A meme-sharing group of progressive, young politicos is charting new ways to fuse politics with pop culture. They’ve celebrated Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s Gershwin Prize at the Library of Congress; paid a somber visit to the Pulse nightclub memorial in Orlando; and, this past weekend, gathered for festivities surrounding the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, DC.
From their social media presence alone, it’s clear that Democratic representative Maxwell Frost of Florida, Tennessee state representative Justin Jones, North Carolina Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton, digital strategist Annie Wu Henry, and gun safety and LGBTQ rights activist Brandon Wolf spend a fair bit of time together. But behind the scenes, these next-generation leaders have found camaraderie in a text chain where they navigate what Henry describes as the “craziness” of existing in a world where the majority of their colleagues are three times their age—at least. Henry started the chat, called “Elder Youths,” last year.
Most of the Elder Youths (aside from Jones) descended on DC last weekend. Henry cohosted a welcome-to-Washington dinner at the Watergate Hotel for model Coco Rocha on Friday, and on Saturday, Henry, Frost, Wolf, and Clayton waltzed down the red carpet ahead of the dinner itself before schmoozing at an after-party hosted by Time magazine and Amazon MGM at the official residence of the Swiss ambassador. (There, like so many of the young and online these days, they posed for a group selfie in 0.5 mode, using an iPhone’s back camera.)
As a self-described “girl balling on a budget,” Clayton wore a Ralph Lauren dress already in her closet and Sam Edelman shoes. (Besides a necklace from Green’s Jewelers in Roxboro, North Carolina—her hometown—her jewelry was from David Yurman.) Henry, meanwhile, sported two Andrew Kwon designs and a vintage Chanel bag she bought on The RealReal. (She also wore a pin in the shape of a white dove that said “Free Palestine,” purchased from a Palestinian-owned shop on Etsy.) The guys kept things simple: Wolf donned a navy tuxedo from Hugo Boss along with a pair of diamond cuff links from his dad, and Frost wore a rental tuxedo with what he called a “droopy” bow tie and a pair of Dr. Martens brogues.
Jones, who was expelled from and then reinstated in the Tennessee Statehouse last year after standing up for gun safety following the shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, hung back in Tennessee for the end of the state legislature session. But he followed along with the weekend’s activities via the group chat, and even photoshopped himself into a photo.
“It’s this common place where there’s anything from a funny tweet to letting people know, ‘Hey, I’m in town,’” says Henry, 28. “We shout people out. It’s a space to privately be each other’s cheerleaders.”
Henry grew up in Hanover, Pennsylvania, and ran John Fetterman’s TikTok account during his 2022 campaign for senate. She points to a day when Clayton appeared live on CNN, or when Frost spoke in the Rose Garden at the White House, as occasions when the “celebratory hype squad,” as Wolf refers to it, was particularly active.
“We talk about politics and event ideas. We tend to be in a lot of the same spaces, being young people in the progressive democratic world,” says Frost, 27, the first member of Generation Z in Congress. “We’re working to bridge that gap between cool and consciousness, between culture and politics, and we’re always bouncing ideas off each other [about] how we can work together to further that vision.”
It was Frost who organized a Capitol Hill press conference focused on democracy and gun safety in Jones’s honor after Jones was expelled from his state legislature—and Frost and Henry who took him on his first roller coaster, at Universal theme park. Most recently, Jones says, he’s been listening to the Kendrick Lamar album To Pimp a Butterfly, a gift from Frost, whom he called his “brother.”
Though the Elder Youths unanimously appreciate Frost’s loyalty, he himself admits he’s “notoriously one of the folks who is bad at keeping up with the group chat.” After a few days on Capitol Hill for votes, Frost will “reply to people very late, which I think is funny sometimes,” he says. “Apple’s reply feature is a godsend.”
When it comes to in-person dinners (which are most often organized by Henry, whom Clayton deems the queen of group meals and happy hours), the Elder Youths often go family-style. “I take charge to make sure we don’t over-order,” Henry says.
In March, when Frost hosted a music festival in Orlando featuring indie pop band Muna, he used the group chat to invite Jones, Henry, Wolf, and Clayton—and all but Clayton attended. (Both Jones and Wolf, the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, made on-stage appearances at what Wolf dubbed “Maxchella.”) Just before the festival, the group visited the Pulse Nightclub Memorial, along with Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York and Greg Casar of Texas. Wolf, who survived the tragic Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016, spoke about his experience on that tragic night, and his work to stop gun violence and LGBTQ hate since.
Gun safety is a cornerstone issue for all members of Elder Youth. Frost, for his part, has long said that he first felt compelled to get involved with politics after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in 2014. He worked with March For Our Lives as the gun safety organization’s national organizing director before running for office himself.
Last year, after a shooting at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill left one professor dead, Clayton, 26, called Jones, who had just come off a spring and summer of rallying against gun violence, to ask for help hosting a demonstration for gun violence prevention. “I was like, ‘Will you come? I need help. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know what I’m doing.’ And he was like, ‘I’ll be there,’” she says.
Clayton has reached out to members of the group at different times for their support, and says their rapport is incomparable. “Annie was there for that [rally] as well. Maxwell came for my Young Democrats of North Carolina convention,” she says. “It’s one of the best support systems I’ve got in this job. It’s them.”
Others feel similarly. While working for an LGBTQ rights group in Florida, Wolf asked Frost for a hand running counter-programming for an event that former President Donald Trump was hosting in Orlando. “Maxwell, of course, rescued the whole thing,” Wolf, 35, says. Not only did Frost come for the event, but “the icing on the cake,” as Wolf describes it, was that Frost, a percussionist and music aficionado, DJed the event himself.
It’s not lost on any of the group’s members that the majority of them are from and represent diverse communities in the South, an area that many political pundits have written off as unwinnable for Democrats, forever beholden to conservative ideologies. “The Southern segregationists would say that the South will rise again, and I’ve rejected that,” Jones, 28, says. Pointing to himself, Clayton, and Frost, each of whom are the youngest in their respective positions, he adds, “we represent a new South that is multiracial, multigenerational, multi-faith, that is pro-immigrant, pro-economic justice, and anti-systemic racism and homophobia.”
Like the others in the group chat, he believes in the value and importance of representation. “Having people like us in these spaces is critical. We’ve been told to fall into nihilism about the South, but I really believe that the reason we’re seeing so much repression and attack in the South is because there is so much resistance and revolutionary activity to quell.”
The Elder Youths all reference each other as a pillar of support in a political ecosystem where they deviate from the status quo. Not only can they look to their group chat for legitimate career advice, but they can also just be 20-somethings there.
“We really built a community for ourselves,” says Clayton, joking that the group could be the punchline of a gag about a member of Congress, a state representative, a digital strategist, a communications expert, and a state party chair walking into a bar. “We crave representation. At the end of the day, we’re all like, ‘Man, we understand why we’re all in this together’… It is just about getting something done for our people. And I think that’s the cool part—and the part that keeps me sane.”