I spent a chunk of last year learning and thinking a lot about Katherine Abughazaleh's campaign for the US legislature. I happened to learn about it in March 2025 as she launched, and contributed a bit to the English Wikipedia article about her, and then kept contributing to the point where I'm still the person who's added the most text to that page. So I read and watched lots of reporting, interviews, online discussions, etc. about her and the campaign. I paid much less attention starting in about June 2025, but want to publish what I learned now, before Illinois's primary election day next week.

So this is one in a series of posts I've written about US political candidates and what I find particularly unusual or otherwise interesting about their campaigns and strategies:

Barack Obama: We Are The That Ones We Have Been Waiting For, On Getting People Mad And Winning Anyway, Mission

and: Reflecting on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Tim Walz's Policy Approach, Dalip Singh Saund, A Fascinating Historical Figure, and It Goes On One At A Time about Jerry McNerney.

Below:

• Local media coverage
• Abughazaleh's media skills & strategy (including sections on her interpersonal attitude and on streaming in particular)
• Credibility and authenticity
• Journalists, please ask Kat Abughazaleh these questions
• This just scratches the surface

Local media coverage

On March 24, 2025, Kat Abughazaleh launched her campaign to challenge the incumbent House rep in the Democratic primary in Illinois's 9th District. In early May, the incumbent announced she wouldn't run for re-election; subsequently, 16 more candidates joined the fray. As of early 2026, Abughazaleh is one of three front-runners.

From March till mid-June 2025, I tried to read, watch, and listen to pretty much every published piece of journalism available about Abughazaleh, with special attention to newspaper, TV, and radio reporting from the Chicago area.

In my estimation, the local establishment media in Chicago, as of early June 2025, was mostly not covering her actual campaign platform. They briefly discussed her platform but spent more time on her newcomer status, her social media fame, fundraising, potential opponents, and so on. The local college newspapers, the indie Evanston RoundTable, and national and international outlets, like The American Prospect, Foreign Policy, and Haaretz, went into some depth on her platform. The local papers and TV and radio, much less so.

I'm sure a lot of that is because print newspapers, TV, and radio journalism have severe time and space constraints, so they often can't spend a lot of time on detailed policy coverage. But also, my personal impression is that at least some local establishment news media in Chicago disliked her, and possibly even considered her candidacy to verge on illegitimate. A few examples: the Chicago Tribune reporting on how much rent she pays, but not on how much her opponents pay for housing. WTTW misreporting the arithmetic of Abughazaleh's early campaign contributions, and then not correcting it when I told them about their errors (details in this Bluesky thread).

I don't know enough about outsider/upstart campaigns in general to assess whether establishment news usually treats them this way, but I think it's likely more common when the candidate is a leftist. I was partway through writing this post when Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary election for New York City mayor, and oh wow The New York Times really did not like that.

Abughazaleh's media skills & strategy

Her campaign announcement successfully captured significant print, radio, and TV attention from high-profile traditional news organizations, but I suspect her operation's consistent and engaging presence in other digital media is a significant factor sustaining attention to her campaign (and aiding in fundraising and recruiting remote volunteers). Temperament and personality, as well as skill, affect this.

Interpersonal attitude

Abughazaleh, like Ocasio-Cortez, has a particular rhetorical skill: when dealing with an interviewer or hostile online commenter: Live, and in the moment, she can notice an unfair or misleading criticism coming her way, refute the specific criticism, and then name and categorize what's illegitimate about the criticism, so as to defuse it and get the upper hand (and point out the problem to all watching). By bringing to light the implicit expectation that underlies the smear, she makes it possible for her to explicitly refuse to meet it.

Being unapologetic, sharp, and fast-paced in analyzing and responding to illegitimate criticism is not just useful to win those individual battles; it also improves all their allies' abilities to fight. Figuratively, they don't just deflect the object coming their way -- they also X-ray it and show everyone the schematics, so we can build our own shields too.

Abughazaleh's now done this sort of thing multiple times during her campaign, as when she addressed men criticizing her clothes and voice (video). She has researched Fox News and the right-wing media landscape for years, and which gives her an unusual level of insight into the usual frameworks they use to dismiss and demean opponents. As she said in a Twitter Spaces conversation (about 51:23-51:49), on why a voter should choose her over other candidates who have more experience organizing locally:

my specialty here is how I can deal with the far right. Right now, we are in an emergency with the far right. I have studied and attacked and triggered these people for a very long time, have provided the advice (along with, you know, my colleagues) that has gone unheeded by the Democratic Party. I know how these people think and I know how to beat them. And that is a unique skill set -- that, unfortunately, is unique.

Her approach to defeating far-right attacks is: don't compromise your values, don't evade, don't back down, don't sacrifice any marginalized group's rights or well-being. (In late June, she said to the Democratic leadership (part of a 1-hour interview video, has an auto-transcript): "Protect everyone. Stand by what you believe and put your money where your mouth is.") Focus on helping the audience understand what's really going on. Pull back the propagandist's curtain to explain their tactics, why they use them, and who benefits from their argument. Frame your position in terms of fundamental values, boiling the ideas down to their essence. Be willing to teach, and use humor but be careful about the targets of mockery. As she said while discussing how to respond to Trump's 2024 win: "I clown on conservatives all the time because it’s fun, but I try to only punch up; people on Fox who are getting millions of dollars to misinform you."

I look at people like my mom, my grandmother, her mother was a major GOP operative in Texas, so she was right in the middle of it. She grew up with this as a major part of it. And she has re-evaluated so many of her views, and I think it takes a lot of bravery and grit. It’s hard to do that. And if you’re looking back when you’re like 40, 50, 60, and you’re like, did I spend this much of my life being wrong, lacking empathy where I could have given it, villainizing people who didn’t deserve it?

....But I think that there’s a lot of people on the left who either grew up in a family that wasn’t really political, or was liberal, like Obama voters or whatever, and they really underestimate, A, the power of propaganda that gets you there in the first place, and then also how hard it is to change that because you’re trying to break an entire structure of thinking and also have someone admit, I was wrong, everyone I love was wrong, and I might’ve had some really shitty opinions about ideas, people, places, things, other nouns, and it’s…

... doing [contextualizing and explaining] instead of straight villainization, because these people [the dedicated far-right] villainize themselves..... We need a baseline for humanity. There is a baseline that if you straight up see me as a womb on legs, probably, you have to address that on your own. This is not [for] us to handhold you through. But there are a lot of other people who just don’t know anything else. And you can’t blame someone for ignorance if you don’t tell them where to find the knowledge.....

Streaming

Perhaps Abughazaleh's single greatest strength, as a challenger to an establishment, is her personal skills in digital media.

It is no longer sufficient to be great at giving a speech or be a killer on the Sunday panel shows (if that ever really mattered at all). Rather, an effective politician today needs to be good at a 30 second TikTok video, a 3 minute cable hit, and a 3 hour podcast interview. - Amanda Litman

Every once in a while, in US national politics, someone demonstrates that they can leverage a particular technology beyond what others had thought possible. Among those: Father Coughlin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt with radio. arguably Ronald Reagan with television, Howard Dean and Barack Obama with Meetup and some other software tools, Donald Trump with Twitter, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with Instagram (especially Instagram Live). And I think, in a slightly different universe, Tim Walz might have done this with maps.

It's worth getting specific about Abughazaleh's expertise.

She gets labelled "a TikToker" in some headlines, and yes, very short vertical video is a medium she knows well. And she's skilled at making tightly-edited, topic-specific 5-minute or one-hour YouTube videos that teach and persuade the viewer, that get a particular intellectual point across.

But she's also a streamer: skilled and comfortable with long-form podcast and video interviews, teleconference town halls (as with her recent "office hours" streams), and all the associated semi-synchronous audience conversation tools -- Twitter and similar microblogging platforms, Reddit (as with her Ask My Anything), and a dedicated Discord chat server. In September she announced that she'd be regularly livestreaming as a campaign tactic.

Longform streams provide depth and continuity, which convey authenticity. Interviewers get a chance to really dive into specific issues and ask followup questions. The audience knows we aren't getting tricked by deceptive editing; if the candidate is speaking well, that's not because they got two shots at answering a question or got prompting offscreen from an assistant. An example from a different campaign: in early April 2025, Zohran Mamdani spoke with streamer Hasan Piker for about four hours. They joked around, yeah, but also got into wide-ranging policy discussions about policing, transit, housing, and several other issues. Even three hours in, Mamdani could fluidly respond to policy questions off the top of his head.

Credibility and authenticity

As she said in an interview in late April, the authenticity and sincerity of her self-presentation is a significant asset.

And then, when it comes to politics, [Democrats are] working from an outdated playbook. Trump threw it on its head. Every popular political figure since 2000 has been someone who's bucked the norm -- both parties. A this playbook that a lot of Democrats are working from is from, like, 2005. It's 2025! We have different types of media, we have a very diverse electorate, and so many people are just yearning for sincerity, for someone to stand for something and not just adapt to whatever consultant says "this issue was most popular today." People are looking for strength and compassion. And that's something that isn't super -- you don't really associate with politics. But it should.

Anyone who tries to convey authenticity and integrity ends up facing the riddle: how do you credibly persuade your audience that you are, in fact, presenting your real self? This is particularly important for Abughazaleh; she grew up Republican, so critics suspect her of being insincere in her political beliefs (an accusation flung in a recent attack ad), and she's new to Chicago (where she's running), so critics suspect she's not committed to the district.

She's done a few things to demonstrate her sincerity, and they interweave with and support each other.

One: focus on local face-to-face contact and initiatives that specifically and materially help local people. Several of her campaign events have had this quality -- beach cleanups and comedy shows and embroidery circles -- and her campaign ran a high school public service internship summer program. Her campaign aimed to knock every door in the district.

Another: make pledges and keep them. Abughazaleh, like some other candidates, has pledged to not take corporate PAC money, and the Federal Election Commission stats bear that out.

And: get hurt, while standing up for your beliefs, someplace other people can witness. And indeed Abughazaleh, while protesting, got physically hurt, and has now been indicted for conspiring to impede an officer.

Claire McCaskill noted: when well-funded adversaries come after you with a lot of attack ads, it is hard to disarm yourself, stay faithful to your pledges, and continue to refuse to take more money that you could use to counter those attacks.

But, as Abughazaleh said during an interview in April (about 30 minutes in), smear-tactic negative ads arriving just before the election will make less of an impact if every one of the 750,000 people in the district has been personally helped by her campaign, or knows someone who has. (Around 34:00 she asks who else has done this. I think the Black Panthers, kinda, and the old Irish machine in New York City -- in a way this is harkening back to a very old approach to electoral politics.)

That focus on one-on-one interpersonal connections came up in a news article in January. Another candidate, responding to smears that Abughazaleh's election would increase danger in the district, said:

“I want to make it clear. I know Kat,” Leon said. “She is not promoting violence.”

Plus: as I mentioned earlier, Abughazaleh also tries to not just counter criticisms, but undermine their foundations. In “People Don’t Want To Feel Helpless,” an Interview with Kat Abughazaleh (June 26th), she says, "But the whole argument you see online that she's not from here, go back to where you came from—it’s not going to resonate as the race goes on. Because a lot of people in the district aren't from here. They weren't born here, and they're thinking, 'Am I not supposed to be here either?'"

Journalists, please ask Kat Abughazaleh these questions

A few questions I'd love journalists to interview Abughazaleh about or research so we can have a better article! (Adapted from this list I posted on the Talk page.)

1. Per her LinkedIn, during a summer while in college, July-Sept. 2018, she was Northeast Region Organizing Administrator for Everytown For Gun Safety. What sort of work did she do in that role? I presume this was an internship, and that it wouldn't have included any work in Illinois, as that would have been under the purview of the Midwest region administrator. This would have been more relevant in 2025, per the sorts of criticisms or doubts levied by, for example, local strategist Kurth in a Tribune piece, suggesting that Abughazaleh doesn't know "how to recruit volunteers and what to do with volunteers once you get them, and how to run a field operation" or whether she "has worked in a political organization, volunteered on a campaign, or knows what it’s like to run a petition drive." But it's still interesting.
2. A USA Today piece and her campaign website say that she's been a union representative. In her Reddit AMA she said, "I was the Media Matters union representative along with my coworker when I worked there. Our union was SEIU Local 500." What was the duration of her service as union rep? Her Reddit history shows that she managed a fund to aid the other laid-off workers in 2024; what did that entail? Again, this would speak to questions of candidate experience & skill that have come up in news coverage.
3. Her LinkedIn and her campaign website say she graduated from GWU's Elliott School of International Affairs with a BA in International Affairs and a concentration in Security Policy. I've found corroboration for almost every part of that and just need specifically sourcing for the Security Policy concentration.
4. It would be helpful to have more detail on how her personal Patreon intersects with the campaign's finances. Abughazaleh has a Patreon. On Bluesky, Abughazaleh said Patreon contributions are completely separate from campaign donations, and that Patreon is currently her main source of income. In her Reddit AMA several months ago, she said that she made USD$684 per month from the Patreon (she posted screenshots of her Patreon income dashboard), and that "I need to ask our compliance people about the ins and outs of reporting but I have no issue doing so. None of this income goes to the campaign — I keep it in an account for Heater’s [her cat's] vet bills." How groundbreaking is it for a US political candidate to have a Patreon? Do Federal Election Commission rules mean there is or ought to be a limitation or regulation on income from the subset of her Patreon supporters who are ineligible to donate to US federal election campaigns? Stuff like this financial disclosure form only partly help with breaking this down.
5. More generally, Abughazaleh has faced criticism for coming from a wealthy background and being supported financially by her partner. The Tribune article mentioned support from Collins; he posted to social media that "my material support is Trader Joe’s pasta and feeding Heater" so more specificity on that may be illuminating. Also, she said that her family has not financially supported her since 2020 and that (at the time of launching the campaign) she had not had health insurance since the MMFA layoff in 2024; it seems reasonable to ask why she has chosen to continue to forgo parental support given the health insurance situation.
6. Does she practice a religion?
7. Just after the Nov. 2024 election, she wrote in The New Republic that "Ideally, a new party (or several!) would emerge" from the Democratic Party's failure in 2024. Did she intend to also seek any other party's nomination for this Congressional seat, in addition to the Democratic Party's? Did she follow the example of some other US progressives in seeking endorsements from the Working Families Party, the Green Party, and/or DSA? If not, why not?

This just scratches the surface

Some topics I haven't dug into:

• a deeper compare-and-contrast with other upstart leftist candidates (such as Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez), and with other candidates parlaying celebrity in political campaigns (such as Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger)
• her stance on the Middle East and how others have reacted to that
• different ways of thinking about electing a legislator, such as "someone specifically to represent this one geographic district" versus "a part of a team (our party's legislative cohort) who might bring particularly rare and needed knowledge/skills"
• her blondeness and other conventional markers of beauty, and how they affect perceptions of her and what positions she can stake out
• whether she's successfully expanded the electorate by engaging low-propensity voters to the point that polls of "likely Democratic primary voters" are undercounting her support

Kat helped inspire a wave of young progressives launching campaigns to unseat much older, more centrist Democrats. About 8 days from now, we'll find out whether she won her race. I think it'll take a lot longer to suss out the impact she had on the district, on races across the country, and on English-language political communication more broadly.