Another competitor has proven openly hostile. Bethany Johnson, a trans woman who is also running on a progressive platform, sees Abughazaleh as an enemy. According to Johnson, Abughazaleh supporters on Bluesky made cruel jokes at her expense, treatment that amounted to harassment. Johnson responded by repeatedly showing up at Abughazaleh’s office with protest signs, roller-skating back and forth in her underwear, and deliberately making herself vomit outside its doors. Abughazaleh filed a “stalking no contact” court order against Johnson to get her to stop.
But Abughazaleh’s biggest headache is Daniel Biss. A slender, energetic 48-year-old with a fantastic head of silvery hair, Biss is a local progressive sweetheart. During his time as mayor, Evanston became the first US city to offer reparations to Black residents. “Let’s take on the billionaire class together,” his Instagram bio reads. He has already nabbed endorsements from US senator Elizabeth Warren and several unions. In a poll commissioned by Abughazaleh’s campaign, he emerged as the front-runner.
And yet, when I asked Abughazaleh this summer whether she was confident that she’d win, she answered without hesitating: “Extremely.” We were sitting on a couch inside her office, surrounded by hand-painted signs made by volunteers and shelves of free items on offer to the community, from books to baby wipes. She didn’t want to discuss her opponents.
“We have the momentum,” she continued. The campaign was, indeed, on a roll—donations keep pouring in—and she scored her first major endorsement at the end of July from US representative Ro Khanna of California, who called her “the absolute best that the Democratic party has to offer.”
She’s working diligently on her ground game, too, often hitting three to six campaign stops a day. She hired a fellow Gen Z campaign manager, Sam Weinberg, who lived in Evanston as a child; they’re focusing on a series of mutual-aid-oriented programs and events, from picking up garbage at the lakefront and local parks to parties where the cost of entry was tampons, boxes of pads, or supplies for the headquarters’ food bank. This August, they handed out hundreds of backpacks filled with school supplies to local children. The reception to this analog politicking has been positive. While visiting her office this summer, I saw people coming in to drop off donations—one guy arrived with a frankly confusing number of computer monitors—and to pick up supplies like tampons and baby food.
Abughazaleh has been compared to New York mayoral primary winner Zohran Mamdani, another young, charismatic leftist with a flair for short-form video. Mamdani’s success stemmed from much more than just his internet game, though—he’s a lifelong New Yorker who was already a state lawmaker; plus, his opponent was Andrew Cuomo, a true foil with a troubled campaign. In some ways, Abughazaleh’s candidacy more closely resembles that of Deja Foxx, another Gen Z content creator who just lost big in the Arizona primary. Like Abughazaleh, Foxx had to go up against a fellow progressive. It’s clear that Abughazaleh is trying to draw lessons from campaigns like Mamdani’s, as she focuses on meeting as many constituents as possible in person and pays specific attention to people who might not otherwise vote at all.
One afternoon, her headquarters was filled with around 40 people who’d shown up to be assigned to canvass blocks this fall. (More than 6,000 people have signed up to volunteer in total.) Abughazaleh’s strategy relies on motivating people who feel alienated from mainstream politics, and many volunteers looked more likely to have lurked in an online forum on the works of Peter Kropotkin than to have previously helped out with a Democrat’s campaign.
