"What if We Didn't Suck?"

Kat Abughazaleh lost. What she built is what the Democratic Party is missing.

Kat Abughazaleh lost her race for Congress last night. She came in second in a 16-person Democratic primary for Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, trailing Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss by roughly 4,000 votes. She’s 26. She’d never run for anything before. She moved to the district a year ago. And she came closer to winning than anyone expected when she announced.

I need to get something out of the way up front: Kat is my friend. We both worked at Media Matters. I wrote about her campaign once before, back in April 2025, shortly after she announced. I wanted her to win. I posted about supporting her on social media. But I made a deliberate decision early on to keep a wall up between that and what I published here at TPA. I didn’t want to spend the campaign writing cheerleader pieces about my friend’s congressional run. So I waited to see how things played out before weighing in again. Things have now played out.

Kat Abughazaleh

I also want to be honest about what this loss was and what it wasn’t. Biss is a good candidate. He’s progressive. He’s the well-liked, twice-elected mayor of Evanston, a former state senator who I personally voted for over JB Pritzker in the 2018 gubernatorial primary. He has solid positions on LGBTQ issues, on immigration, on economic policy. He had Jan Schakowsky’s endorsement, Elizabeth Warren’s endorsement, the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Once Biss entered the race, I remember thinking that this was going to be a real challenge for Kat. It was. He’ll be a fine member of Congress, a fitting successor to Schakowsky.

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If you’re a pundit looking to spin this as evidence that Kat was too far left, or that her positions on some specific issue doomed her, I’d encourage you to consider that the urge to say those things probably has more to do with your own politics than with what actually happened in this race. She lost to a progressive with deep local roots and years of institutional support. That’s a different story than the one some people are eager to tell.

My friend Katelyn Burns wrote a great piece today on how Kat ran her campaign: the Twitch fundraising, the mutual aid, the AIPAC spending, the indictment. I’d recommend reading it. I want to write about something slightly different. I want to write about what Kat’s campaign meant, and why Democrats across the country should be paying attention to it right now.

Something to vote for

That April 2025 piece I mentioned was about a CNN interview where host Jim Sciutto tried to get Kat to agree that support for trans people had cost Democrats the 2024 election. She didn’t take the bait. “Absolutely not,” she said. “Democrats deciding that trans people are the reason they lost the election in 2024 — it’s ridiculous. It’s offensive.” And then she said the thing that stuck with me for the entire year that followed: “A far bigger issue is that we aren’t giving people something to vote for.”

I think about that line a lot. Democrats have spent the last several years agonizing over which voters they’re losing and which positions they should abandon to win them back. Should they distance themselves from trans people? From Palestinians? The premise of this conversation is that the party’s problem is ideological, that it stands for too much, and the fix is to stand for less.

Demonstrators protesting outside the ICE facility, including Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, 26, left, react after being tear-gassed on September 19, 2025 in Broadview, Illinois. (Photo by Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images).

Kat’s campaign was a rejection of that premise. She spent a year trying to build the thing she told CNN was missing: a campaign that actually gave people something to vote for. Her slogan was “What if we didn’t suck?” and it’s funny, but it’s also a real question that most Democratic campaigns don’t bother trying to answer.

Her platform tied everything together under what she called “basic existence”: housing, healthcare, climate, LGBTQ rights, economic justice, all treated as the same fight. “I’m so sick of treating all these issues like they’re separate,” she told The Advocate in January. “Every person deserves to afford housing, groceries, and health care, with money left over. We’re the richest country on Earth — there’s no reason we can’t.”

Every person. That’s the part I want to sit with for a second. Trans people, yes. But also Trump voters. Republicans. People of every race and religion and background. The vision Kat was offering wasn’t about carving the electorate into pieces and deciding which ones to fight for. It was the radical (apparently) idea that a better world is possible for everyone, and that a political party should be in the business of trying to build one.

What not sucking looks like

So what does that actually look like when you try to do it? It looks like turning your campaign office into a mutual aid hub. Coats, boots, hand warmers, menstrual products, all donated by supporters and available to anyone in the community who needed them. No questions asked, no voter registration required. It looks like holding neighborhood cleanups as campaign events and distributing “know your rights” wallet cards instead of glossy mailers designed by consultants. It looks like charging a box of sanitary products as the entry fee to your campaign launch and donating them to a local nonprofit. It looks like a knitting circle at a bar in Evanston.

“What if we didn’t suck?” Pride shirt from a Pride event Kat’s campaign put on.

In her concession speech last night, Kat told the crowd that the campaign “fed and clothed thousands of people across the Ninth District.” That’s not a metaphor. That’s what the campaign literally did while also, by the way, raising $3.3 million (more than any other candidate in the field), almost entirely from small-dollar donors who gave $200 or less. No corporate PAC money. No call time spent begging rich people for checks. The candidate who refused to water down her values outraised everyone. That fact alone should end a few arguments about what’s supposedly necessary to fund a competitive campaign.

One of Kat’s campaign fellows, a Northwestern student named Shayna Tribush, told the Daily Northwestern something after the loss that I keep coming back to: “I want more people to have that expectation for their candidates, that they should actually, tangibly be helping the community they’re running in before they are elected.” That’s it. That’s the lesson. If you’re running for office and your campaign isn’t doing anything for the people you want to represent until after you win, maybe ask yourself why.

The thing she didn’t do

I wrote in that April 2025 piece about Kat’s refusal to accept the premise that trans people cost Democrats the election. What I didn’t know then was whether she’d hold that line for an entire campaign, under real pressure, with real money being spent against her. She did.

That matters to me personally. I’m trans. I’ve watched a lot of politicians over the years decide, after a bad election, that my rights are an acceptable bargaining chip. They don’t usually say it that bluntly. They say “messaging” or “prioritization” or “meeting voters where they are.” The result is the same: they back away, and people like me get the message. Kat told The Advocate that attacks on queer and trans people follow a pattern: “This is what every authoritarian regime does. They go after visible minorities, queer folks, and Jews.” She said it in January, months into the campaign, when softening the position might have bought her a few points in the suburbs. She didn’t soften it. She didn’t treat it as a liability to be managed. She treated it as part of the same fight as everything else on her platform, because it is.

The model is there

There are dozens of progressive insurgent candidates running for Congress right now. Brad Lander in New York. Justin Pearson in Tennessee. Cori Bush running again in Missouri. A lot of them watched Zohran Mamdani win the New York mayor’s race last year and took away the right lesson or the wrong one. A piece in Dissent about Mamdani’s campaign noted that since his win, a crop of candidates have copied the aesthetic (slick videos, kinetic shots, man-on-the-street interviews) without understanding what actually made it work, and warned that “no amount of digital savvy can substitute for political vision, energy, and grassroots support.” The same is true of Kat’s campaign. The viral clips weren’t the thing. The mutual aid was the thing. The positive vision was the thing. The refusal to treat your campaign as something separate from the community you want to serve was the thing.

I’m proud of Kat. I’m proud that she looked at everything going wrong in this country and decided to try to do something about it. We both ended up at Media Matters because we’re the kind of people who care about the information environment we all live in, who think it matters that powerful people tell the truth. Watching her take that same impulse and channel it into running for Congress, knowing what it would cost her, knowing the odds, was something. I’m proud to be her friend.

Kat and me at a campaign launch event in March 2025

In her concession speech, Kat told the crowd: “Every single loss like this one just makes the path easier for the next person who takes the same chance.” I hope this isn’t the last we’ve seen of her in politics. But whether it is or not, the model exists now. Someone built it, ran on it, and came within a few thousand votes of winning with it. What if we didn’t suck? She tried to answer that question. Other people should try, too.