Kat Abughazaleh is first 9th Congressional candidate to release an ad

One day before Illinois candidates began filing campaign petitions for the 2026 primary, Democratic congressional hopeful Kat Abughazaleh on Sunday became the first candidate in the very crowded 9th District race to release a professionally made campaign video.

The 30-second piece, titled “Fighting Back, Pushing Forward Against ICE,” was produced for the web.

It starts with a snippet of a news report about Abughazaleh being thrown to the ground by a uniformed and masked federal agent during a September protest outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility in Broadview.

The rest of the video includes excerpts of remarks Abughazaleh, a Chicago resident, made to the media about the federal agency’s activity in Chicago as part of Operation Midway Blitz and a montage of the agents at work. A “Paid for by Kat for Illinois” tagline appears in small print at the end.

Abughazaleh released the video despite criticizing campaign commercials when she first announced her candidacy in March and specifically promising not to waste donations “on old, ineffective tactics” such as TV ads.

Abughazaleh acknowledged the strategy change in a separate video.

At least a dozen Democrats are running for the 9th District seat, which is now held by veteran U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Evanston. Schakowsky is retiring when her term ends in January.

Petition filing to get on the ballot began Monday and ends Nov. 3.

Abughazaleh was the first Democrat in the race, and she’s been the fundraising leader from the start. Her campaign ended September with a little more than $1 million in the bank for ads and other campaign expenses, records show.

The 9th District includes parts of Cook, Lake and McHenry counties.

Su slips up

Over in the race for the Republican nomination in the 9th, candidate and Chicago resident Mark Su on Sunday released a YouTube video shot outside a suburban Costco store in which he talks about his plan to gather more signatures for his petition there and at a nearby Home Depot store. In the video, Su says they — and he — are in Prospect Heights.

They aren’t. And he wasn’t.

The stores are in Mount Prospect.

The title of the nearly 4-minute clip, which Su also posted on his campaign’s Facebook page, also misspells Prospect Heights, leaving off the ‘s’ at the end.

Reached via email on Monday, Su said GPS software indicated the stores were in Prospect Heights.

“Even though it is not Prospect Heights, it is very close to,” he said.

While Su and Island Lake resident Rocio Cleveland have said they’re running, neither filed candidate petitions Monday. The only Republican to do so in the 9th was John Elleson of Arlington Heights.

• Political Roundabout is an occasional column on campaign, legislative and political news with a suburban focus.