“You matter”: How Maxwell Frost emerged as the Harris campaign’s Gen-Z whisperer
The 27-year-old first-term Florida congressman has zig-zagged the country with a single mission to inspire young people to build on the power they’ve claimed in recent elections.
Maxwell Frost was in Indiana County, PA, late last month during a two-week jaunt across the battleground states on behalf of the Harris campaign when he traveled to the Indiana University of Pennsylvania with a simple message for the 200 students who came to hear him speak.
“I said, ‘Look, I get it. I’m from Florida. A lot of people have given up on my state,’” Frost, a first-term House Democrat who became the first member of Gen Z to serve in Congress when he was elected to represent Orlando in 2022, told me he said to the students. “‘I’m sure a lot of people are giving up on your county and the work that you’re doing, but you matter.’”
The fact that he was even in a ruby-red county that hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since Bill Clinton in 1996 speaks to the Harris campaign’s strategy of visiting regions of the country that Democrats usually don’t.
The students seemed to appreciate the effort.
One by one, they approached Frost to thank him for showing up and to express gratitude to the campaign for acknowledging that Democrats exist in Republican counties too.
“That’s what sets the VP apart from other candidates and people, right?” Frost told me about Kamala Harris on Friday. “She’s not taking this for granted. Donald Trump has, like barely any field offices in all these states: He’s taking not just everybody’s votes for granted. He’s taking Republican votes for granted.
The 27-year-old Frost has emerged as an indispensable surrogate for the Harris campaign. His pre-congressional bona fides as a mass-shooting survivor and gun violence prevention activist, paired with his advocacy for renters’ rights, an assault weapons ban, resources for schools burdened by GOP book bans and grants to support the work of emerging artists, have garnered him credibility from his peers who feel disillusioned with the political process.
“He’s righteous and relatable,” Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA), another Harris surrogate who entered Congress with Frost and recently spent time with him while campaigning in Las Vegas, told me. “He keeps it real and reminds young people to be active in their lives and in their government.”
Jessic Siles, a spokesperson for the Gen Z advocacy group Voters of Tomorrow, which was one of the first national organizations to endorse Frost nearly a year before his election, said in a statement that he has become a powerful voice for young people because he’s personally been through the same challenges they face, including school shooter drills, skyrocketing rents, and climate anxiety.
“We can trust Maxwell because, like us, he has so much at stake in this election,” Siles said. “As a Gen Z constituent of his, I’ve seen firsthand how much Maxwell and his team invest in reaching people—whether it be on campuses, at concerts, or in our communities. His ability to speak our language and meet us where we are makes him a truly authentic representative of our district and an effective spokesperson for our generation.”
Frost described his experience on the trail stumping for the vice president as amazing.
“Everywhere I go, there’s just so much energy for the VP and for Democrats up and down the ballot,” he said. “So I feel really good. I’m a drummer. I’ve been playing a lot of music too. Everyone's been having a band everywhere I'm going. And so there’s a lot of energy. There's a lot of joy. I feel good about the youth vote. I do believe that we are going to have the highest youth vote to turn out in the history of our country in just a few days.”
It’s not just vibes that have Gen-Z leaders bullish about the youth vote.
Voters of Tomorrow issued a report on Friday showing Gen Z early vote turnout surpassed the group’s initial projections, with young voters poised to break turnout records on Election Day in battleground states and nationwide based on an analysis of early vote data, in addition to the organization’s 19 million direct contacts to young people in 2024. According to VOT’s projected youth early vote turnout benchmarks, which are based on 2022 voting preference rates, young voters nationally have blown past their early vote turnout projection by 20 percent.
VOT also announced it surpassed 20 million direct contacts to young people in 2024, including more than two million calls and 18 million texts with the most contacts to young people in Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Texas and Pennsylvania. The milestone is more than double the number of contacts it made to young voters in 2022.
The group planned to make millions of additional contacts over the final four days of the campaign to help young people make a plan to vote and kicked off its “Gen Z GOTV Marathon,” with volunteers calling young voters all day, every day until polls close. It also is led three bus trips with Students for Harris from New York City and Washington, D.C. to canvas on college campuses in Philadelphia, where Gen Z could decide the election.
The early numbers come after Gen Z voted for Biden in 2020 more than any other age group—especially in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania, which flipped from former President Donald Trump in 2016 to Biden four years later. Based on Census data analyzed by Tufts University, Gen Z's voter turnout in 2022 was higher than that of Gen Xers and Millennials when they made up the 18-24 voting bloc.
Frost says Gen Z has been successful in organizing its generation because leaders are willing to meet voters where they are.
“It’s not just about inviting people to your table, but going to theirs,” he said. “And so something that we do a lot on our team is try to find ways to bridge the gap between cool and consciousness and go to places of culture—concerts and different events like that—where we can reach young people who might not care about politics or maybe they’re undecided.”
Sometimes this outreach can be as simple as asking a question.
“A lot of undecided students, when I asked him about the issues they care about, there's some answers that they give me where I'm like, ‘Oh yeah, this is gonna be a Kamala Harris voter, I already know.’ And all they're missing is just some information or just that conversation,” Frost said. “I think about this poll that was done after Obama’s campaign that asked what was the top reason you voted? What was the top reason that you organized or you volunteered? And most people said, because I was asked. And so there’s so many students, so many young people across the country, they’re waiting to be asked by one of us, by an organizer. And so that’s the work we’re doing over the next few days.”
It also helps to have an energizing candidate, which the vice president has proven herself to be.
“A bellwether for me in an election is when you’re going to events and you’re seeing people who are not political, who don’t like politics, but are there because—sometimes they can’t even articulate it—they felt a need to be there,” he said. “I mean, that’s the difference between a political candidate and a movement candidate. And we have a movement candidate and this is a movement right now.”
But movements aren’t enough if they don’t translate into power. For Frost, proof of Gen Z’s strength lies in how candidates respond to young people's concerns.
“We hear candidates talking more about the climate crisis and not talking about it [in terms of] polar bears and ice caps in the far future, but talking about the fact that it's here and it’s now and it’s impacting people,” he said. “We hear candidates across the country talking about gun violence and what we’re going to do to end gun violence, how we’re going to protect reproductive freedom, health, access to abortion and how it impacts us.”
Student loan debt is another issue that’s entered the mainstream debate due to Gen-Z grassroots organizing.
“A decade ago, [it] was considered by many in the media, many pundits, as some like far-left demand and ask that would never happen. Guess what? It's part of the platform of our party, now done and enacted by President Biden, and will be continued by Vice President Harris,” Frost said. “And that is because of organizers and young people who have stepped up and have been fighting for this for decades and for a long time and now it is part of what we’re doing as a party. And I think that shows that our party is receptive to the concerns of young people. We’re listening and incorporating it into our policy.”
And while the stakes of the election are well-documented, Frost is intent on growing his generation’s power beyond it regardless of the results. (The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Frost’s impact as a surrogate.)
“The good news here is this work didn’t start today on energizing the youth vote. The campaign and outside the campaign—organizations, advocates—have been doing this work for a long time,” Frost said. “We believe in building power year-round and sustaining that power for elections like the one in just a few days, but also after that. And that’s really where the power of this youth movement comes from is the fact that we are constantly working so that way we can constantly build power and win elections for young people and for the issues that we care about now.”