At just 25, Deja Foxx is done waiting her turn.
The activist, strategist, and social media creator, who first went viral in high school challenging Senator Jeff Flake over Planned Parenthood, is now running for Congress in Arizona’s 7th District. She’s aiming to replace the late Rep. Raúl Grijalva in a high-stakes special election, and she’s doing it with the unapologetic clarity of someone who’s already lived multiple political lifetimes online.
“This country, this last election, left me just as disappointed and horrified as you,” Foxx said in a recent Teen Vogue interview. “It was crashout or Congress — and I chose Congress.”
Foxx has spent the last decade as an organizer, first around sex ed in Tucson and later as a digital strategist for Kamala Harris’s 2020 presidential run. But after what many in Gen Z saw as a demoralizing 2024 election, her campaign is staking out bold territory: make electoral politics cool again, and representative.
Foxx isn’t just relying on traditional outreach; her strategy fuses grassroots energy with influencer-era intimacy. Her team is DM-banking — literally going through likes and shares on her campaign launch and messaging people in the district. “Young people aren’t picking up calls from unknown numbers. You have to meet them where they are,” she explained.
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Her opponent? A crowded Democratic primary that includes seasoned politicos and the late congressman’s daughter. But Foxx is betting her lived experience — growing up in Section 8 housing, using SNAP, and being the first in her family to attend college — will cut through.
“This isn’t theoretical to me. These are the systems that let me survive,” she said.
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Foxx is vocal about what’s broken, especially within the Democratic Party. She wants leaders with “a spine,” not ones who placate the status quo. That means backing calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, confronting immigration injustices, and rejecting the sanitized paths often prescribed to young candidates.
“We tell young people to start on school boards or unpaid seats while also dealing with a cost-of-living crisis. That’s disingenuous,” she said.
Her rise hasn’t been smooth. Foxx has faced digital harassment, public scrutiny, and critique from both the right and her progressive peers, particularly over her past ties to Harris. But she’s embracing the transparency Gen Z demands: “Nothing prepared me better to run for office than being cyber-mobbed at 20.”
And while she rejects the idea of perfection, she’s fiercely clear about one thing, Gen Z deserves power, not just protest. “I can’t ask young people to keep risking everything unless their voices actually get heard in the halls of power,” she said.
