Liberal social media sensation Kat Abughazaleh announces run for Congress — and raises more than $200,000 on 1st day

In what may be the first campaign announcement in U.S. history ever to use the F-word, the progressive social media sensation Kat Abughazaleh released a video Monday that kicked off her bid to unseat Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois.

“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,” Abughazaleh says in the video. “So I say it’s time to drop the excuses and grow a f***ing spine.”

After graduating from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., with a degree in international security, Abughazaleh, 26, took a job with the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters before being hired by Mother Jones in 2024. She is best known for videos in which she derides Fox News and conservative personalities. On TikTok, she has over 217,000 followers, and nearly 200,000 more on X, and some of her videos have received more than 1 million views.

“I’ve spent my entire career reporting on the far right and being attacked by them as a result,” Abughazaleh said in her campaign video, in which a kaffiyeh, the traditional headdress worn by Middle Eastern men that has become a symbol of Palestinian identity, is seen hanging on a wall.

In her video, Abughazaleh also directed viewers to her website and asked them to donate to her campaign. On her first day as a candidate, she raised “more than $200,000,” her campaign told Yahoo News.

Background

The daughter of a Palestinian immigrant father and a seventh-generation Texan mother, Abughazaleh grew up in an upper-middle-class section of Dallas, HuffPost reported. Both her parents were politically conservative Fox News viewers.

When she moved to Tucson, Ariz., as a teenager, however, her perspective on the world began to shift.

“At least half my high school was low-income or undocumented,” she told HuffPost. “The bootstrap myth just shattered before my eyes.”

‘A representation problem’

On her newly minted website, Abughazaleh declares that Democrats “have a representation problem. As in, about half of Congress are millionaires and people born before the moon landing.”

“I'm a renter. I don't have health insurance,” she adds. “My net worth is pretty much just the laptop I bought with my entire severance when I got laid off... and my adorable cat Heater.”

While Schakowsky, 80, was born before the moon landing, as of 2018, she didn’t qualify as a millionaire, according to Open Secrets. Her net worth was then estimated at $749,017.

Schakowsky has been an outspoken critic of Trump. She boycotted his address to Congress earlier this month, then slammed his remarks as “insulting and disrespectful.”

Last week, Schakowsky joined Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York in denouncing Trump’s firing of two Democratic commissioners at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, calling it “yet another direct assault on our democracy.”

Staunchly liberal platform

Abughazaleh is attempting to tap into rising Democratic anger at old-guard politicians like Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, whom progressives accuse of failing to effectively counter Trump’s moves to dismantle government agencies and fire federal workers.

On her website, Abughazaleh also takes a not-so-subtle shot at Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, whose new podcast has featured guests like the arch-conservatives Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk.

“Some Democrats might be happy to throw trans people under the bus for an interview with Steve Bannon, but I’m not,” she states.

Her policy proposals range from enacting more protections for LGBTQ+ Americans, passing the Green New Deal to address climate change, increasing pay for public school teachers, offering universal pre-K, expanding Social Security and abolishing limitations on abortion.

While Illinois’s Ninth District is considered strongly Democratic, the first question Abughazaleh must answer is whether she can debate and beat Schakowsky, who was first elected to Congress in 1999, in the primary.

Schakowsky, after all, can lean on her own liberal record. According to Progressive Punch, a database ranking how members vote, she was rated as the 27th most progressive Democrat in Congress. A former elementary school teacher, she also has received an A grade from the National Educational Association.

In a statement to Yahoo News, Abughazaleh said her entry into the race is “not a referendum on Rep. Schakowsky individually.”

“On the whole, I admire Rep. Schakowsky’s progressive record and commitment to this District,” Abughazaleh said, adding, "Instead, my campaign is about giving the Ninth District the option to have an outspoken fighter in Congress who can push back against authoritarianism loudly, proudly, and every single day.”

Abughazaleh will have to convince Illinois voters that Schakowsky is part of the larger problem progressives see with the Democratic Party. In her kickoff video, the woman known on social media as Kat Abu puts it this way: “We’re focused on meeting constituent needs with one simple rule: What if we didn’t suck?”

Schakowsky has not indicated whether she plans to run for reelection.