Progressive activist Maxwell Alejandro Frost, 25, will officially become the first Gen Z member of Congress after winning his race to represent Florida's 10th Congressional District.
"Central Florida, my name is Maxwell Alejandro Frost, and I'm going to be the first Generation Z member of the United States Congress!" Frost announced to his supporters in Orlando after the race was called Tuesday night, NBC News reports.
Frost defeated Republican Calvin Wimbish, 72, a retired Army Green Beret and conservative activist. The House seat was vacated by Democratic Rep. Val Demings during her unsuccessful run to unseat Republican Sen. Marco Rubio.
Frost has worked as a top organizer for March for Our Lives, the anti-gun-violence group formed in response to the Parkland school shooting in 2018, and the American Civil Liberties Union. He centered his campaign around issues especially important to young voters: ending gun violence, addressing climate change, protecting abortion rights and supporting Medicare for all.
He quit his previous job in order to run for Congress and drove for Uber to pay rent while on the campaign trail. He hasn't finished college and has instead focused on community organizing through his adolescence and early adulthood.
Frost says his activism was shaped as early as elementary school, when he learned about wealth inequality during the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011.
He's passionate about gun reform, often referring to Gen Z as the "school shooter generation." Frost has worked as an anti-gun-violence activist since the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012 and is vocal about being a survivor of a separate incident of gun violence.
The 2022 midterms were the first time members of Gen Z could run for Congress, which Pew Research Center defines as people born between 1997 and 2012. Candidates must be 25 years old to serve in the U.S. House, 30 to serve in the U.S. Senate, and 35 to be president.
Still, 25-year-olds aren't often running for, let alone winning, Congressional races. In 2020, Representative Madison Cawthorn, who was 25 at the time, was elected to represent North Carolina and served one term; and before that, the last 25-year-old to serve in the House was Thomas Downey, a New York Democrat elected in 1974, reports The New York Times.
Frost will be much younger than most of his peers; the average age of House members is 58. More than half of Americans are millennials or younger but aren't represented generationally in the U.S. Congress — its current membership is the oldest in history, Insider reports.
Though the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly skews older, white and male, it is slowly becoming more diverse across race, ethnicity, gender and age. Frost will be the only Afro-Cuban member of Congress.
Frost won his August primary in a crowded 10-candidate race of more experienced Democrats, with the help of high-profile endorsements from progressive leaders including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.; and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
Frost wasn't the only Gen Z candidate for Congress this fall. Former Trump press staffer Karoline Leavitt, 25, won the Republican primary in New Hampshire's 1st Congressional District. She ran on a platform as a staunch conservative, political outsider and denier of the 2020 presidential election results, despite no evidence of widespread fraud. Leavitt lost the midterm to incumbent Democrat Chris Pappas, 42.
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