The Associated Press called the race in Florida’s 10th Congressional District on Tuesday evening, making Maxwell Frost the first member of Generation Z to hold a seat in the U.S. Congress.
The news: Frost was expected to win in the Orlando-based district, which is largely Democrat, according to NPR.
- He led his Republican opponent, Calvin Wimbish, by over 36,000 votes, with 58.8% of the vote, according to The New York Times.
- On average, Frost, at just 25 years old, is younger than half of the average age of current House members, which is 58 years old, according to Axios.
- In August, he won the 10-candidate primary for the Democratic nomination for the seat, per Ballotpedia.
About Frost: Born in 1997, Frost sits at the older end of Gen Z, a generation that runs until around 2012.
- The New York Times calls Frost a “progressive Democrat whose campaign focused on issues of particular salience to many young voters: gun violence, climate change, abortion rights and Medicare for all.”
- According to Politico, Frost hasn’t finished college but has organized for the ACLU and March For Our Lives, a group that advocates for gun policy.
- His path to activism, NPR states, began after the mass shooting in Newton, Connecticut, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
- “I started organizing at 15 because I didn’t want to get shot at school,” he tweeted.
- “I come from a generation that has gone through more mass-shooting drills than fire drills,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “This is something that my generation has had to face head-on: being scared to go to school, being scared to go to church, being scared to be in your community. That gives me a sense of urgency.”