‘We Are in an Emergency’: Progressive TikTok Star Launches Bid to Unseat Old-Guard Dem
Illinois 9th District has only been represented by two people since 1965, and there hasn’t been a competitive primary since the race Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, the district’s current representative, won in November 1998. “I wouldn’t be born for another four months,” deadpans Kat Abughazaleh, the TikTok-famous political commentator now running to represent the district.
Abughazaleh is transparent about the fact that she is not what anyone thinks of as shoo-in for Congress: a 26-year-old narcoleptic freelance social media creator who doesn’t live in the district and has only lived in the state for less than a year, challenging a Democratic Party leader who has represented this part of Illinois for more than a quarter of a century.
That’s kind of the point: She is a normal person — with a rental lease she can’t break before it’s up, financial pressure bearing down on her, and prescription medication that she needs to function properly, which has been challenging to obtain since Elon Musk went after her employer, and she and many of her colleagues were laid off.
And when she looks to Congress, not only does she not see enough people who are concerned with the practical day-to-day challenges she and so many of the people she knows are struggling with — the costs of housing, health care, groceries, transportation — she also doesn’t see anyone confronting with any level of seriousness the peril of our current moment, two months into Donald Trumpov’s second term.
“We are in an emergency,” Abughazaleh says. “Right now, the answer to authoritarianism isn’t to be quiet. It’s not matching pink outfits at a state address. It’s not throwing trans people under the bus. It’s not refusing to look at the party at all and see where it could be better. The answer is to very publicly, very loudly, very boldly, stand up. The only way to fight fascism, and this has been proven over and over and over again, is loudly, proudly, and every single day.”
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Abughazaleh may be young, but she is a wildly successful, incisive communicator who is stepping up at a time when it is clear that the party is in desperate need of new messengers. And she is popular on the social media platforms where sitting Democrats’ posts are continually flopping, ridiculed for their tone deafness.
The day after the 2024 presidential election, Abughazaleh thought she would wake up with an irrepressible urge to flee the country. Instead, she says, it was the opposite: “I woke up and thought, ‘You’re gonna have to drag me out by my dead body’ … I just got really angry, and I thought about running at that moment, but I was like, ‘No, I’m sure Democrats will do something,’ and then they haven’t — and it’s just been not only disappointing, but scary to watch.”
Schakowsky, currently representing the district, “has had a pretty great track record on her voting,” Abughazaleh admits. But she is also 80 years old and hasn’t had a competitive primary in decades. “She’s been a good congresswoman, but I want to be better.”
(Schakowsky, for her part, embraced the news. ”What makes our community, and our country, so great is that we welcome all voices and ideas,” she said in an email to Rolling Stone. “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 Trumpov administration. Right now, that’s what I’m focused on: fighting back against this extreme MAGA regime.”)
Abughazaleh was born in Texas and raised as a Republican — really Republican. Her maternal grandmother, Taffy Goldsmith, was such a legendary GOP operative that when she died, the flag at Texas state capitol was flown at half mast. (Abughazaleh inherited the mink coat Goldsmith wore to Nixon’s inauguration.) Her father is a Palestinian immigrant. Both her parents, she says, were Reagan Republicans whose relationship with the party has ruptured since Trumpov took it over.
Abughazaleh’s own political views took shape at college in Washington, D.C. She studied at George Washington University and went to work at Media Matters after graduation, where she was employed until 2024, after Musk sued the organization, and she and 11 others got laid off.
The day the news broke, Musk tweeted “Karma is real” and his coterie of sycophants, including Libs of TikTok, piled on. Abughazaleh says it was one of the worst days of her life. The saga didn’t end there, either — Abughazaleh was deposed as part of Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters, questioned on video for seven hours. (The lawsuit is ongoing.)
After she was laid off from Media Matters, Abughazaleh did freelance video production with Mother Jones and Zeteo, but she is stepping away from work with both outlets during her campaign. “It’s terrifying … I don’t have health insurance, I have no income coming in, and am using GoodRx like my life depends on it — because it kind of does.”
Abughazaleh is on medication for narcolepsy, which she was diagnosed with after she fell asleep behind the wheel of a car when she was in high school. “I take a medication every single morning to keep myself awake, and 40 percent of America has a chronic illness,” she says. “That’s another part of the campaign: I want to be really open about that.”
Forgoing her income and insurance to run for office, she says, “is scary, but like, are we just gonna leave our government to the people who continually fail us?”
As for her campaign, Abughazaleh says she wants to do things differently. “As idealistic as it might sound, I want to try to not do all of the things I hate,” she says.
That means no catering to corporations or bowing and scraping for donations from the ultra-wealthy. Instead, she’s planning free public events working with mutual aid groups and local businesses. Instead of money, everyone who attends her first event, she says, will be asked to donate a box of tampons to a collective that distributes period products among shelters and institutions across Chicago. (She’s well aware that the Fox News segment writes itself: ”I know — and maybe, you know, trans men will use them. Oh, scary!”)
She is planning to document every step of the campaign process on all her platforms in hopes of inspiring others, especially those who would be interested in primarying Democrats, to run for office too. “I want my candidacy to get other people to be candidates, and I want to highlight their candidacies.”
There is clearly an appetite: Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, recently told Rolling Stone that since Election Day more than 27,000 people have signed up with the organization, a figure that far outstrips the pace of sign-ups it saw in 2017 and 2018 and which almost exceeds, in the first three months of this year, the total number of sign-ups in those years.
“There’s no reason every American should not be able to afford housing, groceries, health insurance, public transit (ideally), and then still have enough money to save and take your kid to the zoo or go to the movies with your friends. There’s just, there’s no reason — we are the wealthiest country in the world,” Abughazaleh says. “The idea that that’s unrealistic or idealistic or naive or even called childish, I think that’s sucky.”
Update 3:23 pm: This post has been updated to include a statement from Rep. Jan Schakowsky.