In a decisive blow to the far-left "Squad," Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old social media influencer and former Media Matters journalist facing federal charges, lost her bid for Congress in Illinois' 9th District on Tuesday night.
Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss won the crowded Democratic primary to replace retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky. In a district rated D+19 by the Cook Political Report, Biss is all but assured victory in November.
That makes this primary the real contest, and the far left lost it.
Fifteen candidates competed for Schakowsky's seat. She is retiring after nearly 30 years in Congress. Fox News Digital reported that Schakowsky backed only one of them: Biss, a former state lawmaker who previously ran for governor but lost his primary to Gov. JB Pritzker.
Abughazaleh positioned herself as the insurgent. During a primary debate, she said she did not support the continued leadership of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Biss declined to weigh in on the question.
State Sen. Laura Fine, supported by groups linked to AIPAC, said she would back Jeffries. She was described as the most moderate of the three frontrunners.
Voters picked the candidate handpicked by the establishment. Not the firebrand, and not the pro-Israel moderate.
Abughazaleh carried more than just radical politics into the race. She got indicted on federal charges late last year. Those charges stem from an incident in which agitators allegedly attacked an ICE vehicle outside a Chicago detention facility.
A photo placed Abughazaleh holding a megaphone outside the Broadview ICE processing facility on Sept. 26, 2025.
Voters apparently noticed.
This is the kind of candidate the progressive left keeps producing, young, loud, confrontational, and tangled up in legal trouble tied to anti-enforcement activism. It's becoming a pattern with Squad-aligned figures who seem more interested in spectacle than governance.
Abughazaleh's defeat fits a larger story. The far-left wing of the Democratic Party keeps running into walls, sometimes from Republicans, sometimes from their own voters.
Consider the fractures:
Illinois' 9th District sits in deep-blue territory, part of Chicago and its northern suburbs. If the progressive left can't win there with a young influencer running on maximum resistance, where exactly is the mandate?
Biss now heads toward a general election he should win easily. Before becoming mayor of Evanston, he served as a state lawmaker. Schakowsky's endorsement gave him the inside track from the start.
He avoided taking a clear position on Jeffries' leadership. That kind of caution suggests Biss understands the district wants a Democrat, just not a radical one.
The 9th District's D+19 rating means Republicans have little chance in November. But the primary result still matters. It tells us something about the limits of social media celebrity, protest politics, and running for Congress while under federal indictment.
Democratic voters in a deep-blue district looked at the far left's loudest offering and said no thanks. When even your own party's base won't buy what you're selling, maybe the product is the problem.
