Exactly one year after becoming constitutionally eligible to be sworn in, Kat Abughazaleh celebrated her 26th birthday last month in a way most people wouldn’t: by launching a campaign for U.S. Congress.
When Abughazaleh first moved to Chicago last July from Washington, D.C., a bid to represent Illinois’s Ninth District wasn’t on her agenda at all. But just 14 days into President Donald Trump’s second term, she decided she couldn’t stay on the sidelines amid what she called “Democratic inaction.”
“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,” Abughazaleh said in her March 24 announcement video. “So I say it’s time to drop the excuses and grow a f—ing spine.”
Touting “basic existence” as one of her top priorities, Abughazaleh hopes to improve affordability for her constituents. As a renter who doesn’t have health insurance, she thinks it’s time to elect “representatives who face the same challenges we do.”
Should U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Evanston) seek reelection, Abughazaleh would be the first Democrat in years to challenge the 26-year incumbent.
The only other person to ever try, a 2020 write-in candidate, unofficially withdrew and earned just 355 votes.
”What makes our community, and our country, so great is that we welcome all voices and ideas,” Schakowsky said in a statement to The Daily. “I have always encouraged more participation in the democratic process, and I’m glad to see new faces getting involved as we stand up against the Trump Administration.”
Schakowsky, one of 20 sitting members of Congress over the age of 80, hasn’t said whether she’ll seek a 15th term in 2026. If she steps aside, it could trigger the district’s first competitive Democratic primary in decades, one where Abughazaleh may find herself facing a crowded field of contenders.
A former researcher of right-wing media for Media Matters, a progressive watchdog journalism organization, Abughazaleh was born 80 days after Schakowsky initially took office.
The longtime congresswoman first won the seat in 1998 after defeating now-Gov. JB Pritzker and a sitting state senator in a primary, taking over a district that had been in the same hands since 1965.
Now, Abughazaleh is making the case for new leadership; but unlike her predecessors, she said, she has no intention of staying in office indefinitely.
“I don’t want to be a career politician,” she said. “I want to come in, make some change, and then go hang out with my cat.”
In the first three days of her campaign, Abughazaleh raised $275,000, according to her ActBlue donation page. Official filings with the Federal Election Commission have not yet been released, meaning the total does not reflect the number or size of individual donations.
Before becoming a social media influencer and content creator for left-leaning, muckraking outlets like Media Matters and Mother Jones after graduating from George Washington University, Abughazaleh was raised in a conservative household in Dallas. As a child, books were some of her closest companions, and among them, she had plenty of patriotic picks.
Her family proudly supported former presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and she recalls reading “A Is for Abigail: An Almanac of Amazing American Women” by Lynne Cheney. Though Abughazaleh said “staunch feminist” wasn’t a term her family would have used at the time, she believes it was a value instilled in her from an early age.
“There are a lot of people who are conservative and don’t realize that they’re not conservative,” she said.
For Abughazaleh, it took a move from the Lone Star State to Tucson, Arizona, to realize that her political beliefs might differ from her parents.
Having been raised in an affluent area of Dallas, she said she hadn’t witnessed poverty, or even lower-middle class lifestyles, until her family relocated.
“Here I am with one of my best friends, who has to go part time to community college, even though she’s brilliant, because she has to take care of her little brother while both of her parents work two jobs,” Abughazaleh said. “That just kind of changed how I saw things.”
She said President Donald Trump’s first Oval Office bid when she was in high school was “the final straw” that caused her to abandon her conservative beliefs.
From there, Abughazaleh studied international relations at GW. She worked for Media Matters until 2024, when she was laid off following a lawsuit filed by Musk against the company.
In the interim between her stint at Media Matters and her congressional campaign, she was a contributor for Mother Jones magazine.
“Obviously her candidacy brings her journalistic endeavors with us to a close,” said James West, executive editor of the Center for Investigative Reporting, which publishes Mother Jones. “But I can see why this would interest her.”
West said that as soon as he had heard Abughazaleh had left Media Matters, he wanted her to write for his outlet, calling her “a singular voice on the internet” where she had amassed a loyal following on social media for her blunt liberal opinions.
As of April 2, Abughazaleh has 231,500 followers on TikTok, and her candidacy announcement had over 12 million views on X.
“I wasn’t surprised,” West said. “She’s got passion, oodles of resilience and grit and has a lot of star power to burn.”
Despite her social media traction, Abughazaleh is making an on-the-ground campaign approach a key priority.
She officially launched her campaign at Evanston’s Five & Dime Saturday, where she collected menstrual products for The Period Collective, a Chicago-based nonprofit that provides period products to local shelters, transitional housing facilities, schools and food banks.
“There’s a better way we can do this, right?” Abughazaleh said of her goal to implement social justice projects throughout her campaign. “We can’t just keep pissing away millions and millions and millions of dollars on what amounts to various vanity projects.”
She joked that her launch is what conservatives might call a “Tampon Tim thing,” referencing a popular criticism of former Democratic vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s decision to provide menstrual products in public school men’s bathrooms.
As part of the burgeoning members of Generation Z political hopefuls, Abughazaleh hopes to use her platform to offer a behind-the-scenes look at campaigning while engaging young voters.
She sees Northwestern as a cultural flashpoint, citing the Trump administration’s threat to revoke the school’s funding over alleged antisemitism. Abughazaleh attended ceasefire demonstrations at GW, calling them “the most beautiful protest experience” she had ever witnessed.
“Things are going to get bad,” she said, referring to NU. “(The University) is going to be under scrutiny, and I want to be here.”
Abughazaleh said she has already faced early criticism as a “carpetbagger,” given that she has lived in Illinois for less than a year and does not currently reside in the district she seeks to represent. She and her partner plan to move to the Ninth District soon, but for now, she welcomes the skepticism.
“Anyone who is asking for power should be both criticized and analyzed,” she said.
Email: audreypachuta2027@u.northwestern.edu
Related Stories:
— Launching campaign, Biss tears into White House, pledges ‘bold experimentation’
— The Daily Explains: Who’s on the ballot for Evanston voters?
— NU Menstrual Equity Activists keep the period products flowing with campus drive
