One of the most significant election results on Tuesday came from Florida, where 25-year-old gun-control advocate and Uber driver Maxwell Frost won the Democratic primary to represent the area surrounding Orlando in Congress. Unless there’s a major upset in the deep-blue district in November, he will become the first member of Generation Z to be elected to the House.
Endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Frost came to prominence earlier this summer when he interrupted a panel between Ron DeSantis and conservative YouTuber Dave Rubin, yelling at the Republican governor to “take action on gun violence.” In an interview with CNN, he described his experience as a member of the “mass-shooting generation”: “We’re a generation that goes through more school-shooting drills than fire drills.” Frost is at the early end of the zoomers, the generation born between 1997 and 2012. If he wins the solidly Democratic seat vacated by Val Demings — who won the Democratic nomination to take on Senator Marco Rubio in November — he will also be the only Afro-Cuban in Congress.
To ensure that our representatives are coming into office with fully developed prefrontal cortexes, the Constitution requires that members of Congress have to be 25 to be elected to the House. In 2020, Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina skated the line, winning his Republican primary at 24 and turning 25 three months before the general election.
