Kat Abughazaleh on Losing, Mutual Aid, and What Comes Next

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 you’re a working-class person. The first thing you’re asked when you run for office is how many people can you call on day one to max out [donations] to your campaign. For me, that answer was zero. Some people straight-up hung up the phone while I was trying to set up campaign infrastructure. There have been proposals to the [Federal Election Commission] to allow candidates to use campaign funds to help pay rent up to a certain point—I think that’s a fantastic idea. Running for office is already stressful, but the most stressful part for me was the financial precarity. I don’t even understand how a parent—much less a single parent—would ever be able to run for federal office. And then if you lose, you’re fucked. It leads to a Congress where the average age is 58, while the average American is 38, and where half the members are worth a million dollars or more.

You closed the gap significantly in the final week. What do you think you figured out too late—or did you just leave it all on the field?

I truly feel like we left it all on the field. But with another week, that’s another week of dishonest AIPAC ads, or them straight-up advertising for my progressive opponents to split the field. They had to invent new forms of rat fucking because they couldn’t win clean. I was talking to my therapist this morning, and I told her it just feels unfair—we never went after anyone’s personal life, we didn’t do any dirty tricks. She asked if I could go back, would I have done those things? And the honest answer is no. But it doesn’t make it suck less.

Your campaign used mutual aid as a core organizing strategy. Explain what that actually looked like.

Our office doubled as a mutual aid hub. The entire front part was filled with clothes, food, Narcan, baby formula, books, diapers—anything anyone could need. People came in every single day: first mostly the unhoused community, then a lot of undocumented folks, then low-income families. We don’t require anyone to show ID, nothing. They take what they need and go. And often they come back and bring things other people can use.

For those unfamiliar: Mutual aid isn’t charity. It’s the idea of you give what you can and you take what you need. Especially in immigrant and Black and brown communities, people have been doing this forever to support each other outside the structures our government has created—because so many programs allegedly intended to help people just create more and more hurdles to access that help.

How did that connect to actual voter engagement?

A lot of people feel helpless watching our slide into fascism, and they don’t want to doomscroll. So we said: Come with us to clean up a park, knit hats during a cold snap, fold clothes for kids in the community. It gave people an outlet. The volunteer numbers were huge. We increased voter turnout. We won McHenry County—the only part of the Chicagoland area that’s voted Trump the last three elections—outright. Young white men, minority communities, low-income people, students: Those were our people.

When I covered extremism, one thing you see over and over is that the number one driver of right-wing radicalization is a scarcity mindset. When people’s material needs aren’t met, they’re far more likely to align with someone who says: “Be scared, and the answer is hating your neighbor.” Fear is playing politics on easy mode. It’s the most primal human emotion we have. Mutual aid is a direct counter to that.

What do you want other campaigns to take from what you built?

Mutual aid, obviously. But also ditching call time. Call time is the worst thing in the world—the candidates hate it, the people getting the calls hate it, and it inherently relies on oligarchy to function because you are calling rich people and begging them for money. We replaced it with livestreaming, and it was the single best thing for my mental health on this campaign. Every candidate I know is wildly jealous of it. When you ask why campaigns still do call time, the answer is: That’s how it’s always been. That’s never a good enough reason.

What difference do you think this campaign actually made?

Just proving that good things are possible. So much of what we did was actively laughed at by the establishment—the mutual aid hub, the punk shows instead of fancy happy hours, ditching call time for livestreaming. And it worked anyway. In America, we fetishize misery. We treat suffering like a virtue, and it’s not. We live in the wealthiest country in the world. We don’t have to live like this. If we could open that idea for even some people—that they deserve good things, that we can expect more from our representatives—that’s a big deal. Breaking that norm helps other people break those norms too.

What’s next for you?

We’re trying to figure out how to scale the mutual aid model—not just keeping our hub going but offering it as almost a pilot program for voter turnout to candidates across the country, especially at the state and local level. A lot of people running have already reached out asking for advice on working with 501(c)(3)s, making events accessible, keeping the barrier to entry low. We want this to be the expectation, not the exception.

And tonight? It’s my birthday. I’m going to go sing karaoke with my friends.