Deja Foxx Is Running for Congress Because ‘Girls Like Me Deserve a Fighter'

Yahoo

a day ago

Deja Foxx for Arizona
Deja Foxx is many things: an organizer, a candidate for Congress, and a reproductive rights advocate. But there's one thing that she isn't, despite the headlines you may have read.
'I'm not an influencer,' she tells me with a smile. 'I'm a leader.'
Foxx, 25, has been often described as a 'Gen Z influencer' in the many news articles covering her unique and viral campaign for the special election for the House seat in Arizona's seventh Congressional District, the primary for which will be held on July 15. The race was called following the death of longtime representative Raúl Grijalva in March, and the primaries will be one of the first times voters will select candidates for national office since the election of Donald Trump last fall.
Foxx would be the youngest woman in Congress if elected, but she's no stranger to politics. At 17, she went viral for confronting then Arizona Senator Jeff Flake about his stance on Planned Parenthood at a town hall, and she hasn't stopped since. While a high school student and then a student at Columbia University, she has continued to advocate for Planned Parenthood, worked on digital strategy for both Kamala Harris's 2020 and 2024 campaigns, and even spoke at the Democratic National Convention. And yes, she's really good at social media, with half a million followers across platforms.
So when the seat opened up in her home district, Foxx looked at the current state of American politics, at the now-decade of organizing work under her belt, and thought to herself, 'Why not me?'
'I've held a lot of different job titles,' she tells me via Zoom. 'I've worked at a gas station, I've been a digital strategist on a presidential campaign. I've been a content creator in front of the camera, and now I'm a candidate for Congress. But I want more than anything to be a good role model. And every single day I know I'm achieving that goal. I intend to win at the ballot box, but I rack up wins every single day.… In a moment where people feel so hopeless because things are hard, because Donald Trump is making a circus of our government and he's putting families in the crosshairs, it can't be overstated how important it is that someone like me is moving people toward hope again.'
Foxx chatted with Glamour about how her background influences her work, how Democrats can embrace change, and how other young women can get involved.
: You're running for Congress in the district where you were born and raised. How would you describe your background?
Deja Foxx: I was raised by a single mom. She and I relied on Section 8 housing, SNAP benefits, which some folks know as food stamps, and Medicaid. I was a free-lunch kid in our public schools here. So that was my introduction to politics; the things I needed to survive and just get by being decided by people in elected office who more often than not felt really far away from families like mine.
Programs like SNAP change based on elections and who's in charge. How did you come to realize that these things you relied on were, in actuality, political?
As a kid, you only understand things the way that they are in front of you. You don't have a comparison of what's going on in other people's houses. So there wasn't this 'aha' moment of, Oh, it's elections deciding this stuff. It was the lived experience of there being years where our food stamps would get cut. There would be harder months or Section 8 visits where they would come and inspect our house, and that might look like picking up extra chores to make sure the house was ready. So it was a lived and day-to-day experience. There were moments of comparison about being a free-lunch kid at public school when other kids' parents might pack them Uncrustables and all of the name-brand snacks. But it was clear to me that our family was affected by the things going on in the news and in Washington.
I was raised in the era of Obama, which was a very different political understanding. When Obama got elected, I was eight years old. I was so filled with hope. It felt like things were bending toward justice, things were going the right way. And then by the time I was 15, Donald Trump was running for president, which I think blows some people's minds—that for the last decade and for most of my political understanding, Donald Trump and his chaos and cruelty have defined the political landscape.
You were involved in political advocacy starting as a teenager. How did you have the moxie to jump into it at such a young age?
For me, politics was always about survival. My very first organizing memory was seeing my mom and my neighbors make enough together. Everybody had a deficit in their house: Somebody was short on bills, somebody's car was broken down, somebody needed a babysitter, but my neighbors knew each other. We talked, we spent time together, and we made enough together.
I think about the ways that when my mom was between jobs, and I mean she worked every odd job you could imagine. She delivered flowers, she worked at a post office, she cleaned houses. She was a caregiver for the elderly, and when she was between jobs, she would step up to babysit so one of our neighbors could take on an extra shift and because they took on that extra shift, they might have gas in their car to drive me to school when we didn't have a car. And so I really watched as my neighbors came together to overcome the ways that they were made to not have enough in one of the richest countries in the world.
At 15 you made the difficult decision to move out of your mom's home as she battled addiction and moved in with your then-boyfriend and his family. How did that factor into your political origin story?
I lived there until I went to college…they weren't folks with a whole lot extra to give, but they made space in their home to treat me like their own child and take me in. At the same time, I was learning sex education in my public school. It was the only place I was going to get it. The curriculum I was taught was last updated in the 1980s. It didn't mention consent. It was medically inaccurate and more ridiculously, it was taught by the baseball coach.
So I started showing up to these school board meetings and telling my story, which was a very vulnerable story, something I hadn't shared yet. You could imagine being a teenage girl, the last thing I wanted everyone to know about me was that I didn't have a home of my own and that things were kind of rough. Yet I showed up to these school board meetings and during community calls, I stood in front of a crowd and shared the story and demanded that they update this curriculum. I invited my friends along to do the same. And after six months of organizing, we won a victory to update that curriculum in Southern Arizona's largest school district. That was my first true advocacy battle.
You went to Columbia University, moved back to Arizona, and are now running for Congress at 25. Why run now?
I feel a deep sense of responsibility. I wasn't born on a path to Congress. I'm running against someone whose father was the former congressman. For me, this has been a hard choice. I had to ask, Can my friends and family handle this? Do I even have the money to get through this race? I'm no career politician, but I'm in this because I feel a deep sense of responsibility to families like mine who have the most to lose…there's a sense of urgency for me and a responsibility to my community, to my family, to my friends, to give them a fighter in this moment. Because what I hear most on the ground is that people don't feel like anyone's fighting for them right now.
What do you say to those who say you don't have enough 'experience' or are too young to run?
Let's be clear. When we talk about our party, it's two pieces: the establishment and the voters. Right now, they are not in agreement. The establishment goes around and in their stump speeches, every single one of them says, 'We need newer and younger leaders. We need a new generation of leadership.' And they get applause. And yet, when newer and younger comes around…I have watched them put their thumb on the scale, endorse in a primary, a Democratic primary where we have more than one good candidate, where we have the opportunity to make history and elect a new generation of leadership. And so in action, our party is failing a new generation of leaders. Then, when we think about the voters, they're excited, they're open to younger leaders.
What have you experienced in your campaign? Are voters open to a younger leader?
I will tell you that aside from the other 20-somethings, the people who are the most receptive to our message are these older folks. They want so badly for someone to take on the fight, to pick up the torch and know that what they fought for was not for nothing. That someone will keep that work alive. We hear it all the time. I just knocked on a woman's door, and I gave her my speech that I'd be the youngest member, first woman in my generation, I've been fighting for reproductive rights for the last 10 years. And she said, 'Young lady, you just tell me what to do. You young folks need to just tell us what to do.'
I think there's this sort of created narrative that because older people who sit in positions of power are unwilling to cede them, that means that all older voters are unwilling to elect a young person. That's not true from what we're hearing. These older folks are more excited than anyone else that they are seeing young people show up and that they have an assurance that their fight will be kept alive.
We are in an era of rampant misogyny in politics. What new energy will you bring into the Capitol, and how do you combat this rapid hate?
Let me be clear. I got my first death threat when I was 16 years old, but running for Congress is an entirely different experience. It's a different experience for someone like me, a young working-class woman of color, than it is for some of the other people in my race or your traditional candidate. I'll just give you one example. When you file your paperwork to run for office here in Arizona, you're required to list your residential address, essentially self-doxxing and putting your sensitive information into the public record. That is enough to keep most of the women I know out of politics. There are structural barriers to participation, and I am less safe today than I was three months ago. I want people to hear that and know that even though you see me on social media and it looks like incredible energy and momentum because it is, I have taken, rather, I have made this decision. In all seriousness, I have crossed a threshold. I will never be able to walk back.
I do it because families like mine, girls [who grew up] like me who are 16 years old and working at the gas station and relying on Planned Parenthood deserve a fighter, and I'm not going to wait around for somebody else to do it. It is with a deep sense of responsibility and personal risk that I'm in this race.
The Democratic party clearly has rebuilding to do before the 2026 midterms. What do you think needs to change?
I've worked behind the scenes of campaigns, and I've been on the front lines as an activist on the ground and a content creator online reading the comment sections. Democrats believe that we can govern from the top down—that is, if we craft the perfect press release and message, everybody's going to hop on. That's not how our media ecosystem works anymore.
We need to be coming from the comment sections up. We need to be listening to people. Something our campaign implemented that I'm really proud of is that on our policy section of our website, there's a box at the bottom. You want to see something, leave us a suggestion. We don't have to wait until we're in office to listen to our constituents. We host listening sessions often right here in my living room where we sit with people and they tell us their stories of what these Medicaid cuts could mean to them. It's a different question of how we govern, and Democrats are failing to listen. If they had, they'd be embracing candidates like me who are energizing and mobilizing the young people and the working-class people we have left behind.
What's your advice to other young women who want to be involved in politics or activism in the era of Trump?
Politics is personal. It is for me. You don't have to run for office to get involved politically. I'm asking folks to find the issue that personally impacts you. Where does your life overlap with what you see in the news? And then, get really specific on your personal story. Maybe you start by journaling it or telling a friend or talking about it at Sunday dinner with your family. The next step has to be mobilizing your personal network. You show up to that protest for the first time or that school board meeting, but then the next time you go, you bring your daughter or you bring your best friend or your neighbor along. That is how we are going to create change.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
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