On Monday, Kat Abughazaleh announced her candidacy for Congress with a YouTube video. “What if we didn’t suck?” she asked.
The “we” she was referring to was the Democratic Party.
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“Unfortunately, this party has become one where you have to look to the exceptions for real leadership as the majority work from an outdated playbook,” she said to the camera.
Abughazaleh is a 26-year-old content creator who lives on the North Side of Chicago. She cut her teeth at the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, where she monitored right-wing media and has continued to make left-leaning videos and social media posts after she was laid off last year.
She’s challenging an incumbent Democrat in the solidly blue state of Illinois, in the solidly blue 9th Congressional District, which covers part of Chicago’s North Side as well as a smattering of nearby suburbs including Democratic strongholds Evanston and Skokie.
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Rep. Jan Schakowsky has been the congresswoman there since 1999 (the year Abughazaleh was born) and has not lost an election since.
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In an earlier election cycle, a campaign like Abughazaleh’s would have been written off as a publicity stunt. Some people still question her intent; she is, for example, almost certainly the first congressional candidate in history to post a selfie on Bluesky wearing a Pokémon onesie.
But some voters are taking her seriously. Within three days after she uploaded her “Why I’m Running for Congress” video to YouTube, her campaign had raised more than $275,000 from over 7,000 individual donors.
“I’m already feeling really, really good about this,” her campaign manager Sam Weinberg, 24, said Thursday. “And the response over the past 50-something hours has shown that a lot of people are feeling the same way.”
Abughazaleh’s candidacy is exceptionally well-timed. She’s taking on an 80-year-old incumbent after Joe Biden’s aborted presidential campaign raised questions about age and governorship. She’s a loose-lipped digital native campaigning in the shadow of Kamala Harris’s much-publicized aversion to media access. She’s challenging party norms on the heels of a public rift caused by Sen. Charles E. Schumer’s last-minute accession to the GOP’s Trump-friendly budget. And she’s aggressive in her condemnation of Trump and his party, differentiating herself from the Democratic establishment’s polite paddles and pink protest tactics.
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In short, she’s running when more and more people are questioning doctrinaire Democratic politics and asking whether this is her party’s version of 2010, when a new crop of “tea party” candidates unseated incumbent Republicans and pushed the party further to the right.
“People say the Democrats are really good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” Abughazaleh said from her home in Chicago, seated at the same desk where she recorded her campaign announcement speech. “I think we saw that with the 2024 campaign.”
As she sees it, the Harris campaign started strong, judiciously capitalizing on Brat summer and coconut memes. But that soured after Harris hired a battery of veterans from the Obama and Clinton campaigns.
“It felt like we were going to get something new, and then when all these old consultants came in, it was ‘no daylight, kid,’” she said, a reference to Harris realigning with Biden’s foreign policy agenda.
In conversation, Abughazaleh (pronounced AH-boo-guh-ZAH-lay) speaks as she does in her videos: She’s direct, she swears, she makes occasional jokes and trusts the listener to know when she’s kidding.
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The fact that she’s so comfortable on social media is particularly compelling for Democrats who worry that their party is ceding the “manosphere” to Republicans.
Tommy Vietor, a co-host of “Pod Save America” who has worked with Abughazaleh on the Crooked Media podcast “Terminally Online,” thinks she is particularly well-suited for today’s political climate.
“She has been one of the sharpest observers of conservative media for years now, and then has also just been someone who’s been able to cut through the noise and clutter of the internet,” he said. The former Obama staffer praised both the content of her takes and her ability to get people to hear them.
“I think that’s something a lot of Democrats miss,” he said. “They spend a lot of time perfecting the exact words in a speech or in a statement but don’t think enough about how to get people to actually hear it.”
Abughazaleh began working at Media Matters in 2020. She monitored Fox News coverage, with Tucker Carlson being a frequent target of her reporting. She was laid off in 2024 after Elon Musk sued Media Matters over a report it released documenting antisemitism on X. Abughazaleh uses the fact that she was deposed by Musk as a campaign selling point.
Since her layoff, she’s continued to make content criticizing the right. But she’s also critical of Democrats. Three weeks ago, Abughazaleh uploaded a video titled “Why Are Some Democrats Trying to Be Republicans?” that railed against strategies espoused by moderate Democrats, calling their ideas “Republican lite.”
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Abughazaleh, who grew up in what she describes as a conservative family in Texas, considers the moderate wing of the Democratic Party to be too focused on winning over voters from the right.
“Rather than taking your base for granted or spitting in their faces, you should try to think about what they want rather than court a base that doesn’t care about you,” she said.
She also thinks the Democrats haven’t been forceful enough in their response to Trump. She would have liked to have seen Democratic lawmakers standing “arm in arm” in front of the Treasury to block Musk’s entrance. She specifically called out Schumer for “cowering to Trump” and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for “lecturing his colleagues” who had stood up to the president.
The “we” she was referring to was the Democratic Party.
Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.“Unfortunately, this party has become one where you have to look to the exceptions for real leadership as the majority work from an outdated playbook,” she said to the camera.
Abughazaleh is a 26-year-old content creator who lives on the North Side of Chicago. She cut her teeth at the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, where she monitored right-wing media and has continued to make left-leaning videos and social media posts after she was laid off last year.
She’s challenging an incumbent Democrat in the solidly blue state of Illinois, in the solidly blue 9th Congressional District, which covers part of Chicago’s North Side as well as a smattering of nearby suburbs including Democratic strongholds Evanston and Skokie.
Advertisement
Rep. Jan Schakowsky has been the congresswoman there since 1999 (the year Abughazaleh was born) and has not lost an election since.
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In an earlier election cycle, a campaign like Abughazaleh’s would have been written off as a publicity stunt. Some people still question her intent; she is, for example, almost certainly the first congressional candidate in history to post a selfie on Bluesky wearing a Pokémon onesie.
But some voters are taking her seriously. Within three days after she uploaded her “Why I’m Running for Congress” video to YouTube, her campaign had raised more than $275,000 from over 7,000 individual donors.
“I’m already feeling really, really good about this,” her campaign manager Sam Weinberg, 24, said Thursday. “And the response over the past 50-something hours has shown that a lot of people are feeling the same way.”
Abughazaleh’s candidacy is exceptionally well-timed. She’s taking on an 80-year-old incumbent after Joe Biden’s aborted presidential campaign raised questions about age and governorship. She’s a loose-lipped digital native campaigning in the shadow of Kamala Harris’s much-publicized aversion to media access. She’s challenging party norms on the heels of a public rift caused by Sen. Charles E. Schumer’s last-minute accession to the GOP’s Trump-friendly budget. And she’s aggressive in her condemnation of Trump and his party, differentiating herself from the Democratic establishment’s polite paddles and pink protest tactics.
Advertisement
In short, she’s running when more and more people are questioning doctrinaire Democratic politics and asking whether this is her party’s version of 2010, when a new crop of “tea party” candidates unseated incumbent Republicans and pushed the party further to the right.
“People say the Democrats are really good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” Abughazaleh said from her home in Chicago, seated at the same desk where she recorded her campaign announcement speech. “I think we saw that with the 2024 campaign.”
As she sees it, the Harris campaign started strong, judiciously capitalizing on Brat summer and coconut memes. But that soured after Harris hired a battery of veterans from the Obama and Clinton campaigns.
“It felt like we were going to get something new, and then when all these old consultants came in, it was ‘no daylight, kid,’” she said, a reference to Harris realigning with Biden’s foreign policy agenda.
In conversation, Abughazaleh (pronounced AH-boo-guh-ZAH-lay) speaks as she does in her videos: She’s direct, she swears, she makes occasional jokes and trusts the listener to know when she’s kidding.
Advertisement
The fact that she’s so comfortable on social media is particularly compelling for Democrats who worry that their party is ceding the “manosphere” to Republicans.
Tommy Vietor, a co-host of “Pod Save America” who has worked with Abughazaleh on the Crooked Media podcast “Terminally Online,” thinks she is particularly well-suited for today’s political climate.
“She has been one of the sharpest observers of conservative media for years now, and then has also just been someone who’s been able to cut through the noise and clutter of the internet,” he said. The former Obama staffer praised both the content of her takes and her ability to get people to hear them.
“I think that’s something a lot of Democrats miss,” he said. “They spend a lot of time perfecting the exact words in a speech or in a statement but don’t think enough about how to get people to actually hear it.”
Abughazaleh began working at Media Matters in 2020. She monitored Fox News coverage, with Tucker Carlson being a frequent target of her reporting. She was laid off in 2024 after Elon Musk sued Media Matters over a report it released documenting antisemitism on X. Abughazaleh uses the fact that she was deposed by Musk as a campaign selling point.
Since her layoff, she’s continued to make content criticizing the right. But she’s also critical of Democrats. Three weeks ago, Abughazaleh uploaded a video titled “Why Are Some Democrats Trying to Be Republicans?” that railed against strategies espoused by moderate Democrats, calling their ideas “Republican lite.”
Advertisement
Abughazaleh, who grew up in what she describes as a conservative family in Texas, considers the moderate wing of the Democratic Party to be too focused on winning over voters from the right.
“Rather than taking your base for granted or spitting in their faces, you should try to think about what they want rather than court a base that doesn’t care about you,” she said.
She also thinks the Democrats haven’t been forceful enough in their response to Trump. She would have liked to have seen Democratic lawmakers standing “arm in arm” in front of the Treasury to block Musk’s entrance. She specifically called out Schumer for “cowering to Trump” and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for “lecturing his colleagues” who had stood up to the president.
