When we last visited 25-year-old Maxwell Alejandro Frost in September he was campaigning to become the first Gen Z member of the US Congress, and driving Uber shifts to make ends meet in the meantime. In early November he defeated his Republican rival, Calvin Wimbish, by a considerable margin, winning 59% of the vote in Florida’s 10th congressional district, which includes Orlando and many of its surrounding theme parks.
Frost’s life has only become messier since. Chiefly, he has yet to sort out his living accommodation in Washington DC, and must decide whether to keep paying rent for the Orlando home he shares with two others, as well as working out how to foot these bills until his $174,000 (£142,000) federal salary kicks in. He says: “I’ll probably crash on someone’s couch in DC for the first month at least.”
Even finding potential roommates among his fellow representatives brings unforeseen challenges for the congressman-elect, who has been back and forth for freshman orientations. “A lot of people are looking to get their roommates before 3 January,” says Frost. “I just can’t operate on that timeline. Even after I start getting paid it’s not like I’m flush in one day. I have a lot of debt.” Earlier this month he vented on Twitter about being turned down for a DC apartment due to bad credit: “This ain’t meant for people who don’t already have the money,” he wrote.
As full-circle a moment as it was for Frost, who made his first big trip to DC with his high-school band to play in Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration parade, election night was bittersweet due to the Democrats losing control of the House of Representatives – and losing races across Florida.
“I mean, we had a lot, a lot of losses,” Frost says. “I actually had a joint watch party with [fellow Florida congress member] Carlos Guillermo Smith, a progressive champion for working-class people, for the LGBTQ+ community – a good friend of mine and someone I really look up to. He lost re-election. It was really, really hard.”
In his victory speech to supporters, Frost stressed the importance of forging ahead anyway, acknowledging his voters’ yearning for “bold champions” to enact “bold transformational change”. He even made a reference to Mamie Till – the mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black teenager tortured and murdered by white supremacists in 1955, which ignited the civil rights movement. With fewer in his number, Frost feels a responsibility to fight even harder.
Frost campaigned on gun control, the issue that first drove his activism, crisscrossing the country with survivors of the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting before his congressional run. The mass shootings continue (there were seven in the seven days after his election), so he is eager to roll up his sleeves and get to work, but cautions that he cannot solve this seemingly intractable scourge alone. “I’ve gotten messages that are like: ‘You’re our saviour,’” he says. “But, no. There’s not one politician who’s going to save us. We shouldn’t think that way. This is a movement. I’m a small piece of a very big puzzle.”
Still, the fact that Frost – an Afro-Cuban child of adoption – is now a piece of the puzzle at all would once have been unimaginable to his 97-year-old maternal grandmother, a Cuban émigré. It pains him that she died a month before his election victory; Frost had been so diligent about staying away to keep her safe from Covid-19. “She came here in the late 1960s with no money, no nothing,” he says. “She worked three factory jobs making, like, a buck an hour, no union protecting her, nobody looking out for her. She was grinding so my mom and my aunt could have a better life.
“It’s something I think about a lot, all the work she put in. It’s really been pushing my beliefs, and it makes me even more excited for the future.”
