Progressive commentator and former 9th Congressional District candidate Kat Abughazaleh wants to take her campaign playbook across the country while keeping her office and community space in Rogers Park, she said Thursday in a video announcing her next steps less than three weeks after her second-place finish behind Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss.

Abughazaleh’s relatively recent relocation to Chicago, competitive run for federal office and subsequent loss led to questions about how she might continue to leverage both her formidable online platform and her newfound local organization.

“We built a community, and we don’t want to squander it,” Abughazaleh said. “Because that’s one of the worst parts about campaigns and politics, among a lot of worst parts: we let momentum and infrastructure die as soon as an election is over. We create communities, make a bunch of promises, and then Irish goodbye once the campaign ends.”

The new organization, called Kapow, will aim “to help with purple and progressive races all over the Midwest,” Abughazaleh said, and scale up the strategy of incorporating mutual aid into campaigns.

In a brief phone call Thursday, Abughazaleh said she’s still working out the organization’s structure and details but is in discussions with Common Power, a Seattle-based group that mobilizes political volunteers nationwide.

“We know that our model is viable and it’s a way to make politics — not to sound redundant, but suck less,” she said, pulling a phrase she used throughout the last year on the campaign trail.

Abughazaleh, who had a sizable existing following across social media when she moved to Illinois in 2024, finished less than four percentage points behind Biss. She earned more than a quarter of the vote, coming out in front of state Sen. Laura Fine and a dozen other candidates in the crowded Democratic primary, according to the Associated Press.

Campaign finance filings showed she led candidates across the state in terms of total contributions received from the start of her campaign until a filing deadline shortly before the primary.

The Rogers Park campaign office will continue hosting mutual aid work as well as free community events, “investing in the idea of building that political power through apolitical appeal,” Abughazaleh said.

Biss, who faces Republican John Elleson in November for the typically safe Democratic seat, has said he intends to resign from his position as mayor “in time to trigger a special election” in April 2027.

Fine gave up her seat in the General Assembly in her run for Congress, as did state Rep. Hoan Huynh, who received less than 2% of the primary vote, according to AP results. Democratic state Sen. Mike Simmons, who finished fourth according to AP, was in the middle of his term and can continue to serve in his position.

As she moves on from the campaign, 27-year-old Abughazaleh is still contending with another challenge: a federal indictment related to protest activities against President Donald Trump’s Chicago-area immigration crackdown last year. She has cast the charges as political retaliation and an attack on free speech by the Trump administration. A jury trial is scheduled to begin next month.

Abughazaleh throughout the campaign criticized the resources needed for campaign infrastructure that is typically dismantled after Election Day: “We waste so much money on what is essentially a vanity operation,” she said in the video posted Thursday.

“I’m not going to get stuck in the mud of our election loss, and I hope that you don’t either,” she said.