Kat Abughazaleh Gets it

Kat Abughazaleh, the primary challenger in IL-09, raised $200k since her announcement Monday. I threw in $9 just to see what I would get from the campaign, and I think I got my 9 bucks worth from her thank-you email alone. I’m going to excerpt a fair bit and I have some comments at the end about “grifters”.

The email isn’t overly fancy, but it doesn’t look like the Facebook post of one of your older relatives. In other words, it looks like the product of a competent communications operation, unlike almost every other candidate email that I get. After thanking me for my 9 simoleans, it includes this:

I know I’m writing for an audience that’s gotten a lot of Democratic fundraising emails. This is a breath of fresh air as far as I’m concerned.

(I removed the links because they’re individual to my email.)

Here’s what I see, and it’s all good: One of the key things that professional email marketers do is to let you cut back on the cadence of emails. I’ve never, ever seen a political email with that option, except for this one. Adding in other charities is another smart thing to show that she’s going to be engaged in the community if she’s elected. And the promise to not be added to anyone else’s email — that should just be something we take for granted, but, again, this is the first time I’ve ever seen that.

This email should be the standard for every political email. The sad thing is that Democratic politicians reward their donors — the most important and most engaged of their supporters — by spamming them, and by selling their email address to anyone who will buy it. Abughazaleh’s email is, by any reasonable standard, the minimum we should expect from someone who we’ve given our hard-earned money.

So, a good start for Kat Abughazaleh’s campaign. Now, is she a “grifter,” as some on BlueSky are wondering? Let’s think about that for a minute. I can think of only a few “grifter” campaigns. Cenk Uygur’s Presidential campaign was a grift, for example, because he’s not a natural-born citizen and therefore ineligible to be President.

Assuming that Abughazaleh is eligible to run, and she runs a campaign, it’s hard to see how this is a “grift”. A political campaign is one of the most inherently wasteful things on earth. A bunch of money is spent to hire staff, create marketing materials, attend community events to distribute pamphlets and stickers, and to pay for the candidate and staff to travel around the district. When the campaign is over, all that money is gone, and chances are good that the candidate will have lost. I guess if Abughazaleh pockets some money, or hires a friend to run the campaign at an outrageous salary, then her campaign could be considered a “grift”. Otherwise, if she spends the money donated to her to run a decent campaign, it’s not a “grift” in any meaningful sense of the word.

Is it a “grift” for almost every elected Democrat to constantly ask for small-dollar donations when they’re also beholden to big-dollar donors? Is it a “grift” for a candidate to promise to be a progressive and then act like a centrist after they’re elected? Neither of these all-too-common behaviors are considered a “grift” in our current politics, but I would argue that they’re both quite dishonest.

Let’s be frank: candidates like Abughazaleh give “the ick” to Democrats who are wed to party orthodoxy, and that feeling comes out in many ways. They immediately start poking holes in her campaign. “bUt sHe DoeSn’T LiVe iN TeH DistRicT!” when there are a bunch of gerrymandered districts in Chicago’s northern suburbs. They think she’s too young, when 26-year-olds can hold lifesaving jobs like paramedics and firefighters. They’re upset that she’s of Palestinian descent, because that group of people is not supposed to have a voice in our politics. They’re more concerned that an 80-year old incumbent might be shaken up by a challenge than they are excited by the possibility of a breath of fresh air coming to the party. So it’s “to the bat cave, robin!” to shit on this candidacy.

I mean, my $9 might go to young person who’s going to crash and burn under the pressure of a political candidacy, and she might have skeletons in her closet, but those are risks that one takes with almost any political candidate. So far, I’m happy with my massive investment in this primary challenge.