Katherine Marie Abughazaleh (born March 24, 1999), known professionally as Kat Abughazaleh, is an American journalist and social media influencer. Abughazaleh rose to prominence while working at Media Matters for America, where she gained popularity for her criticism of Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. Abughazaleh's writing has been published by Mother Jones and The New Republic. A progressive and democratic socialist member of the Democratic Party, she was a candidate for the 2026 United States House of Representatives primary election in Illinois's 9th congressional district, placing second behind Evanston mayor Daniel Biss.
Early life and education Katherine Abughazaleh was born on March 24, 1999, in Dallas, Texas, to a Palestinian American father and an American mother. Her maternal grandmother, Taffy Goldsmith (née Merrill), was a prominent Texas Republican for four decades, working on John Tower's campaign for the Senate in the early 1960s, and serving as president of the Texas Federation of Republican Women in 2004 and 2005. Her paternal grandfather, Taher Abughazaleh, was from Jerusalem; Abughazaleh says that her grandparents had to flee to Kuwait during the Nakba.
Taher Abughazaleh visited the U.S. to study at Riverside City College in Riverside, California, and George Williams College in Chicago, Illinois, in the 1950s and 1960s, and at one point he worked in Chicago providing mandated oversight concerning Mayor Richard J. Daley. He later worked with Kuwaiti real estate investors and eventually settled in Dallas after periods living outside the U.S. According to Katherine, her father Aladin Abughazaleh immigrated to the U.S. as a child and initially lived in Chicago. Aladin founded a commodity trading advisor performance platform. He also founded a data processing company that became a fund of hedge funds administrator, and was later acquired by BNY Mellon.
Abughazaleh describes her parents as Reagan Republicans. She was a Republican Party supporter throughout her teens, writing an editorial in her student newspaper endorsing Marco Rubio in the 2016 Republican primary while at Salpointe Catholic High School. As a teenager, she considered joining the military, hoping to attend the Air Force Academy or West Point. She attended private schools with classmates from high-income families until her sophomore year of high school, and has credited her family's move to Tucson, Arizona, when she was 16 for sparking her change in political views. She has said that in Tucson she attended a school with many undocumented and low-income students, and that "the bootstrap myth just shattered before my eyes".
From 2014 to 2017, she served on the board of directors of an Arizona Girl Scouts organization.
She attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., aiming to work in journalism or the Foreign Service. At GWU, she wrote and made videos for the student newspaper, performed stand-up comedy, and studied international security and journalism. While a student, she remained registered as a Dallas voter to have "a lot more voting power" than she would as a D.C. resident. She graduated in 2020 with a bachelor's degree in international affairs, and looked for jobs in progressive politics. According to Abughazaleh, she has been independent of financial support from her family since she was 20.
Career
Early career In the early 2020s, Abughazaleh worked part-time as a bartender in Washington, D.C., alongside her media analysis work. In August 2022, she drank a spiked drink, causing her to black out and then to consult a doctor. Her tweets about the experience were shared and liked hundreds of thousands of times, and spurred news coverage on symptoms that indicate a person has been nonconsensually drugged.
Media Matters for America By 2023, Abughazaleh had become a senior video producer for Media Matters for America. She covered Fox News content, including Tucker Carlson's show on that network at the time. This was reflected in the self-description of her Twitter profile, "I watch Tucker Carlson so you don't have to." According to Abughazaleh, her work analyzed "how Fox informs the right-wing political apparatus that shows what's being introduced into the mainstream," such as transphobia and attacks on DEI policies. In January 2023, she started a TikTok account, where she covered Carlson and his show. Within about four months, she had 130,000 followers, and several of her videos have reached 1million views. By April 2023, some of her posts on Twitter, where she had more than 182,000 followers, had gone viral, and she faced online harassment by conservative commentators and right-wing users. In one instance, she collated screenshots of the harassing messages, creating a "visual aid" to illustrate what she and other prominent women in media experience frequently. While at Media Matters, Abughazaleh served as SEIU Local 500 union representative.
In May 2024, The New Republic named Abughazaleh on a list of "25 Political Influencers to Watch in 2024". That same month, Abughazaleh and 11 colleagues were laid off from Media Matters following a lawsuit by Elon Musk.
Independent media and political analyst
By July 2024, Abughazaleh had nearly 500,000 social media followers across TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram. On July 24, 2024, the progressive magazine Mother Jones announced that they hired Abughazaleh as a video creator to produce content on democracy, far-right media, disinformation, and radicalization. She also joined the media outlet Zeteo to produce videos countering right-wing narratives.
The Democratic National Convention invited Abughazaleh as one of several content creators to cover the August 2024 convention. While at the DNC, she participated in an Uncommitted sit-in, though she says she was not a member of the Uncommitted movement. She also interviewed Ro Khanna about the Democrats' Middle East policy. Abughazaleh said during the convention that she "honestly was shocked" and "appalled" at how little Kamala Harris's acceptance speech addressed Gaza and Palestinian concerns, and later characterized Democratic leaders' communications about the issue as "not just wrong but dumb" because "a ceasefire—a permanent ceasefire—is wildly popular, and it makes no sense to sacrifice all of these votes".
Politico highlighted her prominence on TikTok in September 2024, predicting her account would be among those playing "an outsized role in the last 50 days of the presidential race". Analyzing the election results, she wrote for The New Republic that "[i]deally, a new party (or several!) would emerge" from the Democratic Party's failure, but "in the interim[...] new blood, motivated by radical change rather than stagnant power, needs to storm [the] ineffective gerontocracy" of the party.
Abughazaleh was nominated for a 2025 Webby Award in the "News & Politics: Creators" category for her coverage of the far right.
2026 U.S. House campaign
Launch On March 24, 2025, Abughazaleh announced that she would enter the Democratic primary election for Illinois's 9th congressional district seat, which has been held by Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat and a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, since 1999. At that time, Schakowsky had not yet announced whether she would seek re-election in 2026. Abughazaleh says she decided to run following Trump's second inauguration, in response to Democrats "clapping politely" and Democratic leadership's "culture of giving up". She also said she chose to run because Schakowsky, like many incumbent Democrats in safe districts, had not faced a primary challenger for many years.
Shortly after announcing her run, Abughazaleh stated that she was attempting "a new type of campaign". Abughazaleh said that the campaign would reject corporate donations and "the influence of the ultra-wealthy", and instead rely on grassroots donors and free public events, and work with mutual aid groups and local businesses. For example, the entry fee for her campaign launch was a box of sanitary products, which were donated to a Chicago nonprofit for distribution among low-income communities. Her other campaign events have included a knitting circle at a bar in Evanston. Abughazaleh stated her campaign intended to spend its funds on "trying to help meet people's material needs" and informational services such as "know your rights" wallet cards, as well as local public service projects that also serve as "office hours", such as beach and neighborhood cleanups. She contrasted her strategy with "a bunch of bullshit ads that are produced by consultants who haven't won an election since the 90s". Abughazaleh's campaign has been described in reporting as relying heavily on social media engagement and small-donor fundraising, with an emphasis on digital outreach and grassroots organizing rather than traditional consultant-driven campaign structures.
If elected, Abughazaleh would have been the youngest woman, the first Gen Z woman, and the second Palestinian-American woman (after Rashida Tlaib) ever elected to Congress.
The campaign's Federal Election Commission filing stated that the first week's contributions totaled over $378,000, none from PACs, with an average contribution of approximately $32. Her campaign in the first quarter of 2025 outraised Schakowsky's. In mid-April, local high school teacher David Abrevaya announced that he was considering running in the primary as well.
Reactions News organizations in Illinois nationally and internationally covered Abughazaleh's announcement and subsequent campaign. Politico cited Bernie Sanders who encouraged progressives to run as independent candidates in the light of declining popularity of the party, and The Washington Post noted the possibility of her campaign being part of an anti-incumbent movement akin to the Tea Party. News coverage of Abughazaleh's use of digital media, including Bluesky (rather than Musk's X), predicted her skills would help her appeal to younger voters. Coverage also compared her to other younger candidates (including several new media "stars") with progressive political stances who are seeking major US political offices, such as Zohran Mamdani, Jake Rakov, George Hornedo, Saikat Chakrabarti, Elijah Manley, Mallory McMorrow, and Deja Foxx, and placed her in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's camp of "younger, energetic, left-leaning Democrats" who are "blunt about Democratic errors and missteps." The editorial board of the Chicago Tribune castigated Abughazaleh, and other Democrats, for using profanity in public statements, admonishing them not to stoop to Trump's level and "debase American politics even further."
At the time of her announcement, Abughazaleh did not live in Illinois's 9th congressional district, having only registered to vote in Illinois's 7th congressional district a month before her announcement; she did subsequently move to the district. House Representatives are legally required to be residents of the state they represent in Congress, but are not required to live in the same district within that state. Abughazaleh's initial nonresident status in the district, and relatively short duration as a Chicago resident, drew criticism. Local politics commentator Eric Zorn predicted that, even if Schakowsky chose not to run for re-election, local Democrats will "get behind a more established candidate with better local bona fides and greater experience in government" rather than "a very young candidate easily labeled a carpetbagger". In 2025, Abughazaleh stated that she and her partner had already been planning to move into the district when moving to Chicago on short notice the previous year for his job (before she had considered running for Congress), that they live "one bus stop" from the 9th district, which she claims is gerrymandered, and that they planned to move into the district during summer 2025, as soon as they could break their lease on their existing home.