The Viral Creator Running for Congress: Can Kat Abughazaleh Turn Online Fame Into a Seat in Washington?

Kat Abughazaleh has viral online content down to a science. A veteran creator, she regularly posts clips of herself that rack up millions of views. But capturing attention in the physical world is an entirely different challenge—one that Abughazaleh was still working to crack on an overcast July afternoon.

The 26-year-old, who is vying for a U.S. House seat in Illinois, sat outside her Chicago campaign headquarters that day, working to connect with likely voters during the neighborhood’s annual taco crawl. Some pedestrians paused to chat, but others hurried past, fixed on finding their next carnitas order. Online, Abughazaleh can fine-tune every cut of a video to draw as many eyeballs as possible. On Clark Street, a busy thoroughfare cutting through the city’s northeast side, she had to convince taco-hungry passersby that she was worth delaying their next bite for.

That day, the solution turned out to be surprisingly simple: hot sauce. Abughazaleh developed a love for the condiment growing up in Texas and never lost it. She pulled out the collection of bottles she keeps in her office—many sent by a supporter—and lined more than a dozen on a table for pedestrians to splash on their tacos. Within minutes, locals carrying to-go margaritas in plastic cups stopped to flood her with questions: her stance on organized labor (pro-union), her top policy priority (anti-authoritarianism), and her take on modern sci-fi and fantasy (she argues Red Rising is superior to A Song of Ice and Fire).

It seemed nearly every other person had a friend who was a huge fan of Abughazaleh, and supporters passing in cars honked in support. With help from a volunteer translator, Abughazaleh explained to a Spanish-speaking family that her office doubles as a mutual aid hub, stocked with free pantry items and open to “everyone except ICE.” The family left with campaign stickers.

An older man with white whiskers and a “Make America Green Again” hat trotted over to the table after locking up his bike. Abughazaleh leaned in, ready to dive into policy talk. But before she could start, the man cut her off. “You have terrible posture,” he chided, explaining he worked as a physical therapist. “Pull up your breastbone. Shoulders back.”

Abughazaleh copied his adjustments, squaring her shoulders under her loose denim jacket and managing not to look irritated. She asked what issues mattered most to him as he inspected her new stance. By the end of their chat, the pair had plenty to bond over: ICE raids, the Supreme Court’s overreach. When the conversation wrapped up, the man grabbed a stack of campaign pamphlets and never noticed that Abughazaleh had already curled back into her far more comfortable slouch.

Watching her handle even the most condescending constituents, you’d never guess this is Abughazaleh’s first run for public office. She stands at the forefront of a wave of left-leaning young people determined to rewrite what U.S. electoral politics looks like. The movement is fueled by widespread frustration with the Democratic Party establishment, many of whose members have held office longer than their young challengers have been alive—and voters are increasingly hungry for unapologetic candidates like Abughazaleh, who was thrown to the ground by law enforcement last week while protesting an ICE detention center. One of her first campaign slogans put it bluntly: “What if We Didn’t Suck?”

Run for Something, a political action committee that recruits young progressives to run for down-ballot office, reports that more than 61,000 people have reached out about running for office in 2025—that’s more than the total from the first three years of Donald Trump’s first term combined, according to co-founder Amanda Litman.

In this era of intense political division, the Democratic Party manages to be a unifying point: both the left and right agree that it does, in fact, suck. A Wall Street Journal poll from this summer found 63% of surveyed voters hold an unfavorable view of the party, the lowest rating since the Journal began tracking the metric in 1989. While Abughazaleh’s odds of winning a House seat are long, her candidacy is uniquely a product of our current moment: it is not just overlapping with, but actively fueled by, the collision between internet culture and mainstream electoral politics.

“I can’t remember a time when politics wasn’t part of my life,” Abughazaleh says. But as a child, her political views were very different. Her maternal grandmother, Taffy Goldsmith, was a longtime Republican operative in Dallas, so loyalty to the GOP was stitched into her family’s fabric. One of her favorite childhood books was Lynne Cheney’s A for Abigail, a gift from Goldsmith.

When she was in high school, her family moved to Tucson, Arizona. That’s when she started drifting left, after watching her classmates navigate crippling financial hardship. “I had friends who were way smarter and more talented than me who couldn’t afford to go to college—even with a full ride, because going meant they couldn’t stay home to support their families,” she says. “That was the first crack in my worldview: I started thinking, maybe Ronald Reagan wasn’t right about everything.”

Her full ideological shift was gradual—she penned an op-ed for her high school paper in 2016 headlined “Marco Rubio Is My Candidate”—but by the time she enrolled at George Washington University, during Trump’s first term, she was a proud progressive who regularly attended protests. She picked up stand-up comedy as a hobby, often joking about Fox News, which accidentally gave her an intense crash course in public speaking.

After graduating in 2020, she stayed in D.C. She’d originally dreamed of a career as a foreign service officer or diplomat, but when a researcher role opened up at Media Matters for America, the progressive nonprofit watchdog focused on conservative media, it felt like the perfect fit. She’d get paid to spend hours watching Fox News, something she already did. The paycheck wasn’t big, so she bartended on the side; her first taste of online viral fame didn’t come through Media Matters, but when a 2022 Twitter thread she posted describing her experience having a drink spiked blew up.

As a kid, Abughazaleh taught herself video editing on Windows Movie Maker to make fan videos pairing anime clips with popular songs. She recognized the power of short-form video early on. “I realized that so many people get their news from video now, that if you want to reach more people, that’s where you need to be,” she says.

She started recording herself breaking down the antics of Fox News personalities like Pete Hegseth and Tom Homan and posting the clips to social media. She was good at it almost immediately: a compact blonde with bright blue eyes, Abughazaleh is naturally telegenic and quick-witted. She built an audience of hundreds of thousands of followers across TikTok, X, YouTube, and Instagram. She went all-in on independent content creation after Media Matters laid her off in spring 2024. The nonprofit’s finances had been wiped out by a legal battle with Elon Musk’s X, which sued Media Matters for defamation over a 2023 report that found ads were appearing next to pro-Nazi content on the platform.

Abughazaleh attended the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as part of the party’s creator outreach program, shortly after moving to the city. “Brat summer” was winding down, and even people who’d wanted an open primary were rallying around Kamala Harris as the nominee. “As a Palestinian person, I probably wouldn’t have gone if Joe Biden was still the nominee,” she says. She held out hope that Harris might address the genocide in Gaza.

For much of the convention, Abughazaleh joined protesters outside the United Center, livestreaming their push to get Palestinian voices a spot on stage. The DNC rejected their requests. That was the moment she lost all faith in the Democratic Party establishment. “We slept on the concrete,” she says. “I got home that night—my whole body was covered in bruises, I’d been wearing the same clothes for 36 hours—and I just started crying.”

Her frustration boiled over after Trump took office and his new Department of Government Efficiency began slashing federal programs with Musk’s help; she was horrified by how little Democrats did to push back. “I just couldn’t watch it anymore,” she says. “I thought, fuck it, I’m going to run.”

Abughazaleh launched her congressional campaign this past March with a roughly two-minute speech posted to social media. “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,” she opened, her tone carrying the peppy, familiar cadence of a veteran YouTuber as she pledged to take the fight directly to the MAGA movement. It was a high-energy, distinctly do-it-yourself entrance into politics.

She was challenging Jan Schakowsky, an 81-year-old Democrat who had represented Illinois’ 9th District since 1999. The media framed Abughazaleh’s candidacy as the latest front in the battle between young progressive firebrands and older establishment Democrats who have failed to mount a forceful pushback against Trump—and that’s exactly how Abughazaleh framed the race herself from the start. She has always positioned her campaign as a national fight, in part to explain why she is jumping straight from TikTok to a run for Capitol Hill.

“There are so many incredible local and state officials here. They don’t need my experience,” she tells me. “My experience is better used fighting actual fascists. All the people I used to cover don’t run Illinois—they run the country, and I’m the only one who’s gone toe-to-toe with them.”

Almost immediately, Abughazaleh’s campaign drew far more attention than most congressional primary bids, especially those in solidly blue territory like the 9th District. She has zero governing experience, only recently moved to Chicago, and didn’t even live in the district she’s running to represent when she launched—but she’s a master at selling herself online. A flood of donations poured in, including contributions from celebrities Mark Ruffalo and Andrew Yang.

Abughazaleh’s campaign refuses corporate donations on principle, relying entirely on individual supporters. So far, she has raised more than her competitors, pulling in upwards of $1 million, with an average donation of just $32. Bluesky, she says, is by far her biggest fundraising platform.

Abughazaleh is a distinctly modern type of celebrity politician. She doesn’t have the widespread name recognition of a mainstream pundit like Rachel Maddow, but the people who do follow her are deeply engaged. This is both a blessing and a curse. Her campaign depends on her online fandom to raise money and spread the word, and she plans to mobilize as many of those fans as possible to volunteer and vote on election day. But her high online profile also means every move she makes is closely dissected.

Early in the campaign, her relationship with Ben Collins—a former reporter who became CEO of the Chicago-based satirical newspaper The Onion last year—came under heavy scrutiny. When the Chicago Tribune reported that the couple had rented a $4,000-a-month apartment when they first arrived in the city, it sparked a small scandal: how could these coastal elites live so extravagantly while Abughazaleh positioned herself as a woman of the people? (Abughazaleh acknowledges that Collins provides her with a financial safety net; he is also one of the campaign’s largest individual donors.)

The pair have since moved to a modest walk-up apartment near Abughazaleh’s campaign office. To prove she isn’t wealthy, Abughazaleh posted a screenshot of her checking account balance to social media: $4,947. She demonetized all her social media accounts when she launched her campaign, so her only income comes from a Patreon she created exclusively to sell subscriptions for photos of her orange cat, Heater. It brings in around $650 a month.

She also turns scrutiny from ideological opponents into an advantage. On the campaign trail, she often brings up how she was deposed by lawyers for Musk’s X Corp. last fall as part of the Media Matters lawsuit. After far-right Trump ally Laura Loomer ranted about Abughazaleh on X, telling her to “cover your cooch,” labeling her a communist, and implying she was a sex worker, Abughazaleh turned the post into a call for donations.

In fact, she regularly frames the negative attention she draws as a major selling point for her campaign. She jumps at every chance to show she’s not just willing, but eager, to go head-to-head with her enemies. In May, she posted a video titled “Republicans Can’t Stop Being Weird About Me.” “I’m really pissing off all the right people,” she says with a smile.

Abughazaleh excels at this kind of messaging, building her brand around opposition to a common enemy. But this spring, the core narrative driving her campaign shifted dramatically when Jan Schakowsky announced she would not run for re-election after 14 terms in Congress. The incumbent-versus-upstart storyline was dead, and the new race dynamics created a far messier narrative. If the first phase of Abughazaleh’s campaign was framed as a showdown between the new and old guards of the Democratic Party, the race for the 9th District today is more of a free-for-all battle royale.

Since Schakowsky exited the race, a dozen more Democrats have jumped into the primary (and some have already dropped out). There is another Gen Z candidate: 27-year-old Bushra Amiwala, who was once the youngest Muslim elected official in the U.S. There’s also 36-year-old Illinois state representative Hoan Huynh, who pulled off a surprise underdog win in 2023, and 42-year-old Illinois state senator Mike Simmons, who made history as both the first Ethiopian American and first openly gay member of the Illinois State Senate.

While none of them get invited on national cable news the way Abughazaleh does, all have enthusiastic volunteer networks—not to mention on-the-ground governing experience and deep community ties that Abughazaleh lacks.

One rival has been openly hostile. Bethany Johnson, a trans woman also running on a progressive platform, views Abughazaleh as an enemy. Johnson says Abughazaleh’s supporters on Bluesky made cruel jokes at her expense, amounting to harassment. Johnson responded by repeatedly showing up at Abughazaleh’s campaign office with protest signs, roller-skating back and forth outside in her underwear, and deliberately making herself vomit by the entrance. Abughazaleh filed for a court-ordered no-contact stalking order to get Johnson to stop.

But Abughazaleh’s biggest challenge is Daniel Biss. A slim, energetic 48-year-old with a full head of striking silver hair, Biss is a favorite among local progressives. During his time as mayor of Evanston, the city became the first in the U.S. to approve reparations for Black residents. “Let’s take on the billionaire class together,” his Instagram bio reads. He has already locked in endorsements from U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and multiple major unions. A poll commissioned by Abughazaleh’s own campaign found Biss is the current front-runner.

Even so, when I asked Abughazaleh this summer if she was confident she would win, she answered without hesitation: “Extremely.” We were sitting on a couch inside her campaign office, surrounded by hand-painted signs made by volunteers and shelves of free items for the community, ranging from books to baby wipes. She declined to discuss her opponents.

“We have the momentum,” she continued. The campaign was indeed surging—donations keep rolling in—and she scored her first major national endorsement at the end of July from U.S. Representative Ro Khanna of California, who called her “the absolute best that the Democratic party has to offer.”

She’s also working hard to build her on-the-ground campaign, often hitting three to six campaign stops a day. She hired a fellow Gen Zer, Sam Weinberg, as her campaign manager—Weinberg grew up in Evanston, and the pair have centered their work on a slate of mutual aid-focused programs and events, from picking up trash at the lakefront and local parks to community parties where entry costs are a box of tampons, pads, or supplies for the campaign office’s food bank. This past August, they gave out hundreds of backpacks stuffed with school supplies to local children.

The response to this in-person, analog style of politics has been positive. During my visit to her office this summer, I saw people stop by constantly to drop off donations—one man arrived with a surprisingly large number of computer monitors—and pick up essentials like tampons and baby food.

Abughazaleh has been compared to Zohran Mamdani, the young, charismatic leftist who won a New York mayoral primary and also has a gift for short-form video. But Mamdani’s success came from far more than just his online following: he’s a lifelong New Yorker who was already an elected state legislator, and his opponent was Andrew Cuomo, a uniquely unpopular foil. In some ways, Abughazaleh’s run more closely mirrors that of Deja Foxx, another Gen Z content creator who recently lost by a wide margin in an Arizona Democratic primary. Like Abughazaleh, Foxx had to compete against a field of fellow progressives.

Still, Abughazaleh is clearly drawing lessons from Mamdani’s win: she prioritizes meeting as many voters as possible in person, and focuses specifically on people who don’t usually turn out to vote at all.

One afternoon, her headquarters was packed with around 40 people who’d shown up to get assigned canvassing blocks for this fall. More than 6,000 people have signed up to volunteer overall. Abughazaleh’s strategy relies on energizing voters who feel pushed out by mainstream politics, and many of her volunteers look far more likely to have debated Peter Kropotkin’s work in online forums than to have previously volunteered for a Democratic campaign.

I sat with two men who were organizing campaign merch, including stickers that read “Sluts Vote (for Kat).” Both were fans who followed Abughazaleh online—but this was their first time volunteering in person. Neither had ever worked on a political campaign before, and both appreciated Abughazaleh’s focus on mutual aid as a way to engage in politics without the usual corrupting baggage. “I wanted to do something with my pain and anger that wasn’t destructive,” one told me as he cut apart a sheet of stickers and arranged them into neat piles.

There have been missteps, too. In August,