The New Yorker: The First Gen Z Congressman Believes He Can Change Washington
In a narrowly divided House, the twenty-five-year-old Florida Democrat Maxwell Frost seeks to fulfill a promise to his generation.
Just before noon last Tuesday, Maxwell Alejandro Frost walked into the Capitol for the first session of Congress. Dressed in a sleek navy suit, with a gold-plated pin on his lapel, he made his way to the eastern side of the House chamber, joining other newly elected Democrats. At twenty-five, Frost is Congress’s first Afro-Cuban and Gen Z member. Less than two months had elapsed since Frost won his seat in Florida’s Tenth Congressional District, an area that encompasses most of Orlando, by nearly twenty percentage points. The day was to mark a transition long awaited by Republicans, who won a slim four-seat majority in the House. But, first, there needed to be a roll-call vote.
“Pursuant to law and precedent, the next order of business is the election of the Speaker,” Cheryl Johnson, the House clerk, sternly declared from the rostrum. Each party introduced its nominee, with Republicans hailing Kevin McCarthy, of California, as a leader who would “save the United States of America,” and Democrats uniting behind Hakeem Jeffries, of New York, the first Black lawmaker to be nominated for the role, proclaiming him “a Speaker who will put people over politics.” A tense silence followed as, one by one, the House’s four hundred and thirty-four members cast their votes. Some used their time to make a political statement, but Frost had his own preoccupations. “All I could think of was, Don’t say McCarthy, don’t say McCarthy, don’t say McCarthy,” he later told me. When his turn came, Frost leaped from his seat, and, after a moment of hesitation, yelled, “Jeffries!”
The Republicans, however, didn’t deliver McCarthy the quick victory that he had been expecting. Nineteen declined to endorse him as Speaker, prompting a second round of voting—an event that hadn’t happened in almost a century. To Frost, this showed how emboldened the “far-right, fascist maga” wing of the party had become. “They can railroad stuff,” he told me, during a break between votes. After the second round of balloting yielded a similar outcome, Frost asked his younger sister, Maria, who was watching the proceedings from the gallery, to join him on a brisk walk through the underground tunnels that connect the Capitol to nearby House office buildings.
Leading Maria down a long marble hallway, Frost rushed to his office and back before the third round of voting began. “Max has always taken me on little adventures,” Maria, a sunny woman of twenty-two, said, trying to keep up with her brother’s swift pace. This, Maria added, was “the best one.” When the siblings squeezed into an elevator in the Capitol, a young staffer instantly recognized Frost.
“Mr. Congressman,” the young man, dressed in a three-piece suit, said, “I’m so glad you’re here—I can’t even tell you.”
“It’s so good to meet you,” Frost responded with a smile, before the doors opened and the man disappeared into a crowd.
These exchanges were becoming familiar to Frost, but he was still not used to their formality. “It’s crazy, ’cause I’m not a congressman yet,” he said, as we walked to his office. “I’ve got that weird congressman-elect title.” Since the midterm election, Frost had barely had the time to process his new life. During his freshman orientation, in the fall, he got to meet his incoming class of House members. Shortly after, he picked an office and figured out where in Washington he would live. He then flew to Georgia to campaign for Raphael Warnock, and later returned to Orlando to find an office there, but that wasn’t for long. On New Year’s Eve, Frost jumped on a plane headed to Washington alongside his girlfriend. Like the rest of his colleagues, he was still learning the Hill’s labyrinthine ways. When he tried to get on the wrong elevator at the Longworth, his office building, a friendly incumbent helped him. “Max, it’s a different one!” Representative Ilhan Omar, whom he had met earlier, said.
Moments later, Frost arrived in his office and found some of his closest high-school friends camped out around his desk. They had come from Florida, Arizona, and New York to watch him be sworn in. The mood in the room was exuberant. But Frost had come to explain that neither he nor any of his fellow-members would take office until a Speaker was elected. “Hopefully, I think it’ll happen today,” Frost said, standing by the door. “Feel free to go if you want to! Feel free to stay, too! But it’s going to be a few hours.” He then excused himself—the third round of voting was about to begin, and he needed to rush back to the House chamber.
“Have fun!” one of his friends said.
“Don’t say McCarthy!” another one shouted, drawing a burst of laughter. “Actually, maybe say it, so this can be over!”
When the idea of running for office was first brought up to Frost, his initial reaction was “Hell no.” It was the summer of 2021, Frost was the national organizing director of March for Our Lives, and he was committed to fostering a “cultural conversation” about gun violence in the country. That entailed keeping the movement that grew out of the Parkland shooting alive, through acts of protest, musical performances, and gatherings where young Americans could find common purpose and advocate for gun-control legislation. People involved in Orlando political activism told Frost that the movement could use someone like him in Congress. He didn’t say it at the time, but “they planted a seed” in his mind. Frost mulled over the idea with his closest confidants—his parents and mentors, but also his girlfriend and the director of his jazz band—before speaking with dozens of community leaders. “You should look at your beginnings,” one of them told him—a piece of advice that Frost took to heart.
??At birth, in 1997, Frost was adopted by a couple living in Orlando. His adoptive father, Patrick, a musician born in Kansas, had met his adoptive mother, Maritza, who is Cuban, at the department store where they worked as college students. Maritza had been a Florida resident since the sixties, when she, her parents, and her sister fled Fidel Castro’s regime and were airlifted from the island, along with hundreds of thousands of Cubans, as part of the “freedom flights,” a major U.S. refugee program. The family moved to Meadow Woods, a suburb of Orlando, where Frost and his sister were raised. During the early years of his life, Frost spoke mostly Spanish at home, and was always in the company of his Cuban grandmother, Yeya. She travelled from Miami to look after him while his mother, a special-education teacher, was at work. “Yeya was one of my parents,” Frost said fondly.
??From Yeya, he learned the limits of the immigrant experience. When his grandmother first arrived in Florida, she held multiple jobs at a time, often in factories or housecleaning, each of which paid about a dollar an hour. “There were no protections,” Frost said, adding that Yeya carried physical scars until old age. “She had to settle for a different version of the American Dream that was more attainable to her.” During his teen-age years, Frost visited his grandmother often in Hialeah, Florida, where she lived in public housing. He got to meet Fabio, an elderly suitor, who brought her flowers and guava pastries, to little avail. Together, they binge-watched “El Show de Fernando Hidalgo,” starring a popular Cuban host and his crew of barely dressed dancers. “I would take off my shirt and pretend I was one of them,” Frost said. “She would die of laughter.” At night, he would kneel by Yeya’s bed and join her in prayer. “I want to say a prayer for Fabio,” Frost would quip, in Spanish, prompting the final laugh of the day.
Frost’s closeness with Yeya nurtured his sense of identity. “Up until that point, I would say I was Cuban,” he said. But he had not yet fully come to terms with it: “When someone would say I was Black, I would be, like, ‘No, no, no, I’m brown.’ I had a ton of anti-Blackness ingrained in me.” With time, Frost tried to rid himself of the anti-Black prejudices he had absorbed from Latino and American culture. He started hanging out with other Black kids in Orlando, who challenged his understanding of self. “When I had that independence to go where I wanted to go, I was able to be in new spaces,” he said. “And a lot of those spaces were concerts and music, to be honest.” From his musician father, who bought Frost his first set of drums when he was seven, he had learned that music could be both freeing and revelatory. In his teens, he started a jazz band.
On a Friday in 2012, while Frost was eating out with his band members before a show, news reports appeared on nearby television screens. “We’re all talking and then the whole restaurant falls silent,” he recalled. Images of six- and seven-year-olds in tears being frantically escorted out of an elementary school unnerved and horrified Frost. That day, a gunman had opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Connecticut, killing twenty-six children and educators. “I had never seen something like that before,” Frost said. At the concert, he went on, “I remember I wasn’t playing right, because I was looking around the exits. I was just really scared.” Frost later found people online who were planning to attend a vigil in Washington for the Sandy Hook families and lobby Congress. He decided to join them.
On Capitol Hill, Frost shadowed some of the families as they met with senators and members of the House. After the vigil, the group convened around the pool of a hotel, where they dangled their feet in the water as they talked. It was there that Frost met Matthew Soto, the younger brother of Victoria, one of the teachers who was murdered at Sandy Hook. Seeing a teen-ager “with the demeanor of a sixty-year-old changed my life forever,” Frost said. He was determined to fight for “a world where no one would have to feel the way I saw Matthew feel.” The experience set his career as a political operative in motion. Frost worked on the Hillary Clinton campaign, in 2015, and was a staffer for the Bernie Sanders campaign, four years later. He also got involved with the A.C.L.U. and joined March for Our Lives, where, as his successor, Gaby Salazar, put it, he became known for “leading with love, and trying to center those that are the most vulnerable.”
Frost’s origin story required him to answer a question he had ignored for years. “I was adopted out of a pretty bad situation at birth,” he told me. “I never cared to know more about it.” People around Frost suggested that he find out who his biological mother was, not only for his own sake, but to insure that none of his detractors did so first. When he approached his adoptive parents about it, Maritza told him that his birth mother was a friend of a friend. They had been struggling to have children, and his birth mother hadn’t been in a position to raise one. Curious to learn more, Frost looked up her profile on Facebook and marvelled at the photographs of his biological mother. “I had never seen anyone who looks like me,” recalled Frost, whose adoptive parents are fair-skinned. As he scrolled through her Facebook page, he froze. Frost and his biological mother had a friend in common: his barber of ten years, Chris Dean.
Frost texted Dean one of the pictures: “Hey, do you know this person?” Within minutes, Dean called him to ask how he knew her. “Dude, that’s my biological mother,” Frost said. There was a moment of silence. “I used to live with your mom,” Dean responded. In the nineties, she and Dean had shared a flat with another man. “Where we was living was a little piece of apartment, we probably had one couch, we were trying to figure out food from day to day,” Dean later told me. People around them coped with stress through alcohol and drug use, he recalled. Dean had fallen out of touch with Frost’s biological mother, but they were still friends on social media. Frost asked him to make the introduction. “Max is ready to reach out to you,” Dean wrote.
During their first phone conversation, which lasted for about an hour, Frost’s biological mother told him that he was one of eight siblings. She and his biological father, who is Haitian, had been separated for years. “He could be gone,” Frost recalled her saying. She had been “at the most vulnerable point in her life” when she had him, as Frost would later put it in his first campaign ad. “The system had demonized and forgotten about her.” He pledged to voters to do the exact opposite: place their safety and well-being first, in Orlando, an area facing a spate of violence, along with rising evictions, foreclosures, and homelessness, particularly among the youth. Frost enthusiastically adopted a progressive stance on issues ranging from Medicare for All to the Green New Deal. He vowed to work toward ending gun violence and faithfully represent other Gen Z-ers, or, as he saw it, the country’s “mass-shooting generation.”
With a handful of volunteers, Frost launched his campaign from an Airbnb, where he was living temporarily after being priced out of his previous rental apartment. When the Airbnb, too, became unaffordable, they moved to a common area in the building where his campaign manager lived. “At least we had a pool table,” his manager, Kevin Lata, recalled. To get by, Frost worked as an Uber driver at night, in a yellow Kia Soul, a gig that helped pay the bills. The main challenge Frost faced at the time, Meghan McAnespie, a member of the data firm Grassroots Analytics, recalled, was: did he have the money to win? As McAnespie, who advised Frost, put it, his campaign was caught in a chicken-and-egg problem, where “money begets money and endorsements, which beget even more money.”
Over time, donations began trickling in, and so did endorsements, both from local officials and from notable national figures, such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. When the primaries arrived, Frost emerged from a field of ten Democratic candidates, among them a state senator and two former members of Congress. By Election Day, he had raised more than two million dollars, mostly from voters who contributed an average of thirty-one dollars to his campaign. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto-financier, donatedtwenty-nine hundred dollars directly to Frost’s campaign, and a super pac he supported spent nearly a million dollars in Frost’s favor. After Bankman-Fried was indicted, Frost gave the twenty-nine hundred dollars to charity. “I never solicited their support,” Frost said at the time. “I don’t want or need support from those scamming working folks, and I’m going to fight to get dark money out of politics.”
In Frost, young Floridians saw a candidate they could relate to, his friend Niyah Lowell said. “No disrespect to any of the other members,” Lowell added, “but they’re a little far removed, generationally and tax-bracket-wise. Now we have someone who is like us, knows exactly what we’re going through, in power.”
Last Tuesday night, after the third round of voting for Speaker, Frost returned to his office, which was largely empty. A heap of business cards, from trade unions, advocacy groups, and lobbyists, who had stopped by to meet with him that day, sat on the front desk. There was a suitcase filled with belongings left to unpack, and a smattering of books, mostly about Orlando, adorning some otherwise bare shelves near the entrance. A single piece of art hung next to Frost’s new desk. It was a large canvas, which took up an entire wall, with two portraits side by side: one of Frost, and the other of Joaquin Oliver, a seventeen-year-old student who was killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, in Parkland, nearly five years ago.
The piece was a gift from Oliver’s father, Manuel, who had painted it during Frost’s campaign. Across its center were the words “TIME TO SAVE LIVES! SO, GET ON BOARD OR GET OUT OF OUR WAY!” Frost saw it as his North Star in Washington—an emblem of what his presence there stood for. To Manuel, who has been at the forefront of the anti-gun-violence movement since his son’s death, it had a personal meaning. “It’s an image meant to last,” Manuel told me. “A daily, living reminder from Joaquin to Maxwell, his people, and any of the members who set foot in that office.”
How Frost can live up to this, or any of his generation’s expectations, is the main question surrounding his tenure. His first days in Congress laid bare the institution’s many faults. Through fifteen rounds of votes—the longest since the mid-eighteen-hundreds—the House was unable to perform the basic task of choosing a Speaker. Round after round, while Republicans engaged in and sabotaged negotiations, Democrats watched from the sidelines. Late Friday night, as the scene devolved into quarrels, and even one sudden lunge, Frost found himself asking other lawmakers if this was the “craziest thing” they had witnessed in Congress. The answer was no—the January 6th insurrection was.
After two o’clock in the morning, Frost walked out of the House chamber, finally sworn in, thinking his first week in Congress would be a “microcosm of the next two years.” But his work as an organizer had taught him that progress is a function of time. “I’ve been thinking a lot about: What are the things we can get done in a bipartisan way? How can we snip at the edges? How do we uphold legislation that maybe won’t pass this year, but really sets the tone for the future?” he later told me. There were similarities between his present and past work. At the core, it was about swaying people’s opinions and gaining their support, be it for a cause or a bill. But none of that, Frost expected, would happen overnight. “If you’re beginning and ending in 2023 and 2024, you’re probably going to be very discouraged,” he said. “I think about things more than the two-year or four-year term. When you think about things that way, it gives you a lot more hope, because you get a really holistic picture of the movement—the movement of progressive legislation.” ?
Source: New Yorker