from day one, been like, ‘I’m a third-generation Chicagoan,’” to quash early criticism in the House race that she was a carpetbagger who had moved to the city just months before. “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 said, adding that once she starts trying to have children, for example, she won’t be comfortable spending time in Texas due to its restrictive abortion laws. 

“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 artist and advocate for the rights of the people, reads his Quran in traditional costume.’”

The move to Chicago meant Abughazaleh was on the ground for last summer’s Democratic National Convention. She got credentialed as an independent creator to cover it. When it became clear that party leaders would not allow a Palestinian speaker as Israel’s war in Gaza raged on, dividing the party’s base, she joined a group of uncommitted delegates outside to protest. They slept there; the experience 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 said. But there was also kindness: Colleagues at a podcast she was contributing to sent tea, coffee, 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 said 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, Abughazaleh went to bed early as Collins continued to watch returns. When she woke up briefly in the early hours of Wednesday and saw that it was shaping up to be a near clean sweep of swing states for Trump, she thought, “Fuck it, I’m going to run for something.” 

Then she went back to bed.

It took Abughazaleh several more months of tallying up what she thought was wrong in Democratic politics before she definitively decided to challenge Schakowsky. The final straw was watching party leaders at Trump’s inauguration, then, them “pushing through his fascist appointees.” She recalled thinking, “They’re not going to do anything, are they?” Sometime in February — “I don’t remember the exact breaking point, but there’s a note in my planner” — she told herself: “Okay, I guess I’m running for Congress now.”

But she would run a very different type of campaign.

Abughazaleh has focused on mutual aid and is using her campaign’s fundraising prowess to inject resources into the district. The price of “admission” to her launch event was donated menstrual products, which were given to an area shelter. Backpacks filled with supplies were stacked in a corner of the campaign’s office from a recent back-to-school drive. During a July street fair in Evanston, just outside Chicago, the campaign booked a popular barbershop for the day, providing $2,500 worth of free haircuts, mostly for kids. Sam Weinberg, Abughazaleh’s 24-year-old campaign manager, said he was drawn to work for her, despite not having traditional campaign experience or a plan to develop it, because of the “vision of the campaign she had,” which “wasn’t awful and soul sucking.” 

Amanda Litman, the co-founder and president of Run for Something, which supports young and diverse progressive candidates in state and local races, said that roughly 67,000 people have signed up to explore a run for office since the 2024 elections — more than during the entirety of Trump’s first term. About 80 percent are under 40 and the field slightly favors women. While Run for Something does not work with candidates for federal offices, Litman said she still gets a lot of email from people considering running for Congress, “and particularly about primarying Democrats.” She has spoken to Abugazaleh informally and is tracking her campaign, but is not advising her in any official capacity. 

Litman said the biggest spikes in interest that Run for Something saw were in the two weeks after Trump beat Harris; in February, after the first wave of firings of federal workers by Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE; when New York City progressive Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral primary; and in March, when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer “caved” — Litman’s word choice — during a congressional standoff over a spending bill and worked with Republicans to avert a government shutdown. As another spending fight looms, liberal commentators are questioning whether Schumer and other leaders need to embrace more obstructionist tactics. 

“The thing we’re hearing that’s different this time around is that people are saying, ‘I’m done waiting for my turn,’” Litman said of the influx 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 said if you plot Democratic candidates on two axes, fight versus fold and transform versus return, in terms of the direction of the party, it’s “the people on the fight and transform, they’re breaking through.”

At the federal level, these candidates face real headwinds: taking on an entrenched incumbent requires tenacity and economic resources. But it has been done before. In 2018, now-Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat then-Rep. Joseph Crowley of New York, who was seen as a potential successor to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the years since, she has built a national profile via her savvy use of social media and membership in the Squad, a group of progressive House lawmakers who are mostly women of color. They are a frequent target of right-wing media and politicians, while also sometimes playing the role of left-of-center antagonists to their own party. Their stances on national and international issues — a minimum wage hike, raising taxes on the wealthy, universal health care, the war in Gaza — carry immense weight with the Democratic base. 

Ocasio-Cortez is now seen as a potential challenger to Schumer. Around the time that the minority leader canceled his book tour during uproar from Democratic voters about the government-funding battle, Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont packed tens of thousands into venues for their Fighting Oligarchy Tour.  

“AOC is absolutely an inspiration,” Abughazaleh said. “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 pointed out, when drawing contrasts between herself and her Democratic primary opponents, that she comes into the race already having a sizable social media following and is likewise already accustomed to weathering attacks from prominent far-right figures — many of them virulently misogynist. 

Young candidates who, like Abughazaleh, are challenging their party’s status quo skew liberal. Beyond policy, they share the sentiment that their party elders did little to stop Trump’s rise and are ill-equipped now to contend with the far-right forces his movement unleashed. They reject the conclusion, after Democrats’ brief soul-searching following the party’s devastating 2024 loss, that Harris’ failure to respond to Trump’s attacks on her support of transgender people led to her defeat.  (Rumored 2028 presidential hopefuls, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, have since publicly softened their support for transgender rights, specifically as it relates to playing sports.) 

These young candidates make the case, in styles that range from angry to humorous, that it’s time for those in power to step aside from the broken system they have built and make room for a generation that has never experienced anything else, but insist  a different, better Democratic Party is possible. They believe that showing they are willing to fight to protect vulnerable people’s rights, while offering an economic plan that appeals to the middle and working classes, isn’t an either/or but a both/and endeavor. 

“Trans people have kitchen tables. People that love trans people have kitchen tables. Immigrants have kitchen tables,” Abughazaleh said. “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 Pride Month event, Abughazaleh gave anti-LBGTQ+ protesters the middle finger during a clash, prompting outrage online from the political right. “Yes, I did flip off some bigots for telling children they’d go to hell and, no, I’m not going to apologize,” she said in a video response. The campaign designed a “Kat isn’t sorry” t-shirt with her image, middle finger raised. The shirt urges people to “stand up for trans kids.”

Abughazaleh noted that the far-right uses a playbook of division so their attacks “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 example. She also 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 does not accept PAC money and has pledged to offer would-be constituents greater access to her, something her campaign is already doing with weekly “office hours.” During one such office hour in July, as she waited for her first guest to join, she fielded a question from the online chat about what she would do after serving her self-limited five terms. She immediately responded: “Hang out with Heater, obviously.” Heater is the cat Abugazaleh adopted with Collins last year after she gifted him a visit to a Brooklyn cat cafe, even though she is allergic to cats. She has embroidered Heater’s likeness on a pair of denim overalls. The orange cat is also depicted on a favorite set of earrings. 

Abughazaleh said that when she made initial calls about taking on Schakowsky,  “I had people literally hang up the phone when I said there was an incumbent.” She saw it as further evidence of a broken system where you can “literally be blacklisted” by the party and deprived of its machinery and support. After Schakowsky, the incumbent, decided to retire, the 9th District’s primary grew crowded. The field now includes fellow front-runners Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, a one-time Democratic gubernatorial challenger to current Gov. JB Pritzker, and state Sen. Laura Fine, who has name recognition but trails them both in fundraising. 

Abughazaleh joked that for a split second after buying tamales for herself and a campaign worker, she worried the charge wouldn’t go through because she was behind on submitting her expenses for reimbursement. She has been open about likely being one of the “poorest members of Congress” if she is elected, only recently secured health insurance and often talks about the “paywall” that keeps people out of politics.  

“I think that competitive primaries are great. If we win, I want someone to try a primary the next year, because I think that if you truly are the best candidate, you shouldn’t be worried about a little competition,” she said.

“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 asked.