| Maxwell Frost | |
| State: | Florida |
| Term Start: | January 3, 2023 |
| Predecessor: | Val Demings |
| Birth Name: | Maxwell Alejandro Frost |
| Birth Date: | 17 January 1997 |
| Birth Place: | Orlando, Florida, U.S. |
| Party: | Democratic |
| Education: | Valencia College |
| Website: | |
Maxwell Alejandro Frost (born January 17, 1997)[1] is an American politician and activist serving as the U.S. representative for since 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, he was previously the national organizing director for March for Our Lives. Elected at age 25,[2] Frost is the first member of Generation Z to serve in the United States Congress.
Frost was born on January 17, 1997, to a woman of Lebanese and Argentine descent and a Haitian father.[3] [4] His biological mother had several children.[5] He was adopted from birth; his adoptive mother is a special education teacher who migrated to the United States from Cuba in the Freedom Flights, and his adoptive father is a musician from Kansas.[6] He reconnected with his birth mother in June 2021.[7] Frost attended Osceola County School for the Arts in Kissimmee, Florida.[8] In high school, he was part of the Technology Student Association. He attended Valencia College but dropped out before his senior year.[9]
Frost has been organizing since around 2012, when he was active with Barack Obama's 2012 presidential campaign.[10] [8] He also volunteered with the Newtown Action Alliance, an organization created in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. He has identified Occupy Wall Street, the Columbine High School massacre, the killing of Trayvon Martin, and the Orlando nightclub shooting as events that affected his thinking.[11] He later volunteered for Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Margaret Good.
Frost survived an incident of gun violence at a Halloween event in Downtown Orlando in 2016.[12]
Frost was an organizer with the American Civil Liberties Union and worked to support Florida's 2018 Amendment 4 and to pressure Joe Biden to stop supporting the Hyde Amendment in 2019. He was the national organizing director for March for Our Lives.[13] In November 2021, Frost was arrested at a voting rights rally in Lafayette Square led by William Barber II and Ben Jealous.[14]
In August 2021, Frost announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for Florida's 10th congressional district.[15] During the primary campaign, he released a television ad in Spanglish, telling The Hill, "Latinos are in a place where their first language is Spanish but they speak English as well, and quite frankly that's me... We speak Spanglish in the house, and I know that's the same for a lot of Latino families in the district."[16]
Frost beat state Senator Randolph Bracy and former U.S. Representatives Alan Grayson and Corrine Brown, among others, in the August23, 2022, primary.[17] Due to the district's Democratic tilt, Frost was expected to win the general election in November 2022,[18] which he did, defeating Republican Calvin Wimbish by a 19% margin, which was smaller than the 32% margin by which Biden won the district in 2020.[19] Frost is the youngest member of Congress and the first member of Generation Z elected to Congress.[20] [21] [22] He was endorsed by numerous national and local political figures, including Jesse Jackson, former NAACP President Ben Jealous, civil-rights activist Dolores Huerta, and U.S. senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.[23]
For the 118th Congress:[24]
Frost supports a Green New Deal. He has identified environmental justice as a priority of his campaign.
Frost is a strong advocate for gun control.
In January 2023, Frost and Representative Jared Moskowitz sent House Speaker Kevin McCarthy a letter asking him to convene a classified meeting to address mass shootings. The letter called for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to conduct the meeting.[27]
Frost supports single-payer healthcare and investing in pandemic prevention.
Frost wants to "build toward a future without prison". He supports the decriminalization of sex work and the decriminalization of cannabis use.[28]
Frost believes that the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) "certainly fell short in ways, but it blocked Iran's ability to build a nuclear weapon, which was an important success".[29] In 2022 he supported restoration of the JCPOA but stressed "we must make it longer, stronger, and broader to cover not just the issue of nuclear weapons, but also the full range of destabilizing and threatening actions Iran engages in, like Iran's ballistic missile program and the country's support for terrorist proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas."[29]
Frost supports a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and has indicated his intent to travel to Israel to promote "US leadership in bringing peace to a region that so desperately needs and deserves it".[30] [31] He has called himself pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian.[32] He supports unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel.[33] He has criticized the Palestinian Authority's martyr's fund that compensates the families of dead and wounded militants, likening it to a recruitment tactic of Hamas for the purpose of committing politically motivated violence against Israel. Frost vehemently opposes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, accuses it of harboring leadership from terrorist organizations, and suggests that businesses that participate in BDS should in turn be divested.
Frost had formerly participated in pro-Palestine activism, signing pledges with the Florida Palestine Network (FPN) and the Palestinian Feminist Pledge, calling for support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, ending military aid to Israel, and rejecting the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.[34] In early August 2022, the Jewish news website Jewish Insider published a candidate questionnaire from Frost's congressional campaign that showed a shift in Frost's foreign policy positions on Israel and Palestine. Jewish Insider characterized his responses as a reversal that distanced himself from his past while declaring an aggressive stance against the BDS movement, calling for unconditional military aid to Israel, and stating his opposition to anti-Zionism. His campaign later released a position paper that formalized these positions.
Frost voted to provide Israel with support following the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.[35] [36]
During his campaign, Frost announced a "crypto-advisory council" that would advise him during his campaign.[37] He received $8,700 in contributions from Sam Bankman-Fried and his brother and nearly $1 million in help from the Super-PAC Protect Our Future, almost all of it after announcing the council.[38]
Frost is against building a southern border wall.[39] During a January 2024 House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing on immigration Frost proposed removing the Statue of Liberty in response to Republican bill H.R. 2 Secure the Border Act.[40] [41]
Frost can speak both English and Spanish. He is a jazz drummer and plays the timbales. His nine-member high school band Seguro Que Sí performed in the parade during Obama's second inauguration in 2013.[42]
Frost is a Baptist.[43]
In December 2022, Frost said he was denied a rental apartment in Washington, D.C., due to a "really bad" credit history. He said his credit rating was bad because he "ran up a lot of debt running for Congress for a year and a half".[44]
Frost was among a handful of Democrats who received about $1 million in support from former billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried's Protect Our Future PAC, as well as the maximum individual donation of $2,900.[45] In December 2022, the U.S. government indicted Bankman-Fried after alleging that he gave investor money to progressive political candidates, among other fraudulent crimes.[46] After the announcement of charges against Bankman-Fried, Frost donated the individual donation to the Zebra Coalition, an LGBTQ charity.[47]
| Office | Party | Primary | General | Result | Swing | . | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total | % | . | Total | % | . | ||||||||
| 2022 | U.S. House | Democratic | 19,288 | 34.77% | 1st | 117,955 | 59.00% | 1st | Hold | [48] | |||
| Source: Secretary of State of Florida Election Results |
43. Diamant, Jeff (January 3, 2023) “Faith on The Hill” Pew Research Center. Retrieved September 7, 2023.
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