Maxwell Frost

Maxwell Frost
Rep. Maxwell Frost - 118th Congress.jpg
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
from Florida's 10th district
Assumed office
January 3, 2023
Preceded byVal Demings
Personal details
Born
Maxwell Alejandro Frost

(1997-01-17) January 17, 1997 (age 26)
Orlando, Florida, U.S.
Political partyDemocratic
EducationValencia College
WebsiteHouse website

Maxwell Alejandro Frost (born January 17, 1997) is an American politician, activist and musician serving as the U.S. representative for Florida's 10th congressional district since 2023. He was previously the national organizing director for March for Our Lives.

Early life

Frost was born on January 17, 1997, to a Puerto Rican woman of Lebanese descent and a Haitian father. His biological mother had several children. He was adopted as an infant; 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. He reconnected with his birth mother in June 2021. Frost attended Osceola County School for the Arts in Kissimmee, Florida. As of June 2022, he is enrolled as a student at Valencia College.

Early career

Frost has been organizing since around 2012, when he was active with Barack Obama's 2012 presidential campaign. 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. 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.

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. In November 2021, Frost was arrested at a voting rights rally in Lafayette Square led by William Barber II and Ben Jealous.

U.S. House of Representatives

Elections

2022

In August 2021, Frost announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for Florida's 10th congressional district. 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."

Frost upset state Senator Randolph Bracy and former U.S. Representatives Alan Grayson and Corrine Brown, among others, in the August23, 2022, primary. Due to the district's Democratic tilt, Frost was expected to win the general election in November 2022, 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. Frost is the youngest member of Congress and the first member of Generation Z elected to Congress. 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.

Caucus memberships

Committees

  • Vice Chair, House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force

Political positions

Environment

Frost supports a Green New Deal. He has identified environmental justice as a priority of his campaign.

Guns

Frost advocates 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.

Healthcare

Frost supports single-payer healthcare and investing in pandemic prevention.

Criminal justice

Frost wants to "build toward a future without prison." He supports the decriminalization of sex work and cannabis use.

Israel

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." He has called himself pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian. He supports unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel. 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.

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. 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 Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, ending military aid to Israel, and rejecting the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. 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.

Crypto regulation

During his campaign, Frost announced a "crypto-advisory council" that would advise him during his campaign. 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.

Personal life

Frost speaks Spanish and English. He is a jazz drummer and plays the timbales. His nine-member high school band Seguro Que Sí (Spanish: "of course") performed in the parade during Obama's second inauguration in 2013.

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".

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. 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. After the announcement of charges against Bankman-Fried, Frost donated the individual donation to the Zebra Coalition, an LGBTQ charity.

Frost is a fan of the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game.

Electoral history

Electoral history of Maxwell Frost
Year Office Party Primary General Result Swing Ref.
Total % P. Total % P.
2022 U.S. House Democratic 19,288 34.77% 1st 117,955 59.00% 1st Won Hold
Source: Secretary of State of Florida | Election Results

See also


This page was last updated at 2023-04-20 08:35 UTC. Update now. View original page.

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