Sign In to Your Account
Subscribers have complete access to the archive.
Sign In Not a Subscriber?Join NowSHORTLY AFTER 7 P.M. on January 3, down a cobblestone alley in the splashy Washington, DC, waterfront known as The Wharf, a steady pulse emanated from Union Stage. Inside was a raucous scene: strobing lights, high-top tables covered with empties, the stagnant smell of beer-soaked floors. A backlit white sign near the entrance read “Tonight: Swearing In Concert of Maxwell Alejandro Frost.” Inside, an eclectic crowd—half dressed like they’d just left meetings on Capitol Hill, the other half like ’90s teens—filled the dance floor. “I am too old for this shit,” one attendee near the bar quipped with a laugh as music thumped in the background.
Most people there were too old for this shit—and that is, in a sense, what the party was about. Elected when he was 25 years old, Frost is the first Gen Z member to win a seat in Congress. His arrival on Capitol Hill comes at a critical inflection point for House Democrats. For the first time in two decades, Nancy Pelosi, who is in her 80s, is no longer the Democratic leader—New York representative Hakeem Jeffries, a 52-year-old Gen X’er, is. And despite his complicated record on progressive issues, Jeffries is ushering in a new generation of Democratic lawmakers, Frost among them. “It’s not like Gen Z has been waiting to get into Congress. We just got old enough,” Frost told Vanity Fair. “But the thing is that we just got old enough and we are already here. And I think that’s really the story: Gen Z isn’t waiting.”
At that moment, though, Frost was waiting. There was no swearing in before his “Swearing In Concert.” Kevin McCarthy was still in the throes of negotiating enough votes to win the House speakership, so the 118th Congress was on hold, and all the members-elect were in political limbo. But the party went on. In a crisp, white wide-collar shirt with subtle polka dots and a navy suit, Frost made the rounds with ease. He is, simply put, cool—“probably is the coolest member ever elected to Congress,” per Congressman Ruben Gallego of Arizona. A drummer, Frost cofounded an Orlando music festival before he ran for Congress. That night, he toggled seamlessly between the roles of a selfie-snapping politician and an emcee for the Brooklyn-based band Phony Ppl.
“We just got old enough and we are already here. And I think that’s really the story: Gen Z isn’t waiting.”
At 26 years old, the Florida representative is fighting hard not to be put in a box. “I’m learning from the past, and I think it’s easy for people to craft a narrative around you that can have other implications. So for instance, the biggest one we hear about is like the Squad this and Squad that,” Frost said, a reference to representatives Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar. “Then you might think that, oh, someone like AOC only speaks with those four people or whatever. But that’s not true.” Frost’s welcome to Washington has been distinctly different from that of Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad. AOC was sworn into office in 2019, having participated in a sit-in in Pelosi’s office with climate activists; some of her colleagues anonymously went to the press to paint her outspoken activism and online tactics as divisive and self-promotional. Four years later, the number two and number three House Democrats are partying in celebration of Frost’s victory.
Among those in attendance: two Cabinet secretaries, Marcia Fudge and Deb Haaland; media figures Joy Reid and Symone Sanders-Townsend; Gallego and fellow representatives Steven Horsford, Pramila Jayapal, Raul Ruiz, David Cicilline, Eric Swalwell, Jonathan Jackson, Jan Schakowsky, Darren Soto, and Sheila Jackson Lee; and—notably—new House minority whip Katherine Clark and House Democratic Caucus chair Pete Aguilar, security detail and all. Even the Reverend Jesse Jackson made a brief appearance.
In some ways, Frost’s reception on Capitol Hill is notable not because of his age—former Republican member Madison Cawthorn, if not Gen Z, was also 25 when he took office—but in spite of it. His relationships with other politicians and political players seem more in line with a multiterm established leader than a freshman. “Brother Maxwell Frost is awesome, double awesome with some whipped cream on top,” Jackson Lee declared onstage. (Just minutes earlier she was dancing with Frost. “She’s got moves,” he said of the 73-year-old Texas lawmaker.) “I want to be part of the Maxwell Frost movement.”
“I’m really old, and I love it when Max gets up at 25 and says, ‘I’ve been an organizer for most of my life,’ ” Schakowsky said onstage. “Max is the beginning, I think, of a new progressive era in this country. He’s going to lead the way for many years.”
But first he needed to get sworn in. As the party wound down around 10 p.m., Frost took the mic one final time. “If you live in DC, now you know how our parties are. Come to the next one. This one is over.”
DIGGING INTO A plate of scrambled eggs, toast, and hash browns at Pete’s Diner on Capitol Hill, Frost exuded weariness. Three days into what was supposed to be the 118th Congress, and all he had done was repeat Hakeem Jeffries’s name in Speaker votes. “I mean, I love Hakeem Jeffries,” Frost said. “It’s just a wild experience. [I’m] excited for once we get past all this bullshit and we’re like, actually legislating.” Later, he acknowledged the chaos over the Speaker vote was just a window into the next two years under Republican control. He’ll likely be spending more time undercutting GOP messaging bills and political investigations than legislating.
The dysfunction, in a way, flattened his learning curve. After all, none of his colleagues have suffered through such a drawn-out Speaker fight. “I’m pretty lost right now, but everyone is, right?” He is adjusting. Self-described as “not a morning person,” every night he transfers his green congressional pin to the suit he plans to wear the next day. He is still not used to being recognized by strangers, though it happens. As he walked through the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, a DC native wished Frost luck finding an apartment, referencing his tweet about struggling to sign a lease in DC because his “credit was really bad.” He said he accumulated debt while campaigning. For now, he is staying with a friend but looking for a permanent place in Navy Yard, so he can walk or scooter to work.
Frost is already pushing back on the idea that he represents his entire generation. “I’m the first of this generation in this institution, which is important,” he said. “The perspective needs to be there, but everyone in Gen Z is the representative of the generation.” Just as generations before have touchstones of identity—the moon landing, Watergate, the assassination of JFK, the space shuttle Challenger disaster, 9/11—a handful of events played an outsize role in shaping Frost’s worldview. He remembers watching the Occupy Wall Street protests as a student; in Barack Obama, he saw a president who looked like him; when Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in a Florida suburb roughly 30 minutes north of his, Frost stopped running around his neighborhood playing with Nerf guns; when a gunman shot and killed 26 people—20 of whom were children six or seven years old—at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, he threw himself into activism.
“Getting sworn in on my fourth day here after a fight almost breaks out on the House floor is not the best first impression.”
He reached out to a Sandy Hook teacher over Facebook asking how to get involved and went to Washington, DC, by himself at 15 years old to attend a vigil. Frost recalled sitting around a hotel pool listening to Matthew Soto talk about his sister, Victoria, one of the Sandy Hook victims. “It just really hit me.… And that’s really where I dedicated my life.”
Frost dropped out of Valencia College before his senior year to focus on organizing full time. (He has said he plans to go back to school at some point.) He volunteered for Obama’s reelection campaign and on the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders campaigns. He did stints at MoveOn and the American Civil Liberties Union. He was arrested during the Black Lives Matter protests. Running for Congress wasn’t part of Frost’s plan. When other activists first suggested he run for Florida’s 10th Congressional District seat after Democrat Val Demings announced plans to seek higher office, his response was, “Hell no.” At the time, Frost was content in his role as the national organizing director for March for Our Lives. But, as he put it, “they really planted that seed.”
Ultimately, it was a conversation Frost had with his birth mother that compelled him to run (Frost was adopted in 1997 by a mother who is a Cuban refugee and a special education teacher and a father who is a Kansas-born musician). “There’s times in life where there is a call to action. And you make a decision,” he said. “But it’s everything before that that makes the environment in your life where you feel comfortable enough to make the commitment, where it hits you in the first place.” Frost didn’t just want to run for office as an exercise in progressivism. “I wasn’t trying to just shift the conversation. I wanted to actually win,” he told me. After winning a competitive primary, Frost secured the general election with 59 percent of the vote on a platform of abortion rights, Medicare for All, and ending gun violence.
FROST’S CONGRESSIONAL OFFICE, 1224 Longworth, is sparsely decorated. Above a black leather couch hangs a large painting by Manuel Oliver—whose son Joaquin was among the victims of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—a transplant from Frost’s campaign office. “Time to save lives! So get on board or get out of our way!” it reads. The books strewn across a wooden coffee table in the center of the room suggest the young congressman is doing his homework: Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Leadership in Turbulent Times and Cornel West’s Democracy Matters rest between issues of the Unquiet zine, copies of Freedom Papers, and a visual history of the Back to the Future movie franchise. His staff, a mix of people who have known him for years from his activist and organizing roots and a handful of Hill veterans, are milling around, also waiting.
At 1:40 a.m. on January 7, Frost was sworn in. When he took the oath of office, most of his friends and family had already returned home. In a phone call on Sunday, after the dust had settled, Frost reflected that in the moment, “it was hard to take it all in” in the wake of the chaotic, protracted Speaker battle.
“Getting sworn in on my fourth day here after a fight almost breaks out on the House floor is not the best first impression,” he said, in reference to a dustup between Republicans Matt Gaetz and Mike Rogers, the latter of whom had to be restrained by another lawmaker as tensions peaked in the final hours of McCarthy’s battle for the speakership.
“I’m just anxious and ready to get to work,” Frost said.
