How to Build a Post-"Nobody Nobody Sent" Chicago Politics

For decades, this was the defining story of Chicago Politics:

In 1948, a University of Chicago law student named Abner Mikva walked into his local ward office to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson's campaign. A man named Timothy O'Sullivan—cigar in mouth, exactly the Chicago Politics Type of Guy you're picturing—looked at him and said: "We ain't got no jobs."

Mikva said he didn't want a job.

"We don't want nobody that don't want a job."

O'Sullivan asked: "Who sent you?"

Mikva said, "Nobody sent me."

O'Sullivan put the cigar back in his mouth. "We don't want nobody nobody sent."

You want to help? Suspicious. You don't want anything in return? More suspicious.

The Chicago Machine that powered this extremely Chicago story died, eventually.

In 2026, it has been dead for many years. The ward bosses are gone. But the whole infrastructure of deference remained, long after the machine itself has mostly rotten away.

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Somewhere along the line, progressive organizing groups in Chicago adopted this logic. Not because progressives are corrupt, but because, at the time, it worked, for some people. If you're trying to pressure a machine, you need to prove you can deliver.

Before the internet, message control made sense.

When working with many, many different people, mostly gathered together through institutional affiliation, coalition sign-off on everything made sense.

When Chicago Machine Cigar Guys held all the power, you had to show up unified, with the bosses all happy, no matter how long it took or what was lost in that process.

What we're seeing this Election Day is already clear: that doesn't work anymore.

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Kat Abughazaleh might win tonight.

I wrote about her campaign almost a year ago, when her campaign first launched, because she was new to Chicago but already understanding something most Democrats tied up in local politics didn't: what we were doing wasn’t working.

She got federally indicted for blocking an ICE vehicle and put the footage in her closing ad, and called called Broadview a concentration camp. Dark money groups are paying influencers to call her a fraud.

Seventy percent of Democratic primary voters say ICE is the most important issue, and Kat was talking about ICE when the establishment was still doing the calculus about whether it was worth it to stir things up.

She is accountable to a base, but it’s accountability outside of an organizing group, or something that local organizations can't control.

Kat’s model, to be clear, isn't "be famous online." That's not what’s actually happening (though it’s a tempting takeaway for those of us, including me, who don’t want to make vertical video). If it were true, Maria Pappas would be president already.

This model, even if you subtract the giant audience she built as a reporter, her national media relationships from getting sued by Elon Musk, and the Gen Z early adopting of streaming and YouTube interviews, is so profoundly different from the old standard of progressive organizing in Chicago.

And it doesn’t feel like an accident that this is happening in the midst of an existential crisis for the organized progressive left in Chicago.

The old model brought people in through institutions—unions, churches, orgs. You proved yourself inside a structure.

Instead, Kat built something people actually wanted to be part of. It means finding people where they already are, explaining what matters, doesn't credential them first, and lets them do something useful (or even fun) right away.

Regardless of whether or not Kat wins today (or Nick, or any of the many other young, ‘outsider’ candidates on the ballot today), the deference model of Chicago politics is dead — it has been dead for a long time.

And maybe the question now that ‘who sent you,” is long dead, even zombified dead —

What are we building that's worth coming to?

And this is why this race hits hard for me over others: because this is the one that tells us whether anything can be different in Chicago, even if no one sent you.

VOTE TODAY.

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