09 Mar 2026, 22:00 p.m.
What's Interesting About Kat Abughazaleh's Campaign
Her campaign announcement successfully captured significant print, radio, and TV attention from high-profile traditional news organizations, but I suspect her operation's consistent and engaging presence in other digital media is a significant factor sustaining attention to her campaign (and aiding in fundraising and recruiting remote volunteers). Temperament and personality, as well as skill, affect this.
Interpersonal attitude
Abughazaleh, like Ocasio-Cortez, has a particular rhetorical skill: when dealing with an interviewer or hostile online commenter: Live, and in the moment, she can notice an unfair or misleading criticism coming her way, refute the specific criticism, and then name and categorize what's illegitimate about the criticism, so as to defuse it and get the upper hand (and point out the problem to all watching). By bringing to light the implicit expectation that underlies the smear, she makes it possible for her to explicitly refuse to meet it.
Being unapologetic, sharp, and fast-paced in analyzing and responding to illegitimate criticism is not just useful to win those individual battles; it also improves all their allies' abilities to fight. Figuratively, they don't just deflect the object coming their way -- they also X-ray it and show everyone the schematics, so we can build our own shields too.
Abughazaleh's now done this sort of thing multiple times during her campaign, as when she addressed men criticizing her clothes and voice (video). She has researched Fox News and the right-wing media landscape for years, and which gives her an unusual level of insight into the usual frameworks they use to dismiss and demean opponents. As she said in a Twitter Spaces conversation (about 51:23-51:49), on why a voter should choose her over other candidates who have more experience organizing locally:
my specialty here is how I can deal with the far right. Right now, we are in an emergency with the far right. I have studied and attacked and triggered these people for a very long time, have provided the advice (along with, you know, my colleagues) that has gone unheeded by the Democratic Party. I know how these people think and I know how to beat them. And that is a unique skill set -- that, unfortunately, is unique.
Her approach to defeating far-right attacks is: don't compromise your values, don't evade, don't back down, don't sacrifice any marginalized group's rights or well-being. (In late June, she said to the Democratic leadership (part of a 1-hour interview video, has an auto-transcript): "Protect everyone. Stand by what you believe and put your money where your mouth is.") Focus on helping the audience understand what's really going on. Pull back the propagandist's curtain to explain their tactics, why they use them, and who benefits from their argument. Frame your position in terms of fundamental values, boiling the ideas down to their essence. Be willing to teach, and use humor but be careful about the targets of mockery. As she said while discussing how to respond to Trump's 2024 win: "I clown on conservatives all the time because it’s fun, but I try to only punch up; people on Fox who are getting millions of dollars to misinform you."
I look at people like my mom, my grandmother, her mother was a major GOP operative in Texas, so she was right in the middle of it. She grew up with this as a major part of it. And she has re-evaluated so many of her views, and I think it takes a lot of bravery and grit. It’s hard to do that. And if you’re looking back when you’re like 40, 50, 60, and you’re like, did I spend this much of my life being wrong, lacking empathy where I could have given it, villainizing people who didn’t deserve it?
....But I think that there’s a lot of people on the left who either grew up in a family that wasn’t really political, or was liberal, like Obama voters or whatever, and they really underestimate, A, the power of propaganda that gets you there in the first place, and then also how hard it is to change that because you’re trying to break an entire structure of thinking and also have someone admit, I was wrong, everyone I love was wrong, and I might’ve had some really shitty opinions about ideas, people, places, things, other nouns, and it’s…
... doing [contextualizing and explaining] instead of straight villainization, because these people [the dedicated far-right] villainize themselves..... We need a baseline for humanity. There is a baseline that if you straight up see me as a womb on legs, probably, you have to address that on your own. This is not [for] us to handhold you through. But there are a lot of other people who just don’t know anything else. And you can’t blame someone for ignorance if you don’t tell them where to find the knowledge.....
Perhaps Abughazaleh's single greatest strength, as a challenger to an establishment, is her personal skills in digital media.
It is no longer sufficient to be great at giving a speech or be a killer on the Sunday panel shows (if that ever really mattered at all). Rather, an effective politician today needs to be good at a 30 second TikTok video, a 3 minute cable hit, and a 3 hour podcast interview. - Amanda Litman
Every once in a while, in US national politics, someone demonstrates that they can leverage a particular technology beyond what others had thought possible. Among those: Father Coughlin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt with radio. arguably Ronald Reagan with television, Howard Dean and Barack Obama with Meetup and some other software tools, Donald Trump with Twitter, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with Instagram (especially Instagram Live). And I think, in a slightly different universe, Tim Walz might have done this with maps.
It's worth getting specific about Abughazaleh's expertise.
She gets labelled "a TikToker" in some headlines, and yes, very short vertical video is a medium she knows well. And she's skilled at making tightly-edited, topic-specific 5-minute or one-hour YouTube videos that teach and persuade the viewer, that get a particular intellectual point across.
But she's also a streamer: skilled and comfortable with long-form podcast and video interviews, teleconference town halls (as with her recent "office hours" streams), and all the associated semi-synchronous audience conversation tools -- Twitter and similar microblogging platforms, Reddit (as with her Ask My Anything), and a dedicated Discord chat server. In September she announced that she'd be regularly livestreaming as a campaign tactic.
Longform streams provide depth and continuity, which convey authenticity. Interviewers get a chance to really dive into specific issues and ask followup questions. The audience knows we aren't getting tricked by deceptive editing; if the candidate is speaking well, that's not because they got two shots at answering a question or got prompting offscreen from an assistant. An example from a different campaign: in early April 2025, Zohran Mamdani spoke with streamer Hasan Piker for about four hours. They joked around, yeah, but also got into wide-ranging policy discussions about policing, transit, housing, and several other issues. Even three hours in, Mamdani could fluidly respond to policy questions off the top of his head.