Kat Abughazaleh on Losing, Mutual Aid, and What Comes Next |
Kat Abughazaleh on Losing, Mutual Aid, and What Comes Next
The upstart candidate for the Illinois House fell short on election night, but she may have pioneered a new way of community-based campaigning.
In the space of a year, Kat Abughazaleh’s campaign for Illinois’s 9th district went from internet oddity (“the first Gen Z influencer to run for Congress!”) to a movement dangerous enough to attract over $5 million in spending from AIPAC—as well as some late-stage dark-money handouts to any mercenary TikToker willing to take a snipe at Abughazaleh in 30-second increments. She lost to Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss by fewer than 4,000 votes in a 14-person field.
But she ran a winning campaign in at least one sense: She had a visionary idea of what a campaign can, and maybe should, be. Her organization embraced the idea that a congressional race could function as a community-building apparatus, complete with a mutual aid hub at its center, punk shows instead of donor happy hours, and livestreaming instead of call time. People who stopped by her office were able to get food, books, coats, even the overdose antagonist Narcan. Her policy positions sit at the progressive edge of the Democratic Party, but what was truly radical was the structure—a rehearsal on the stump for a whole different kind of politics in the halls of power.
How are you processing your loss?
I’ve spent most of the time since sleeping—catching up on a year of sleep. I still don’t fully know. I also have to get my affairs in order because I’m in debt. Not from the campaign itself, but from just having to balance the money aspect of existence while running for office when my job was a conflict of interest.
That’s something people don’t talk about much—the personal financial cost of running.
It’s almost impossible if........