Democratic digital creator likely facing field of local politicians to succeed US Rep. Jan Schakowsky

Chicago Tribune

12-05-2025

A day after U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky told hundreds of people at a swanky downtown Chicago hotel that she wasn't running for reelection, the first major declared 9th Congressional District candidate sat cross-legged in her new Rogers Park campaign headquarters, painting an image of a lava lamp on the wall.
Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old newcomer to the Chicago region who is banking on her blunt messaging and massive online following to earn her a place on Capitol Hill, might have been the first to announce she was running for the congressional seat — even before the 80-year-old Schakowsky said she wouldn't run again. But Abughazaleh won't be the last.
One state legislator, state Sen. Laura Fine of Glenview, joined the race within hours of Schakowsky's announcement. Other local politicians are expected to follow soon, setting up a confrontation between candidates employing new media savvy and those relying on grassroots support and old-school organizing.
In the heavily Democratic district, which includes parts of Chicago's Far North Side, as well as north and northwest suburbs from Evanston to Algonquin, the Democratic primary will be the key race in determining who will be only the third representative for the district since 1965.
Abughazaleh — also known around the internet as 'Kat Abu' — is taking an unconventional approach with her nascent political career. While Abughazaleh has made a name for herself nationally with TikTok videos and on podcasts by blasting veteran Democrats for allegedly sitting on their hands in the face of Donald Trump's presidency, she has thin connections to the district and its voters.
She said she's trying to solve that problem by attending rallies with veterans in Algonquin and hosting knitting circles at an Evanston bar while she continues to use social media to snag local followers and build excitement for her campaign — and her brand.
'I have this huge platform that I built with my own hard work, but it's great to have to start a campaign,' Abughazaleh said in a recent interview with the Tribune, adding that her goals are not just to win but to make the process of running for public office more approachable. 'It's so inaccessible for normal people. It feels like it's something reserved for the rich or already well-connected, which is reflected in our Congress.'
Less than a day after Schakowsky, of Evanston, announced she wasn't running for a 15th term, Abughazaleh, dressed in overalls, sat on a blue Ikea gym mat and painted on the walls of her office space on Clark Street. She used social media to invite others to stop by, and about half a dozen 20-somethings did during the first couple of hours.
Fine, for her part, attended Schakowsky's Ultimate Women's Power Lunch event last week with a couple of other potential competitors, watching the congresswoman make her announcement. Fine has much deeper ties to the district than Abughazaleh. Born in Skokie, she has represented the area since 2013, the last six years as a state senator.
'Washington is failing Illinois families,' Fine says on her campaign site. 'Trump and the Republicans in Congress want to rip away our access to health care. I personally know what that's like. I've expanded families' access to health care, and I'll never stop fighting for our future.'
She almost certainly will not be the only local elected official to try to step into Schakowsky's shoes. North Side state Sen. Mike Simmons of Uptown, the Illinois Senate's first openly gay member, and Bushra Amiwala, a board member for Skokie School District 73.5 and one of the first Gen Z elected officials in the U.S., both told the Tribune they are weighing bids.
Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, state Rep. Hoan Huynh, also of Uptown, and several other state lawmakers and city officials also could join the race.
Onstage at Schakowsky's event, Jill Wine-Banks, an attorney and former Watergate prosecutor, didn't use Abughazaleh's name but asked Schakowsky if having a declared competitor motivated her to retire.
'I've always had someone running against me, and I have always beaten that person,' Schakowsky responded to applause. 'I've always had the opportunity to try and lift, especially women, but not always, to run for office, to feel secure to do something brave. And I'll be looking forward to working on campaigns locally and nationally and will continue to do that. But I certainly am not afraid, at all, of anybody who ran against me.'
Speaking to reporters after her remarks last week, Schakowsky declined to endorse a successor.
Kitty Kurth, a longtime Democratic political strategist, said she anticipates a 'plethora of qualified, homegrown candidates' will join the race and that district voters will be paying attention.
'In this district, politics is not a spectator sport, but hand-to-hand combat,' Kurth said. 'It's a district of a lot of politically savvy, politically active voters. A lot of the Democrats who live in the district spent all last year going to campaign in Wisconsin (against Trump). They understand politics on a granular level, not on a TikTok level. … You can get a lot of people to watch your show on TikTok, but that doesn't move them to the polls.'
The area's elected officials also have an organizational advantage over first-time candidates like Abughazaleh, Kurth said.
'It's not so much about an existing machine. It's about knowing how to organize volunteers,' Kurth said. 'You need someone who knows how to recruit volunteers and what to do with volunteers once you get them, and how to run a field operation. I don't know that (Abughazaleh) has worked in a political organization, volunteered on a campaign, or knows what it's like to run a petition drive.'
Still, Abughazaleh has shown the ability to raise money nationally for her congressional bid. She brought in more than $350,000 in the first month of her campaign, giving her a leg up — at least for now — on state and local elected officials who can't use their existing campaign accounts to pay for federal races.
The Abughazaleh campaign's first test, Kurth said, will be collecting enough signatures to get her name on the ballot. Legally, Democratic candidates in the district need to gather only 1,173 valid signatures between when signature collection begins in August and when nominating petitions are due Nov. 3. But campaigns often collect far more than the minimum to show broad support and ward off challenges from rival camps.
Abughazaleh is the latest — and most prominent — young influencer to make a bid for the U.S. House. A pro-gun Texas candidate lost a Republican primary last year, and an Arizona activist is running in a special election in July.
'The difficulty for (Abughazaleh) and all of them is that their fan base online does not translate into the ability to have a base in these districts,' said Erin Covey, an editor who specializes in House races for the Cook Political Report, an elections newsletter based in Washington, D.C. Abughazaleh not being from the district, Covey added, 'will be a significant hindrance.'
But Abughazaleh rejects the 'carpetbagger' label some have assigned to her for moving to the area and declaring a run for Congress all in less than a year.
'I mean, there are plenty of districts that would be easier to carpetbag, as I've been accused of online, and like, if that's the case, I'm a very bad carpetbagger,' she said. 'I moved to the wrong district, first off. … I want to live where I want to live and run because it's something I believe.'
Abughazaleh said she came to Chicago for personal — not political — reasons.
Until last year, she worked in Washington as an analyst and researcher for the liberal advocacy group Media Matters for America. But Abughazaleh was one of a dozen staff members the group laid off after being sued by Elon Musk for a report alleging that corporate advertisers' posts on Musk's social media platform X, formerly Twitter, were being displayed next to pro-Nazi content. The lawsuits are ongoing.
Abughazaleh left Washington on 'super short notice' to accompany her partner, Ben Collins, in Chicago after he became CEO of the news satire site The Onion last spring. They landed in a two-bedroom apartment on North Michigan Avenue with a monthly rent of around $4,000.
She first publicly acknowledged her relationship with Collins after the Tribune asked her about it. She released a video that Collins also shared in which he appears in one of Abughazaleh's posts about their cat. In an interview, she said her partner has supported her financially as she runs for Congress. Abughazaleh grew up primarily in Texas, where she attended private school, and attended George Washington University, a private school in Washington, D.C. But she said her family hasn't provided financial support to her since she was 20.
Abughazaleh said she never intended to stay in the Streeterville apartment, which is outside the 9th District, and is looking to move north, into the district, to Rogers Park or Edgewater, where she enjoys the feel of the neighborhoods and has friends close by.
After moving to Chicago, Abughazaleh covered the Democratic National Convention last summer, including unsuccessful efforts by Palestinian Americans to secure a speaking slot on stage to highlight Israel's mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza in the wake of Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack. Abughazaleh's grandfather was a Palestinian immigrant (she says her last name is derived from the Arabic word for 'gazelle'), and she has repeatedly criticized U.S. support for Israel's Gaza campaign. Many of her videos show a kaffiyeh, or Palestinian headscarf, hanging on the wall behind her desk.
Abughazaleh's position on the war in Gaza will be one she'll have to answer for in a district that has elected only two people to Congress — both Jewish — since 1965. Before Schakowsky, who is Jewish, the 9th Congressional District was represented by Sidney Yates, one of six children of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, who represented the district for 24 terms, a five-decade run interrupted by only one term in the 1960s.
Abughazaleh's grandfather, who died in 2017, lived in Chicago for a time, she said, but her father rarely mentioned the family living here.
After Trump returned to office this year, Abughazaleh said, she became dismayed with how little Democrats in Washington were doing to stop or slow his actions.
She soon jumped into the congressional race with a slick video and a memorable message: '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 (expletive) spine.'
Abughazaleh mentioned Illinois only once in the two-minute video, when specifying for which U.S. House seat she was running.
In pitching her candidacy, she advocated for free child care and expanding Social Security. And she promised her campaign would be different, coordinating mutual aid efforts and swearing off 'spammy guilt-trip texts' and 'grifty consultants.'
Abughazaleh's campaign actually sent out fundraising texts. But after getting some blowback accusing her of not keeping her word, she said her campaign has stopped sending out cold texts and now allows people who donate to opt out of further texts.
The timing of her campaign launch proved auspicious. As she hammered Trump barely two months into his term and Democrats for being weak, Abughazaleh looked ahead of the game when top Senate Democrats, including U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, voted to advance a Republican spending bill to avoid a government shutdown.
Abughazaleh, who rejects the 'influencer' label, was already well-known to many politically active voters. She had amassed hundreds of thousands of followers over the last few years on TikTok and Bluesky by sharing, dissecting and commenting on conservative media. Her internet celebrity helped her land profiles in The Washington Post, The Guardian, GQ, Rolling Stone and Germany's Die Zeit, plus friendly interviews on podcasts like The Bulwark's 'FYPod,' even as she remains largely unknown in the district she's hoping to represent.
Abughazaleh says her experiences fighting with right-wing media figures and rallying people against them would serve her well in Washington.
'I want to give voters another option, and I think that my expertise can be used in Congress. I want to bring it there so you can effectively fight back against Trump,' she said.
But Abughazaleh also chafed at the idea that her campaign is solely focused on her online audience.
'People think that this campaign is really online, because that's what my background is,' she said, speaking at a corner table at Sketchbook Brewing in Evanston. 'But this is about our ground game. It's been about our office hours. It's been about the knitting circle that we held right in that corner over there. We got little campaign embroidery kits, and I'm going to be teaching a class. … I taught (my women's club) how to embroider, and we want to do that at places around the district, so that way we can foster community in a way that's not just on Zoom. I know that might sound idealistic, but I don't care.'
Fine, the state senator, is taking a more traditional approach in the initial days of her campaign. Her announcement came as a news release touting the endorsements of other elected officials. She also shared a 24-second video on Facebook and Instagram asking for donations to her campaign.
Fine is leaning into her experience as a legislator who has led efforts to make health insurance work better for consumers.
Her husband, Michael, lost one of his arms in a near-fatal car crash in 2010 when a driver in a truck hit his car on his way to work, she said in an interview. She traces her desire to get into politics to the ensuing struggle with insurance companies.
'I made taking on big insurance my life's work, and I feel like I didn't let them ruin my family, and I was not going to let them ruin any others,' she said.
Since then, her legislative victories include protecting care for preexisting conditions in the event the Affordable Care Act is overturned. Last year, she also sponsored part of Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker's health insurance reform package to ban short-term 'junk' plans. She is chair of the Senate committee covering mental health and serves on other committees covering health and insurance.
'We need guys like him to start paying their fair share,' Fine said of Trump.
Fine declined to provide specifics on how she would fight the Trump administration, a contrast to Abughazaleh's promises to 'gum up the works' of the Republican president's initiatives such as standing 'arm in arm' to block Musk's team from the Department of Government Efficiency from entering the offices of the U.S. Treasury and accessing taxpayers' personal information.
Fine, who is Jewish and co-chair of the Legislative Jewish Caucus, first had her candidacy reported in the publication Jewish Insider, which described her as a 'pro-Israel favorite' in the race. The legislator declined to share any opinion about Abughazaleh's past criticisms of Israel, saying she had not looked into Abughazaleh's views.
Abughazaleh said she welcomes other candidates like Fine joining the race.
'I know there are probably a lot of local names that'll throw their hats in the ring and, frankly, I wish that they would do it sooner,' she said. 'We have this culture where you can't cut in line, you've got to wait in line until it's your turn. Why?'
'Look,' she added, 'if you're the best candidate, you shouldn't be afraid of competition.'