Social media activist Deja Foxx has been dubbed the ‘next AOC’ as she runs to fill a vacant Congressional seat in Arizona.
The 25-year-old made her name as an abortion rights activist and built a legion of over 200,000 Instagram followers with her snazzy social media posts and advocacy work.
She launched her campaign for Arizona’s 7th District seat in April, which is vacant following the death of Democrat Congressman Raúl Grijalva from cancer in March aged 77.
Her efforts have quickly been compared to that of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known as AOC, when she ran on an ultra-liberal platform to unseat longtime New York Congressman Joe Crowley in 2019.
AOC was four years older at the time than Foxx is now, and rode a wave of liberal outrage at President Trump during his first term to become a prominent member of ‘The Squad’ in Washington DC.
Foxx is running on a similar platform to the one that got AOC elected, and has made abortion rights and criticizing the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade – which codified the right to an abortion federally – central pillars of her campaign.
Foxx also named AOC and firebrand Democrat Jasmine Crockett as her inspirations in Congress, saying they ‘best represent the values of the party.’
However, she remains a longshot to win the Democrat primary when voters head to the polls in July.
Foxx gained just five percent support in a Public Policy Polling survey compared to 49 percent for Adelita Grijalva, the daughter of the deceased congressman they are running to replace.
Despite trailing heavily in the race, Foxx has said she is undaunted by the polling numbers, and hopes to replicate AOC when she overcame huge odds to defeat Crowley six years ago.
She has noted that her support is made up of small donors and her average contribution is around $29, saying she is rejecting big super PAC money like AOC before her.
Although she is only 25, Foxx has made her youth a key selling point, telling Newsweek that ‘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.’
‘Age is a defining factor in our political system, like it or not, it just is,’ she said, and pointed out that the seat she is running for ‘opened up because somebody passed away while in office.’
The advanced age of many lawmakers in Washington DC has been growing as an issue in recent times, with Grijalva becoming the third Democrat in Congress to die in office this year.
Since 2022, eight members of Congress have passed away.
Foxx first rose to prominence as an abortion rights activist in 2017 when she was just 16 years old, as footage of her confronting then-Arizona Senator Jeff Flake at a town hall went viral.
She berated Flake over cuts to Planned Parenthood, and catapulted her viral fame into becoming a social media influencer, often sharing similar clips of her confronting Republicans online.
Recalling her start in politics, she told Newsweek: ‘I was a teenager living with my boyfriend, working at a gas station. We relied on Title X funding’, referring to the federal program that supports services like Planned Parenthood.
She said she often used ‘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.’
She says on her campaign website she experienced homelessness during a turbulent adolescence, but rose to become the first in her family to attend college, earning a full ride to Columbia University in New York to study political science.
While at Columbia, Foxx joined Kamala Harris’ first run for the presidency in 2020 and went on to lead her 2020 campaign 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,’ she said.
After Harris lost the 2024 election in a landslide, Foxx said she decided to run for Congress because she ‘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.’