On November 4, in a rebuke to the GOP and the Trump administration, Democrats won races across the country. They won governor seats in Virginia and New Jersey, retained State Supreme Court justices in Pennsylvania, and even broke up the GOP supermajority in the Mississippi Senate. And in New York City, more than a million voters cast their ballots for 34-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, an anti-Zionist Muslim South Asian immigrant, whom Republicans, as well as corporate Democrats, had done their absolute best to vilify. To reflect on the implications of this moment, I spoke with Cori Bush and Kat Abughazaleh, two courageous women who are doing politics in a big way. Cori Bush is fighting to retake the congressional seat she won in 2021, Missouri’s first district, that covers the city of St. Louis. She’ll be up against incumbent Wesley Bell, whose successful campaign against her in 2024 was heavily funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a Zionist political action committee. Kat Abughazaleh is a 26-year-old Palestinian American making waves in a crowded field of Democrats seeking to represent Illinois’s ninth district, the Chicago area district formerly held by progressive Representative Jan Schakowsky.
Laura Flanders: Congresswoman, how are you feeling as we start this conversation today?
Cori Bush: I am overwhelmed. One year ago, if you would’ve told me we would be here this quickly, I would’ve questioned it. But the tide has turned in so many ways. Our government has to reckon with the fact that the people want self-determination for all people, the people want humanity, the people want dignity. We want to see our leaders actually represent the people.
Kat Abughazeleh: When Zohran won his primary, I posted something like, “This is a huge night for progressive grassroots candidates with ethnic last names.” We saw Democrats sweep across the country. I think part of that is if you, as in the Republican Party, are filled with a bunch of weird guys that are pushing universally unpopular policies and terrorizing communities, people don’t like that, and they want to vote against it.
LF: Let’s talk a bit more about your campaign, Kat. How are you running differently? And then I want to find out why you decided to run in the first place. I read somewhere that you started out life as a Republican.
KA: I did. There are a lot of things in politics that I don’t like, especially when it comes to money. I saw how much money we spent in 2024 just for Donald Trump to win, and frankly, it made me nauseous. And the fact that a lot of people have lost faith in our political system, from every political stripe, because politicians are about words and not actions. We are using our resources to not only reach voters but materially improve their lives. We do backpack drives, food drives. Our campaign office doubles as a mutual aid hub. We’re doing everything we can to make sure everyone in our community has whistles as they patrol and keep an eye out for ICE. We are genuinely making a change on the ground. And, win or lose, this campaign is a net benefit to this community, and I think it’s going to help us win.
LF: Congresswoman, you are signing up for another probably brutal campaign. Why? What’s giving you the drive to do this?
CB: I’ve been in Congress, and I know the change that can happen when someone not only works for their district but when someone fights for the district. We need proven leadership in my district, because we’ve had it. I have heard from my community, their frustrations with the lack of leadership. I’ve heard their despair, because this manufactured chaos that is coming down from the Trump administration is not being dealt with. It is not being met with the urgency and with the fire that is coming down on us. The destruction is happening every single day, and we’re saying, “Wait till 2026 because things will get better.” People are living it right now.
LF: Tell us a bit about your background, Congresswoman.
CB: I am someone who’s been in municipal politics for most of my life. My dad would help the person who he saw was unhoused, who slept on the ground. He’s the one that was going to make sure that person got to safety and got a meal and got a shower. That was my example. But I’m a registered nurse by trade. I am a mother, a wife. I’m someone who lived unhoused, lived in a car with my two children, moving it around the city of St. Louis, hoping I wouldn’t fall asleep too long and wake up and one of my children had passed in the night because it got too cold in the car. I’ve been on EBT. I’ve been on SNAP. I’ve been on WIC. I have been through so many things that people are fighting right now. That’s why I speak up. That’s why I stand up the way that I am.
Like you said, Laura, I’m coming back again even though this could be a brutal campaign. But what’s really brutal is having to go through all of the policy violence or going through what people go through every single day because no one is speaking up, to the point where they’re flipping the tables over and making change. I’m that one. For this particular moment, I am the one for this seat.
LF: Kat, your background is a little different. And there are Daughters of the Revolution in your history, at least part of it. Where’d you come from? Who are you? And how did you go from being a teenage Republican to who you are now?
KA: My mother is a white Texan. My father is a Palestinian immigrant. He was born stateless. His father came here for college in Chicago and then brought his family over later. My mother’s family was really active in Republican politics, so I grew up in a very Reagan Republican family. But in hindsight, a lot of the values that my parents lived by didn’t really match up with the party they ascribed to.
I think that’s a story that resonates with a lot of Americans. My last name’s Abughazaleh. Growing up in post-9/11 Texas, there were a lot of things that didn’t match up to this party we said we were a part of. When I was about 15, we moved to Tucson, Arizona, which is much less segregated by income compared to Dallas where I grew up, and I suddenly had friends who were a lot smarter than me, who were unbelievably talented, that couldn’t afford to go to college even with a full ride, because they couldn’t afford the extra costs or they had to help take care of their family. I was like, “Wait, maybe Ronald Reagan isn’t right about everything.”
By the time the 2016 election rolled around, my parents voted for Hillary. I couldn’t vote, I was 17. I did voter registration drives, but I wanted to devote my life to deradicalization and progressive politics. That’s what I studied in school, that’s what I started my career doing, covering the right for Media Matters. My specialty was Tucker Carlson and communicating these narratives. People like Rupert Murdoch have spent billions of dollars to create a system that keeps so many in a bubble of misinformation. That’s why I have devoted my career to deradicalizing folks and to try to cut through in a way that makes people listen, that makes them start asking those questions I did.
LF: What kind of conversation would you like to have with each other? You’re both connected by this long-term vision of what’s wrong in this country and what could be different.
CB: I admire the fact that you have made a decision to run on your values. That your principles are first—your community, that’s your priority, but without biting your tongue to make it happen. I applaud that. I started a PAC called Politivist, because I call myself a politivist, it’s the politician and the activist. When I entered Congress, I was told, “You can’t be an activist. You have to just be the politician.” I was like, “No, no, I’m bringing the fire, the moxie, the courage. I’m bringing all of that to Congress. And I’m going to be the activist while I’m still the politician.” So the power of the push and the power of the pen and the purse, I was marrying those. And you are a politivist too. You’re the activist.
KA: Everything you just said means so much. I truly can’t stress that enough. Running for office is really hard, which, Congresswoman, you know, and it’s even harder when you stand by your values. There have been so many times during this campaign where someone or a group is offering a lot of money, frankly, race-changing amounts of money, to stand for values that I don’t represent. It’s because of people like you, Congressman Bowman, Representative Ocasio-Cortez, this entire group of modern progressives that walked so we could run right now, that gave me the strength to say no. I was asked by someone, would I rather lose with my values than win and owe a few favors, and I was like, “Absolutely the former.” It’s really hard. This entire system is built to make it almost impossible for people who are not wealthy to run. I really admire what you and other progressives around the country have been doing.
LF: Kat, what about this question of the indictment that you’re facing? How does that affect your ability to run, or does it?
KA: I have been protesting at the Broadview Processing Center, which is where ICE headquarters its operations in Chicago. This is a processing center, it’s not a detention facility, so people aren’t supposed to be held for more than 12 hours. They are being held for days or weeks, being denied water, they don’t have beds, hot meals, access to hygienic facilities. We’re now hearing reports of people going into cardiac arrest, being carried out on stretchers, being given fake translators so they’ll sign their own deportations. It’s abhorrent, and so I have been protesting there alongside hundreds of Chicagoans. I was recently indicted by Trump’s DOJ along with five other people, and it’s a blatantly political prosecution. This case is going to determine if this administration can criminalize free speech, free association, the right to protest. It’s a lot to have on top of a campaign. I have covered the right for my career as a journalist, so this wasn’t surprising. It was maybe a little surprising to see my name on the indictment, especially so soon. But I know the exact playbook that these people are working from. This is what cowards do. They’re afraid, so they tried to terrorize us with guns and tear gas, pepper balls, abducting people from daycares. It didn’t work. Chicago’s still standing up. Now they’re using the federal legal system to try to shut us up, and it’s not going to work this time either.
LF: Let’s talk about the Democratic Party. You are running, Kat, to take the seat formerly held by Jan Schakowsky, a pretty good progressive Democrat but whose retirement was announced early this year. You actually announced your candidacy before she announced her retirement. Then we are looking at a moment of leadership change with the announcement from Nancy Pelosi, former speaker, that she would not seek another term after this one, which would be her 40th year in office. Congresswoman, you’ve been there and you’ve seen how power works inside the party. I’d like to ask you your thoughts on the crossroads that the party is at now and whether you think there’s a real chance for the sort of change you’re seeking.
CB: There has to be a chance. I think that we are it, those of us that are running right now that have made the decision to be anti-genocide, to not take the corporate super PAC money, to stand up for our communities, in a way that we are not seeing some of the folks in Congress who are Democrats do. I was there, Laura. I was able to see how six people, I’m talking about Squad, could make change simply by continuing to push. We didn’t get to bring everything to the floor that we wanted, but we made change. We were able to become a force within the Congress. And it was just six people. What we were missing was six more, 12 more, you know, 30 more to really be able to make that change. What I’m hoping is that for those running right now, be true to who you are. Don’t say that you’re going to fight and change up on us when you get to Congress, because that hurts this movement. Don’t do it. Be who you are now.
