Gen Z officially has a seat in Congress.
Maxwell Alejandro Frost, a 25-year-old Democrat, won his election on Tuesday in Florida’s 10th Congressional District over Calvin Wimbish, a Republican.
Maxwell Alejandro Frost focused on issues important to many young voters: gun violence, climate change, abortion rights and Medicare for all.
Maxwell Alejandro Frost, a 25-year-old Democrat, won his election on Tuesday in Florida’s 10th Congressional District over Calvin Wimbish, a Republican, according to The Associated Press. Mr. Frost will represent the Orlando-area seat being vacated by Representative Val Demings, the Democratic nominee for senator, who lost her race.
His victory means that the next Congress will include one member of Generation Z, whose oldest members were born in 1997 and are newly eligible for the House, which has a minimum age of 25. The other Gen Z candidate on the ballot on Tuesday, Karoline Leavitt, a Republican, lost in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District.
“The perspective I bring as a young person, as a young Black person, as a young Black Latino person from the South, is important,” Mr. Frost said in an interview with The New York Times late Tuesday night. But he added that he saw himself as “a small piece of a really big puzzle” composed of members of Gen Z who are becoming more influential in many areas of society.
Mr. Frost said his first priority was to get his district offices and staff up and running to assist constituents who are still reeling from Hurricane Ian — to “show them that government can work for them,” he said.
In addition to policies like increasing the minimum wage and codifying Roe v. Wade that are supported essentially universally among elected Democrats, Mr. Frost backs many of the proposals of the party’s left wing, including universal health care and expanding the Supreme Court. Democrats are highly unlikely, though, to have the sort of majority in the next Congress that would be required to enact those policies, if they retain a majority at all.
Mr. Frost’s background is in activism, including work with the student-led anti-gun-violence movement March for Our Lives, and his campaign focused on issues like gun violence and climate change that are of particular salience to many young voters. In an interview with The Times in August, he argued that he brought a different perspective to politics because of the era he had come of age in: one of mass shootings, increasingly frequent natural disasters and broad social upheaval.
“I come from a generation that has gone through more mass-shooting drills than fire drills,” he said then. “This is something that my generation has had to face head-on: being scared to go to school, being scared to go to church, being scared to be in your community. That gives me a sense of urgency.”
It is rare for 25-year-olds to be elected to Congress; before Representative Madison Cawthorn, Republican of North Carolina, won in 2020, it hadn’t happened in more than 45 years. Mr. Frost turned 25, the minimum age to serve in the House, earlier this year.
On Tuesday, his interview with The Times was briefly interrupted by a congratulatory phone call from President Biden. The president asked whether Mr. Frost had a birthday coming up before his swearing-in, as Mr. Biden did between his own election to the Senate at age 29 and his inauguration at age 30, the minimum age for senators.
“I said no, he beat me on that one,” Mr. Frost said with a laugh, adding that he planned to take Mr. Biden up on an offer to meet with him in the Oval Office.
NYT