PART I:
“IS THIS FOR REAL?”

On March 24, 2025, Rolling Stone ran a story with this headline: “‘We Are In An Emergency’: Progressive TikTok Star Launches Bid to Unseat Old-Guard Dem.”

Soon, the news was everywhere. “I kept seeing it trending on Twitter,” one Ninth District resident told me over the phone.

Coverage began to roll out from there. The Washington Post wondered if Kat could make the jump “from YouTube to Congress.” The Guardian said that her pitch “had struck a chord,” noting she raised more than $300,000 in her first week since announcing. GQ quipped that while Kat has never held office, “she does have a constituency: around 250,000 followers on both X and TikTok.”

With a larger magnifying glass on Kat’s campaign, increased scrutiny followed. And like many, I was surprised to learn Kat was from the Sun Belt — not the Midwest. So I began reaching out to voters in the Ninth District. How did they feel about her buzzy campaign in its early stages?

Had they even heard of her?

Garrett lives in Evanston, a suburb directly north of Chicago. He hadn’t come across Kat — until he registered to vote in the Evanston mayoral election. When researching local candidates, Garrett decided to read up on Kat a little closer.

“We need more young people in Congress,” he told me. “But we also can’t just let anyone walk in off the street. Résumés matter.”

I started following Kat’s journey when she worked at Media Matters, a journalistic organization that reports on “conservative misinformation” in the news media. She took a job with the DC-based nonprofit after graduating from George Washington University in 2020, and quickly rose the ranks from researcher to senior video producer. Compilations of her explaining how Fox News hosts warped the truth grew her personal following on TikTok and YouTube; her timely reactions and clips would often go viral on Twitter (for several years, her bio read “I watch Tucker Carlson so you don’t have to” across platforms).

Still, just two weeks after that headline ran in Rolling Stone, I’m here at the Pancake House to deliver Garrett’s question. “Why do you think you have the résumé required for the job?” I ask Kat.

Her case is based in the moment. “I don’t want to be in Congress my whole life,” she tells me, sharing how she vows to serve no more than five terms if elected. Kat moved to Chicago by chance in 2024 after her partner, Ben Collins, became CEO of The Onion publisher Global Tetrahedron. In her words, by Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025, “I just kept sitting around waiting and waiting, and they didn’t do anything.”

The they in question? The Democratic Party.

“Right now…my expertise is in anti-authoritarianism, anti-fascism,” Kat tells me. “My education is in atrocity and extremism, and my track record in my career is pissing off the far right. You know — the people that are now in charge of our government.”

She argues that there is a need for lawyers, businesspeople, and civic politicians to represent the American populace on Capitol Hill. But a diversity of experiences has never been more essential, either.

“A lot of our leaders, especially the older ones…it’s not their fault, but they aren’t as technologically literate with new media in the ways that a lot of younger people are,” she continues. “They’re not fighting back [online]. I can do that.”

Throughout February and March, Kat sprinted to form a team, including twenty-five-year-old campaign manager Sam Weinberg (they were introduced by a mutual friend, and hit it off after a night of playing games at a barcade). They quickly built out their political platform, mostly focusing on national issues such as climate change, cost of living, and electoral process reform. And in an announcement video posted across her channels, she rolled out her campaign slogan: “What If We Didn’t Suck?”

The video has over fourteen million views across platforms. “I’m pretty good at getting attention,” she jokes.

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