As the Democratic Party contemplates its reinvention, a younger, fresher generation of political hopefuls is bringing with it a new type of candidate: the influencer politician.
Deja Foxx, a 24-year-old content creator with a TikTok following of nearly 143,000, launched her candidacy this week for the special election in Arizona’s Seventh Congressional District, following Representative Raúl Grijalva’s passing last month. A crowded primary to fill the vacancy is already shaping up, with candidates including Grijalva’s own daughter, a progressive advocate who is a member of the Pima County Board of Supervisors, and former state representative Daniel Hernández Jr., who helped save Gabby Giffords while serving as her intern when she was shot in 2011.
But the stacked field of competitors isn’t stopping Foxx from throwing her hat in the ring. A community activist in her own right, the Columbia graduate generated an online following by advocating for reproductive health and education—something she has been doing in Tucson for years with organizations like Planned Parenthood.
In 2019, the same year she served as an influencer and surrogate strategist on former vice president Kamala Harris’s first presidential campaign, Foxx started GenZ Girl Gang, a digital community for young women. She hosts Girls on the Ground, a vertical video series in which she interviews female politicians, and has posted videos with everyone from Harris to Texas representative Jasmine Crockett and Arizona senator Mark Kelly. Foxx was one of the few Gen Z’ers to deliver a prime-time speech at the Democratic National Convention, and she helped boost Harris’s profile online and in Arizona in 2024.
In a conversation with Vanity Fair, Foxx shares why this moment is ripe for a generational shake-up, and how experience building community online isn’t just an asset but a requirement for Democratic candidates moving forward. Our conversation below has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
Vanity Fair: What do Gen Z candidates bring to the table that the old guard doesn’t? Was that a factor in launching your campaign for Congress?
Deja Foxx: Gen Z brings a sense of urgency to the table that a lot of older Dems are simply lacking. Young people are the ones that are thinking about affordable housing through the frame of, I want to move out of my parents house, and month after month, I save and I don’t get closer; thinking about wanting to own a home and feeling like it’s unattainable. Gen Z is the generation that’s left holding the bag when it comes to climate change and bad policy, right? And not only that, but for folks like me, and women like me, we’re the first generation to have less rights than our mothers or grandmothers. And so what I think young people are bringing to the table is a renewed sense of urgency that actually matches this moment, one in which we see authoritarianism on the rise.
The media-personality-to-politician pipeline was always a thing. But now we have the Gen Z influencer-to-politician pipeline. What does that mean to you? And do you embrace or reject that label?
Let’s be clear, I was an activist first, who knew how to use digital in a smart way. My very first viral video was me bird-dogging. (That’s an organizing term where you sort of show up and catch a member of Congress or someone in power off guard, catch them saying something, back them into a corner—not physically, obviously.) Anyway, my first viral video was at a town hall with my then senator, Republican senator Jeff Flake, after he voted to repeal Title X funding, the funding that I relied on to access birth control when I didn’t have money, didn’t have parents, didn’t have insurance. And so I want to be very clear that, for me, my roots are in activism, and they are in organizing, and I have always found ways to use social media as a tool.
