She Was a Gen Z Influencer for Kamala Harris. Now She’s Running for Congress

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.

And that’s no different now. I have built a community online that is excited about progressive candidates, newer candidates, young people, because they’re really looking for a sense of excitement and change in a party that many of them feel has left them behind, and many are experiencing, or have experienced, one of their first really big losses. When we think about maybe some of those younger women who follow me, or younger folks who follow me, that are in that 18-to-24 range, this last election was probably really hard on their morale. What I’m thinking about here is that I have been ear-to-the-ground. I’ve been reading the comment sections on my videos and on others’, taking temperature on the cultural conversation that young people are having online. And when I was making my decision to jump into this race, to launch this campaign, I did an interview at an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders rally here in Tucson—where 23,000 people showed up—one in which I asked young people, “What are you looking for in new Democratic leadership?” And they responded [that] they were looking for newer and younger faces, real progressive action, and someone who had grit and fight.

The nature of what it means to be a political figure is evolving in and of itself, and an ability to create and maintain community on digital spaces isn’t just an asset; it is becoming a requirement. And so I don’t know if I reject or embrace the label wholeheartedly on either end. But I do see it as a tool, and one that I’m uniquely suited to use.

Talking about influencers, former vice president Kamala Harris lost despite leveraging influencers. I’m curious, from your perspective, did she leverage the wrong ones, or did she leverage the right ones poorly?

I sort of reject the question, because we have to look at the structures in which we’re playing. These tech companies are owned by [a] billionaire boy club who lined up behind Trump at his inauguration. It’s no surprise that the algorithms they’ve created—the platforms we use every day that shape our economies and our elections—favor the interests of rich white men like them. So I sort of reject the question that she used influencers the wrong way, or that we were the wrong influencers, but rather think we should have an expanded look at the systems and the structures in which we’re operating.

Listen, [I’m] someone who creates content around my abortion advocacy work. I’ve been censored on TikTok. And so when we’re talking about issues like reproductive rights, like abortion, on platforms that are hostile to them and punish us—or rather, limit our speech because of it—our side is actually, in some ways, set up to fail. So we see that. There was that Media Matters study. The lion’s share of followers are going to the right. And I think that that’s not because we don’t have the personalities for it. I would argue that it’s actually the incentives of the people building these companies.

If that is true, how do Democrats overcome that?

Running in a race like this in a congressional district is interesting. It’s not a presidential race. This is about my neighbors. These are the kids that I went to elementary, middle school, and high school with. This is where I was born and raised. And so a congressional race like this really balances both a national presence with a local, grassroots strategy. And so for someone like me, who’s been using social media for the last decade in my activism work, I’m thinking really critically about how I’m using broadcast channels on Instagram. Even today, I sent a voice memo to my “AZ Alerts” broadcast channel, where I’ve been sharing protests and clips from town halls and interviews with electives, and most recently I shared with them just a personalized voice memo about how today was going, about how [my] launch was going.

If we’re not mobilizing the right people in the right places, and this is true of my constituents in Arizona 07—if I’m not talking to them, then I’m not achieving my goal. If I’m not moving them to action, to sign our petition, show up, and volunteer on our day of action, then I’ve lost sight.

Understanding the local nature of it, how should Democrats broadly be fighting back against President Donald Trump right now? And does it take playing into the attention economy that he captures?

Yes and yes. One of the reasons I decided to run in this primary is because I was out at [Trump’s] joint address [to Congress], doing interviews with electeds, talking to them about what their plans were for the evening, how they were thinking about this moment. And I left kind of disappointed. It was actually the day that I started my conversations about running for this seat, even though it had not opened up yet in a special election. I was still looking ahead at 2026 at the time. But what I saw there was that so many of these electeds were unable to meet the moment in a messaging sense. And we know that the majority of them vote the same way most of the time.

But one of the key differences, and what I’ve been hearing from young people on the ground, is that they don’t feel fought for. In this moment where Donald Trump and Elon Musk are calling people who rely on Social Security or SNAP benefits or Section 8 housing—people like my family—“the parasite class,” people want someone who’s going to be a fighter, and that means showing up and disrupting. And it’s about the message. It’s about the delivery. It’s about being courageous.

That’s one of the most special things about the seat that I’m running for here in Arizona. It has a very strong progressive legacy, with former member Raúl Grijalva, and it is one of the seats in Arizona where someone could really be bold, because of its nature of being sort of a safer seat. We need to be, in every primary, asking ourselves, How are we best using the power of this seat? Some seats are going to come up in 2026 and they’re going to be absolutely critical to win, to win the majority. And we can’t count any seat out, not even the one I’m running for. This has to be held by a Dem, and we know that, and that’s why we have healthy primaries, so we can send the best person.

This is obviously already a crowded race, including the former representative’s own daughter. How do you plan to differentiate yourself from the pack, given the timing of the special election?

I know I’m already an outsider candidate. I’m young. I’m working-class. I’m someone who has been engaged with politics on the other side of the dais. I’ve been an issue-based organizer, I’ve been an activist, and I’ve been a content creator as well. There’s already a clear difference here about what we bring to the table, and the argument I’m making to voters here in my hometown and beyond in CD-07, is that this moment calls for more than a politician. And that goes exactly to your point earlier. The question around this is not just a chaotic political moment. This is a chaotic moment for media, for attention, for our understanding of what is true. We need people who are going to go to DC and be loud, who are going to share our message and our stories in a way that resonates with people. And that’s not just about the words we use, though I think that’s part of it too, but also the strategies. And that’s going to be everything from the community-organizing piece, the door-knocking, to getting outside, talking to folks, to using social in a really smart way, because it’s where so many young people in particular are getting their news and building a political understanding.

Who are some of your role models?

One person that comes to mind is the first Planned Parenthood organizer who ever brought me into this movement. Her name is Melissa, and she really taught me what organizing was. She saw my potential at a time where I was experiencing homelessness. I had just moved out of my mom’s house because of issues of substance abuse. I was figuring out how to be in a new home, and on my own, and working at a gas station, and I’ll never forget that. She invited me to a storytelling training, and I told her I couldn’t make it. And she went just a little bit further. She asked me why, and I told her that it was because I didn’t have access to transportation. I didn’t have a car. And she told me just a few words that really changed my life and taught me what it means to be an organizer, which was that she would give me a ride. And so when we think about the sort of values I hope to capture in the next 100 days of this race and beyond, it’s that. It’s about meeting people where they’re at, engaging people who have been left behind by just offering them the chance to get involved.

In what way have your political views evolved over the last few years, if at all, and what has contributed to any shift in ideology?

Donald Trump has shaped the entirety of [my] political consciousness. It’s almost hard to remember a time before he was actively running [for] president or in office. About a decade now. And so how my political views have changed over the years, especially the last year or so since this presidential election, is that I felt really let down. I felt hopeful in 2024 that we were going to be able to do something big here, like not just fend off Donald Trump, but make some history-making ground with a history-making candidate, and we got our results back. We got a clear look at where the country and where voters were at in that moment. And I think for a lot of young folks, a lot of women, a lot of folks of color, a lot of working-class people, that was a really tough pill to swallow. I know it was for me.

But I can tell you what hasn’t changed. I have organized since before Donald Trump was president—even the first term—right through his first administration, under a Democratic president, and under Trump again, and what I know to be true is that when we invest in people, when we invest in folks’ organizing potential, there’s storytelling superpower, building relationships that we never really lose. I am in this work with some of the same people, organizers like Melissa, that I was in it with a decade ago. And so for folks who are feeling a little hopeless right now or unsure what they can do, I ask of them to find their community and really invest in it, because win or lose elections, that’s what’s going to be there.

Can you describe your first political memory?

This is actually very sad, but when I was growing up—I grew up here in Tucson, born and raised, and one of my first political memories was the Gabby Giffords shooting, that act of political violence against a woman in politics, a woman who had taken up leadership. I’ll be so honest with you. When I decided to get into this race, one of the hard conversations I had to have with my family, with my loved ones, and with myself, was if I was willing to put myself at risk to that kind of political violence. I recognized that running as a young woman, as a person of color, as a working-class person, as someone with a bold progressive vision, that I’m sticking my head up in a way that is different from other candidates when they join, just by the nature of being so young, by being so visible. That’s my first political memory, and it has informed the seriousness, the gravity with which I have made the decision to get into this race, knowing that even in an environment like this—where extremism is on the rise and there’s a real threat, often to the safety of women like me who stick our head up to lead—I do it anyway.

What’s the most Gen Z thing about you? And the least?

The least Gen Z thing about me is that I still use a paper planner every morning. And the most Gen Z thing about me—I feel like Gen Z just has this, like, ‘Why not me?’ spirit. And I know that doesn’t resonate with a lot of older generations, who think we should wait our turn or that we need to be quiet.

Democrats have a bad rap right now, and I’m curious how you plan to change that narrative?

That’s what primaries are all about, right? In a moment where young people feel really frustrated with the Democratic Party, and rightfully so, I think that’s what primaries can help us with, by putting names on the ballot that give us difference. Difference in experience, difference in approach and ideology and background. People, just more than anything, deserve options. And I think that’s what I can offer to this race—by getting into this primary, I am giving people an opportunity to select, to vote for, to get excited about, to mobilize on behalf of someone who, I think, as a candidate, can really resonate with a lot of their lived experiences.