The 24-Year-Old Aiming to Join Congress and Redefine What “Politics” Means
As a kid, Maxwell Alejandro Frost was inspired by the community organizer-turned-President. Now, he's taking his own leap from organizer to politician – on his own terms.
Maxwell Alejandro Frost, a 24-year-old from Orlando, is running for Congress. Frost joins a wide pool of candidates vying to fill Florida’s 10th Congressional District seat, currently held by Democratic Rep. Val Demings, who is running to replace Marco Rubio in the Senate in 2022.
If elected, the 24-year-old would become one of the first members of Generation Z in Congress. But to Frost, the stakes are higher than generational representation, or making history. With a background working for the ACLU, organizing for gun safety as National Organizing Director for March For Our Lives, and leading Black Lives Matter protests, the implications of Frost’s hypothetical victory would signal validation for a distinct style of politics that demands more out of public officials than attending meetings and placating donors. Frost’s vision instead resembles politics exhibited by Congresswoman Cori Bush sleeping on the steps of the Capitol to advocate for renters facing eviction, or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez skipping the glitz and glam of Joe Biden’s inauguration to rally alongside striking food and manufacturing workers. Frost is looking to join the rising tide of elected officials redefining what it means to be a politician in America.
Frost was born in Orlando. The circumstances surrounding his birth, sadly, were mired with struggle. The youngest of eight biological siblings scattered across the country, Frost was born to a woman who, at the time, was in a troublesome relationship and felt forced to hide her pregnancy. She couldn’t afford adequate healthcare, and thus seldom received routine check-ups while pregnant with Frost. Enmeshed in such trying circumstances, his biological mother turned to drugs. “I actually was literally shaking as a child for about three weeks right after I was born,” Frost tells me. It turns out he was having withdrawals from crack cocaine.
“Not to use this term as a joke, but I was literally a crack baby when I was born,” Frost says. “I think a lot of folks would expect that I would be angry. I wasn’t really angry – I was sad and I felt for my biological mother.”
Frost has carried this moment with him since – not as a chip on his shoulder, but as a grounding force reminding him why he cares about politics at all. Years ago, at a lecture featuring Dr. Cornel West, this force was clarified further, when West told the audience that “we need to see the world through the eyes of the most vulnerable people.” Frost says this idea is the core ethos of his campaign. Moreover, he argues by centering people who need the most help, everyone stands to benefit.
This sort-of universalist, rather than means-tested, way of carrying out governance seems a natural product of Frost’s vision for what social relations in this country could be. “We live in this country where the idea of individualism has been weaponized by the Right to mean when ‘I take care of me, I can’t take care of you,’ and that’s not the way a society works,” Frost says. “I want to ensure that we’re loving each other, we’re taking care of us, and that’s really what the campaign is about.”
Frost’s adopted parents each have imbued parts of themselves within him. His mother, who emigrated from Cuba in her teenage years, is a special education teacher, supporting and teaching students with disabilities. Frost is happy and proud for his mother, but is reminded how her story is one conventionally and vainly dubbed a “badge of honor” in America. “We hear the story all the time – ‘my family came here with nothing, had to work a bunch of jobs,’” he says. “And it is a testament to the strength and resolve of immigrants, but it’s also sad as well. People shouldn’t have to go through that to have a good life.”
Meanwhile, Frost’s father is a working musician. Originally born in Kansas, his father picked up a knack for the steel drums in Bermuda, where his own father’s Air Force career took them. Frost received a drum set from his father when he was in the second grade, and he’s felt attached ever sense. He even felt that he’d grow up to become a drummer. Until he really got acquainted with politics.
Frost’s first formal foray with politics was during Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. “Obama was a big deal for me. Seeing someone who looked like me speak the way he spoke was a big deal,” he says. Frost admired, as many had, Obama’s unique oratory abilities. Frost even began participating in speech competition after hearing Obama. “I wanted to make people feel the way he made me feel,” he says.
Soon, Frost would officially join the effort to re-elect Obama as an intern. “It’s still on my Facebook, it’s a little embarrassing, but I keep it there because it keeps me grounded,” Frost quips, implying how his politics have developed since being a “generic liberal.” Regardless, he remembers how great he felt on election night, to feel a part of something bigger than himself. And that feeling fueled his desire to channel energy more directly into service. Just barely a month later, tragedy would inform Frost where he needed to throw himself.
December 14, 2012: One of the deadliest mass shootings in American history, at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. Frost had a jazz band concert that day. Per tradition, he and his bandmates were at a restaurant beforehand, eating junk food and gabbing, before seeing the tragic news on the TV at the restaurant. Frost was shaken, unable to play well at the concert, restlessly lying awake in bed after the concert. That week, he begged his parents to allow him to travel to Washington D.C. Frost pooled enough money together from various neighborhood chores to make the journey and join the lobbying effort in the nation’s capital. He recalls one moment in the basement of a hotel during the trip, hearing Matthew Soto talk about his sister, first-grade teacher Victoria Soto, who was killed while trying to protect her students from the shooter. “It was that night I literally went right to my room and said ‘I want to fight for a future where no one has to feel like Matt.’”
After high school, Frost began working on more campaigns, including Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, before working for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He was attending college online so he could continue working in the field. In 2018, he worked for the ACLU of Florida – his first time in the sphere not working for a specific candidate – before joining March For Our Lives.
Frost’s evolution from “generic liberal” to unabashedly running a campaign with policy planks including Medicare-for-All, the Green New Deal, legalizing recreational marijuana, and decriminalizing sex work is one that came through experience. “There’s a few moments in my life that radicalized me,” Frost starts. “I know that word can be taboo sometimes, but it’s important. I’d say radicalization is just that moment when you realized how screwed up the world really is.”
Frost accredits some of this process to Bernie Sanders for bringing issues like wealth inequality to the popular consciousness – issues that, to Frost, the Democratic party simply wasn’t speaking to. He also reflects on time spent with the ACLU advocating for Amendment Four, an eventually-successful effort to restore voting rights to previous felons. “I was raised middle class in a suburban neighborhood; I was never around folks who were previously incarcerated. Getting to hear about their lives, how the system pushed and demonized them – kind of exactly what it did to my biological mother – I started putting together the pieces,” Frost says. “That’s when I started diving in to literature that teaches about the most vulnerable people, systems of government that help champion the most vulnerable people. I started thinking about this different America that existed that no one had ever taught me about.”
This evolutionary process apexed within the past few years, as he became more and more immersed in organizing spaces. Much of last summer, Frost played an active role organizing local protests amid the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement, in conjunction with his daily work for March For Our Lives. Frost would work 9:00-5:00 with the latter, before grabbing his book bag packed with snacks, goggles, and a first-aid kit, heading downtown to protest from around 5:30 to sometimes as late as 2:00 A.M. “That’s another thing that really radicalized me: the treatment of police officers towards me, and being arrested, maced, tear gassed,” he says.
One instance of brutality Frost faced stands out. He and fellow organizers were protesting a $15 million increase to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, arguing that the money should be dedicated towards initiatives like community violence intervention. Frost recalls one night when they had just finished protesting and were walking away towards their vehicles when, all of a sudden, officers began tackling and arresting people. Amid the chaos, Frost felt obligated to tell the officers that the protesters were all leaving anyways and nobody needed to be arrested. “I walk up to one, start saying ‘hey we’re done,’ and before I could finish the sentence, my face was on the pavement, I was thrown into a paddy wagon, and brought to jail,” he says.
At the jail, officers asked what he was arrested for. Frost replied with “nonviolent protest.” Frost says the officers were set off and began screaming expletives at him, saying things like “Shut the fuck up, say why you’re really here – disorderly conduct,” before slamming him against a glass door, the tightened handcuffs pressed so tightly against his wrists that he started bleeding. Soon, Frost says, the officers put him in a small panoptic room with narrow chairs and blaring lights, and clear glass windows all around. Two other protesters were thrown in as well, with no masks to protect any of them amid the spread of COVID.
As the trio sat in the room, late in the night, they saw the officers walking a large, muscular Black man by his neck through the halls. The man was yelling at the officers to let go of him. The officers opened the door to the small room holding Frost and the other two protestors. One of the officers who was previously yelling at Frost caught his eye and grinned. Frost saw this as the officers trying to scare the young protestors, forcing them to share a small enclosed space with someone being racistly presented as scary, or threatening. “They let go of him and close the door,” Frost says, his voice catching. “And he just walks to a corner of the cell, gets literally in a fetal position and just starts crying. That was a moment in my life I’ll remember forever, because I was scared, and it was literally like a visual representation of when the system lets go of these people, they can feel and they can be human.”
Notably, this eventual budget increase for the Sheriff’s office that Frost and others were protesting was to come following a plainclothes officer shooting Salaythis Melvin, an innocent 22-year-old Black man, in the back. After he was shot, the officers crowded around Melvin for over a minute, screaming expletives at him, telling him to keep his hands out as he lay writhing on the ground, handcuffing him before finally administering first aid. Melvin later died in the hospital. James Montiel, the plainclothes agent who shot Melvin and whose body camera was inactive at the time, has since returned back to work for the Sheriff’s office.
And so this astonishingly contradictory series – from joining the initial protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd while also dedicating eight hours a day advocating for people to be able to exist in society without fear of being shot, to then being violently arrested and threatened by a force supposedly tasked to “serve and protect,” to thereafter watching that same force receive $15 million after shooting and killing an innocent man – illustrates why Frost’s politics have evolved to be hyper-focused on the very structures of power that have impelled him to be so active in the first place.
As much as his own story alone may bolster his case for running, Frost is particularly focused on centering the campaign around issues. “We won Amendment Four in the state, we won Amendment Two – the minimum wage for $15 an hour – in this state with over sixty percent of the vote. That means there’s a lot of Trump people who voted yes on those things,” Frost says. He sees this as a case study of how progressive policies can win, despite progressive politicians themselves falling short in the past. Frost explains that his campaign is also focusing on the issues – and proposed solutions – so the community can hold him accountable to the challenges he promises to pursue.
Parallels to supposed insurgency candidacies, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ or Jamaal Bowman’s, are sure to come. One implicit notion embedded within this insurgency narrative is the idea that young, or new, or more progressive candidates like Frost are somehow acting as outside agitators, and are thus to be treated with a different level of seriousness or validity as a candidate. Frost has already been questioned in this way. “Am I an outside agitator? I mean, no, and I don’t think they [other recent progressive challengers] are either. They were born in the district they were running for. What’s the problem with challenging power that hasn’t done much for us?” Frost also mentions that this specific race is indeed an open seat – he isn’t challenging an incumbent. He concedes he may be perceived as an underdog, but the excitement he has seen informs him he does indeed have a shot – and at the very least, deserves to be taken as seriously as anyone else in the primary.
Like some of his progressive contemporaries, Frost is running to re-define politics in America, and what it means to serve the public. He doesn’t believe people should feel “lucky” to have genuine representation. “When we say the word ‘politician,’ people should beam with happiness, and be so excited about the fact that one of their own is out there fighting the fight with them, alongside of them,” he says. Instead, Frost says, American politics is structured such that not only do people generally have negative connotations with those elected to represent them, but the levers of power are seldom taken as mechanisms actually meant to constantly be serving people. “The atmosphere of politics does not celebrate you deserving shit,” he stresses. “It is meant for you to feel like you would be lucky to get something, because the process to get there is so hard that, if we get it, we’re lucky right?”
Frost admits that if he wins, he of course may not be able to secure everything on his platform. But he says he can at least promise what he will fight for, and how he will fight for it; he hopes to empower people to demand more from their government than what they have been given. “I don’t believe government can solve every single problem,” he says. “But I do believe that government should be solving as many problems as it can. Government needs to pave the way for folks to live the life they deserve to live,” he concludes.
Maxwell Alejandro Frost could very well be among the first Gen Z members of Congress. But he has more on his mind than representation for representation’s sake. For him, this race is about coalition building – of drawing people young and old into a political project that seeks to take on a common struggle. “Do I believe in identity politics? Hell yes I do. Do I believe in the brand of identity politics that a lot of neoliberal folks like to celebrate? Hell no,” Frost declares. “I just believe we have to really look at every part of people, and see how the world sees them, and that’s how we should be crafting legislation,” he says.
Frost agrees that the prospect of him becoming among the first Gen Z members of Congress is exciting, and hopes it encourages others his age to make the leap as well – to perhaps even bring a slate of Gen Z candidates into the next Congress. However, to him, the urgency of this prospect is more about how advocacy can unify different groups of people together. “We need to do work in coalition with our elders and folks who are going through different things,” Frost says. “We need young folks in government to help advocate for young people because they understand what they’re going through – and that it’s not because we live beyond our means, it’s because we’ve been denied the means to live.”
At minimum, Frost is running a campaign that may generate lots of excitement – both locally among activists and engaged community members, and nationally, among voters across the country looking for more ways to challenge entrenched power structures. But Frost’s campaign could also contribute to a burgeoning style of leftist politics that emphasizes movement building, rather than compromising ideals in attempts to superficially placate opposition voters.
“For me, it comes down to this, man,” Frost starts. “Movements that are primarily motivated by anger are short. We’re not meant to be mad for long periods of time. Hating and being angry is something that takes a lot of energy from us,” he continues. But Frost is by no means discounting the emotion behind much of the issues his campaign is confronting. “We should have an underlying righteous anger about the fact that we don't live in the world we deserve to live in, that we deserve to live in a better world,” he continues. “But then when we learn that that world is possible, we can shift that righteous anger into a radical love – a love of people who are suffering, a love of myself, love of my family, and a love of my community. That has to be the guiding star.”
Frost’s focus on those suffering most is joined by a complementing focus on broader systems of oppression, rather than individuals. He believes doing both in tandem lays the foundation for a “long-lasting movement open to everyone.” As such, Frost argues that a larger progressive coalition can be grown in Florida, but that it must be done with care. “We don't want folks to feel demonized. And if we're constantly only talking about the systems of oppression, if we're not abundantly clear, folks might categorize themselves as the oppressor,” he says. “And lot of times folks are, right – we've all caused harm to people. But I want people to think about the folks being affected. And I want that to drive them to action,” he finishes.
There’s exactly one year between now and the primary election, and Frost already faces a formidable array of Democratic opponents. The pool includes State Senator Randolph Bracy, who served in the state House from 2012 to 2016, and whose parents are the founders of Orlando’s New Covenant Baptist Church; civil rights lawyer and Navy veteran Natalie Jackson, who has worked on massive civil rights cases including the killing of Trayvon Martin; and Aramis Ayala, who was Florida’s first Black State Attorney.
Frost may appear young and contrasting against this politically-seasoned pool. But he comes with a distinct theory of change, a probable base of local and national activist support, and a proven record of tenacious dedication to the causes he believes in. Time will tell whether Frost can actually generate enough enthusiasm and support to rise above the pack.
But, if there is anyone who could be the next underdog to exhibit the political strength of being a community organizer vying for change, unity, and a better politics – and to do it on their own terms – it might just be Maxwell Alejandro Frost.
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