My $9 Kat Abu Investment Continues to Bear Fruit

She's doing some interesting things

Author

mister mix
May 25, 2025

As promised, Kat Abughazaleh’s campaign is trying to address the things that piss off donors. Here’s the latest fundraising email I got from her campaign:

Hi [mistermix], this is Sam Weinberg, Kat Abughazaleh’s campaign manager.

 As you probably know, most of our campaign’s emails come from Kat but I just had to chime in briefly to tell you something kind of crazy: as a person my favorite thing about Kat is the thing that bugs me most about her as her campaign manager.

 It’s that she hates asking people for money. Personally, I think that’s a good quality. It means she’s considerate and thoughtful and generally non-imposing. But as her campaign manager, it annoys the hell out of me.

So here’s the compromise Kat and I came up with…

 To stay competitive in this race, I set a goal of raising $600,000 this quarter (before July 1). But to get Kat on board, I told her that we can stop asking for money this quarter once we hit that goal and donate every penny we raise beyond that to local charities. 

If you’ve never heard a candidate say “Don’t give me any more money this quarter!”, here’s your chance.

Kat doesn’t like asking, but I know that we have to: Chip in $32 (our average donation) or whatever you can afford to give to help us reach this goal.

And once we hit that goal of $600,000 we promise to stop emailing you until the next fiscal quarter. If you want to know more about the weirdness behind these quarterly deadlines, Kat made an excellent video about it that you can watch here!

I’ll let you evaluate this one. I think it’s an interesting strategy, but $600K is a lot of cash. I’ll keep you posted on how it turns out. She’s going to need the money, because she now has two serious opponents, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss and State Senator Laura Fine. Both announced after Schakowsky dropped out early this month.

If you missed it, Abughazaleh has a cat named Heater who has feline leukemia, who she rescued.

Heater

Abughazaleh was recording a podcast and Heater was making some noise in the background. She and the podcast producer, who was based in New York, started talking about Heater, and they discovered that the producer had fostered Heater before Abughazaleh adopted her. Here’s the video about that:

I’ll continue to watch this campaign because she’s going to be a well-financed outsider in what’s going to be a hard-fought primary.

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