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Twenty-five year old Deja Foxx is vying for more than a seat in Congress. She's looking to be part of a root-and-branch overhaul of the Democratic Party.
Foxx is running in the special election to fill the seat for Arizona's 7th District, which remains vacant after longtime Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva died of cancer in March. Foxx's campaign, in both style and substance, mirrors that of one of her political inspirations, New York's Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: young, unapologetically progressive and grounded in her personal experience as a member of the working class.
Foxx, who told Newsweek she's determined to become the youngest woman elected to Congress, hopes to bring a fresh Gen Z voice to a Democratic Party that is still soul-searching after the fallout of the second election of Donald Trump in November.
Viral Origins
If Foxx's name sounds vaguely familiar, she went viral at the age of 16 when she confronted Arizona's Republican Senator Jeff Flake at a town hall over cuts to Planned Parenthood.
"I was a teenager living with my boyfriend, working at a gas station. We relied on Title X funding," she told Newsweek's Olivia Cataldo in a video interview, referring to the federal program that supports family planning and health services like those provided by Planned Parenthood.
Foxx says she was at "Planned Parenthood centers to get the birth control that I needed to take control of my body and my future when I had no money, no parents and no insurance. And this is just one of those ways that policymakers often disconnected from their constituents, vote without ever thinking about the consequences for real people."
After the clip of her confronting Flake rocketed across the internet in 2017, she became more involved in advocacy, regularly pressing local leaders to update sex-education curricula to include consent and medically accurate information, while also opposing GOP cuts to Planned Parenthood.
"We won an organizing victory to rewrite that curriculum in southern Arizona's largest school district," she said. "It was my first storytelling practice as an organizer and my first win. And I never looked back."
Born in Tucson, which sits halfway in Arizona's 7th District, Foxx was raised by a single mother relying on Section 8 housing, a federal program providing rent assistance for low-income individuals. Her mother juggled a patchwork of jobs—cleaning houses, making deliveries, sorting mail—while also struggling with addiction and working her way through recovery.
"When she was out of work, I watched her step up to help our community members make enough," Foxx said, recalling how her mom volunteered to cover childcare so others could take extra shifts.
"Those are my first organizing memories," she added, reflecting on how neighbors pitched in—offering rides to school, pooling gas money, and providing collective childcare.
"That's really the organizing tradition in which my politics is rooted," she told Newsweek.
Life and Political Experience
Foxx is the first in her family to attend college, earning a full ride to Columbia University in New York. She studied political science there, but she's quick to point out what she believes many overlook: "Lived experience is experience." Her campaign, she insists, isn't just rooted in policy knowledge—it's shaped by her life.
She's critical of policymakers who "attempt to understand the implications" of cutting programs like Medicaid or SNAP by leaning on data and cherrypicked anecdotes. "It often falls flat because they can't actually understand the experiences," she said. Her official platform advocates for affordable housing, a $17 hour minimum wage, investment in early‑education and protection of social services including Medicaid.

"I have an intimate knowledge of [those social services], a personal knowledge of the stakes of what we are voting on and the responsibility we have to our constituents."
While at Columbia, Foxx found herself thrust into the behind-the-scenes of a national presidential campaign. At 19 years old, she joined then-Senator Kamala Harris's first presidential campaign as one of its youngest staffers, leading the 2020 campaign's influencer strategy.
"What it taught me is a lesson that I took in to 2024 and that I'm taking into my own special election here in 2025 as I stick my head up to lead and to run — which was what it means to be fearless."
Foxx says she carries that lesson forward, seeking to "get into something. To get into a fight. Not because you're certain you can win, but because you're certain of your values."
In the wake of the 2024 election—when Harris lost all seven swing states, including Arizona, to Donald Trump, with congressional Democrats not faring much better—Foxx said she looked around at young voters and "felt a deep sense of responsibility."
"It wasn't enough for me to just work the behind the scenes of campaigns or in front of the cameras," she said, adding "I needed to give them someone they could get excited about, or we would stand to lose our generation."

Foxx said her peers were feeling "so disillusioned and they have every right to. They feel left out. They feel left behind. They feel lied to," and that her campaign is offering a new leader for them to "put their hope on."
"We are doing the hard work to put a new face to this party," she said.
An Arizonan AOC?
Foxx's vision and approach to politics draws obvious comparisons with Representative Ocasio-Cortez's longshot 2018 Congressional campaign that shook the Democratic establishment when she defeated longtime incumbent Joe Crowley in her New York City district.
Ocasio-Cortez, then 29, ran on an unapologetically progressive platform that included support for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal and tuition-free public college. The Bronx-born activist worked as a waitress and bartender, positioning herself as a voice for working-class communities and challenging establishment Democrats. Ocasio-Cortez is now so well known in national politics — even floated as a potential 2028 presidential contender — that she is one of the few elected leaders to be recognized by nothing more than a three-letter nickname.
The young Arizonan candidate, who also prides herself in grounding her campaign in lived experience rather than generational political careers, says she looks to both AOC and Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas, as guiding leaders who "best represent the values of the party."
What draws her to them, she says, is that they are "outspoken, who are clear in their values, and who communicate with voters right where they are." She added that AOC is respected by some even on the right because "she's honest, she feels real in a time where inauthenticity is running our party."

"And I stand in that lineage," she stated.
Even more so than AOC in 2018, Foxx's campaign remains a longshot. Polling for Arizona's 7th remains scant, but a small Public Policy Polling survey in April put her at 5 percent support, compared to 11 percent for Daniel Hernandez and 49 percent for Adelita Grijalva, the daughter of the late Rep. Grijalva now hoping to fill her father's long-held seat.
Foxx remains undaunted by those numbers. She says her campaign mirrors the community she represents, with 98 percent of contributions coming from small-dollar donors, "people who donate under $200," she explains, noting the "average contribution is about $29." It's that kind of grassroots support that helped carry AOC over the line, to say nothing of the wave of support that built behind Senator Bernie Sanders in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
In a Congress with an average age of 59, Foxx is trying to lean into the symbolism of generational change of which many disillusioned Democratic voters say the party is in desperate need.
"If everybody who told me I was too young went and told somebody that they were too old, we would be in a vastly different, political structure right now," she said.
The Democratic primary for Arizona's 7th District is scheduled for July 15, with the special general election set for September 23.

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About the writer
Mandy Taheri is a Newsweek reporter based in Brooklyn. She joined Newsweek as a reporter in 2024. You can get ... Read more