Last week, 25-year-old Maxwell Frost, an American activist and politician, was the first member of Generation Z to be elected to the United States Congress. Newly elected, Representative Frost will represent Florida’s 10th district and won against the Republican candidate Calvin Wimbish. Frost was heavily favored to win this seat and defeated Wimbish by 19 percentage points. 

“We made history for Floridians, for Gen Z, and for everyone who believes we deserve a better future,” Frost tweeted after the election. 

Frost joining the United States Congress brings new levels of diversity to an institution known for lacking diversity in age among representatives.

 “The perspective I bring as a young person, as a young Black Latino person from the South, is important,” Frost said in an interview with the New York Times. 

Gun safety serves as one of the main issues on Frost’s platform as his political activism began with his gun control advocacy after the 2012 mass shooting in Newton, Connecticut. Frost served as a national organizing director for March for Our Lives, a well-known gun control advocacy organization.

 “I started organizing at 15 because I didn’t want to get shot at school,” he said. 

Frost stated that he brings a different perspective to Congress as someone who grew up in an era of mass shootings, frequent natural disasters and broad social upheaval. In his promises to end gun violence, Frost hopes to work towards banning assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition, require background checks for all gun sales, fund and support local community violence intervention programs, fight to end the corruption of the gun lobby and dismantle the NRA and develop a national task for to end gun violence.

In addition to ending gun violence, Frost also focused his campaign on Medicare for all, pandemic preparedness, the climate crisis, reimagining justice and housing and transit. Frost understands that the United States has essentially failed to provide a basic minimum regarding healthcare to its citizens. In order to alleviate healthcare disparities and improve our system, he believes America must ensure that every person in America has access to comprehensive healthcare, work to prevent pharmaceutical companies from price gouging, heavily invest in the infrastructure of communities that have been historically excluded and expand healthcare to cover eyes, ears, dental and mental healthcare for those with substance abuse disorders. 

In terms of the pandemic, Frost offered many solutions such as passing Biden’s Pandemic Preparedness plan, working to reduce biological risks to prevent outbreaks, increasing funding for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, creating vaccines that will protect us from future viruses, design better protective equipment, develop better and cheaper testing and much more. 

Frost also holds a heavy passion for environmental justice and believes that the greatest challenge facing our country and the world is the climate crisis. Frost believes that to tackle climate change, the country must crack down on corporations that pollute communities, ensure every community has clean water, access to food and clean air, establish a civilian climate corps to provide good paying jobs, build the robust no-carbon infrastructure and to pass the Green New Deal and the Thrive Act. 

“As someone who is Black and Latino, I’ve had the privilege of really getting to dive deep into many different cultures,” Frost said. “I just think it’s important that we continue to push that and really shine a light on the beauty that’s here in Florida and the beauty that’s here in central Florida.” 

Another one of Frost’s main issue areas is reimagining justice and working to end all federal subsidies contributing to mass incarceration, demilitarize the police and abolish the death penalty. Additionally, he promised to work to fully fund community-led violence intervention programs, legalize recreational marijuana, end sentencing, prosecutorial and pre-trial practices that compound the cruelty of our justice system and restore voting rights to all Americans including those currently incarcerated. 

Finally, Frost believes that historically, elected officials have not given much attention to housing and transit and believes that for communities to thrive, communities have to build fair and sustainable transportation systems. Frost posed many solutions, including instituting national tenant protections, including rent stabilization, restricting evictions without cause, massively increasing funding for public housing, instituting policies that curb real estate speculation, ending national addiction to car-centered transportation and investing in regional rail and bus systems. 

“The first election of a Gen-Z member of congress is a monumental event in more ways than one,” said Anna Kepes, a Political Science student at Villanova. “Young people are a generation that is heavily underrepresented in the electorate. Maxwell Frost’s initiation into Congress is representative of my age demographic stepping forward and creating the type of change that we want to see.” 

Maxwell Frost’s victory in Congress serves as a historical win for Generation Z, signaling hope for the amplification of younger voices.