This interview originally appeared in Prickly, a podcast from KJZZ’s Politics Desk. Subscribe here or wherever you get your podcasts, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Prickly newsletter.
CAMRYN SANCHEZ: 2025 is giving most of our Arizona voters a break from having to mail ballots or go to the polls, but in Congressional District 7, campaigns are underway in a special election to pick someone to replace Congressman Raúl Grijalva, who passed away earlier this year.
And this is a southern Arizona district. It covers Yuma, part of the West Valley, even. And Grijalva represented that area for two decades. So what do we know about these candidates?
WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Well, first of all, there’s a lot of them. There’s five Democrats and three Republicans running for the seat alongside an assortment of third-party candidates and write ins. But this is a safe blue district. One that Democrats really have a huge voter registration advantage in, so whoever wins the Democratic primary is all but guaranteed to win the general.
And there are two frontrunners right now in that Democratic primary in Adelita Grijalva, the daughter of the late Raúl Grijalva, who is also a Pima County supervisor before entering this race.
And then there is Daniel Hernandez. He is a former state lawmaker, and he was also a staffer for former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, perhaps best well known for actually helping save her life when she was shot during that tragic incident down in Tucson.
But there’s also a third candidate in that Democratic race who has a pretty impressive resume. Her name is Deja Fox, and though she’s just 25, she’s been involved in Democratic politics for quite a while. She worked as an influencer for Kamala Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign — yes, that was an official position. And she had a speaking slot at the DNC last year.
So I sat down with her to hear more about her story.
DEJA FOXX: I was born and raised here in Tucson, and I was raised by a single mom in Section 8 housing on SNAP benefits and Medicaid. And I was a free lunch kid in our public schools, which means that I learned what politics was in a very personal way at a very young age.
And now so many of the things I relied on — and so many families across southern Arizona rely on too — are in the crosshairs of folks like Donald Trump. And I mean, families like mine know what it’s like to make hard decisions in the grocery checkout line, while people like Trump and (Elon) Musk have probably never even done their own grocery shopping.
And it’s that kind of rub, right? Seeing elected officials who are so far out of touch, who feel so far away, making decisions about the things families like mine need to survive and thrive. That politicized me in the first place.
SANCHEZ: Fox is pretty young for a congressional candidate, but you mentioned that she has a lot of experience.
SCHUTSKY: Right. At 25, she barely meets that minimum age requirement to run for Congress. And if elected, she would be the youngest member. But she told me she’s been politically active for over a decade.
@deja_foxx All the moments that lead up to stepping on to the debate stage. #FoxxForAZ #AZ07 #DebateAZ07 ♬ original sound - Deja Foxx
FOXX: And though I’m young, I’m not new to this. I got my start at 15. When my mom struggled with substance abuse and as she was navigating the rehabilitation process, I was on my own, living with a boyfriend and his family.
And through that experience, I was sitting in a sex education classroom here in Tucson with a curriculum last updated in the ’80s that didn’t mention consent, that was medically inaccurate and — in a truly relatable turn of events — was taught by the baseball coach, an experience that I’m sure a lot of folks had.
But for someone like me who didn’t have parents at home to fill in those gaps, it was personal. And so I started showing up to the most local board you can, to your school board, and demanding that they do better, sharing this very vulnerable personal story in these meetings.
And after six months of bringing my peers along and organizing student storytellers, we won a unanimous victory to update that sex education curriculum in southern Arizona’s largest school district. And I never looked back.
SCHUTSKY: Fox is now a bona fide social media star, but one of her early viral moments happened back in 2017, when she confronted then-U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake over cuts for funding to Planned Parenthood.
(Clip from 2017 town hall plays)
FOXX: Jeff Flake, my name is Deja Foxx, and I’m a 16-year-old from Tucson. I just want to state some facts. So I’m a young woman, and you’re a middle aged man.
FLAKE: Ouch.
FOXX: I’m a person of color, and you’re white. I come from a background of poverty, and I didn’t always have parents to guide me through life. You come from privilege.
So I’m wondering, as a Planned Parenthood patient and someone who relies on Title X, who you are clearly not, why it’s your right to take away my right to choose Planned Parenthood and to choose no- copay birth control to access that. So if you can explain that to me, I would appreciate it.
(End of clip)
SCHUTSKY: Fox told me that that was a defining moment for her.
FOXX: Under the first Trump administration, Republicans here in Arizona voted in lockstep to defund Planned Parenthood centers. And these are the very same places where I received care when I had no money, no parents and no insurance. And so I showed up to a town hall, went toe-to-toe with Jeff Flake, demanding answers as to why someone like him refusing to meet with constituents like me would make those decisions about me and my body.
He told me he supported policies that support the American dream, and I asked him why he would deny me the American dream. The next day I woke up, and millions had seen that video, seen themselves in my story and the personal connection that I have to policy.
And so I tell this story to say that I am not a career politician. I am an advocate.
And when we see Republicans going so far to the right, trying to steal the things like Medicaid that our families need to just get by, we need activists who are ready to risk something to stand up, and won’t fold right on behalf of our families. And I’ve been doing that.
SANCHEZ: So it’s not strange to see a Democratic candidate going after Republicans. But Fox is running in this very safe Democratic district, which will be basically decided in the primary election. So that means she’s basically running against other Democrats and not Republicans.
And she is facing off against two of the more established candidates in Grijalva and Hernandez, because unlike Fox, these candidates have really big-name endorsements, and they have donor lists, which is the infrastructure that is critical to winning a congressional race.
SCHUTSKY: That’s right. And I discuss that with Fox, who has been able to gin up a lot of social media traffic and media coverage based on kind of that interesting backstory we’ve heard about, but she doesn’t have the same resources as Hernandez or Grijalva.
(To Foxx) You’ve obviously got a few other candidates in this race, some with good name ID. Why are you the best, I guess, champion, the best voice to represent those issues at the congressional level for District 7?
FOXX: Yeah. I mean, let’s just take it back to that origin story, right? It took advocates like me showing up and demanding better for our school board to take action. They had decades to update that curriculum. And yet it took activists like me showing up and demanding better to see real change.
And in a moment where Donald Trump is throwing rules out the window, in which Democrats have lower approval ratings than ever because voters feel that they have lost touch, we need someone who’s ready to push back and fight. And I have a decade of advocacy experience doing just that.
SCHUTSKY: Fox said that 2017 exchange with Sen. Flake is an example of what she would bring to the office. And she says Democrats need more candidates like that that are not only active but can effectively communicate what they’re doing to voters.
FOXX: We are losing folks online to apathy and to the other side, and we need and are in a deficit of effective communicators in this party. And I’ll share that our campaign has amassed over 5 million organic views, not a dollar of paid behind them, just good storytelling in a special election primary in the middle of summer in Arizona, since our launch, just a little over 30 days.
And so we would build our bench of leadership in the Democratic Party, communicate effectively with people who we stand to lose, how we are fighting for them, and bring a new kind of experience, an advocacy experience to this work under a very extreme administration.
SCHUTSKY: Camryn, you watched Grijalva, Hernandez, Fox and all the other Democratic candidates debate recently. Did you get the impression that the frontrunners view Fox as a threat?
SANCHEZ: Well, overall, I would say that Hernandez and Grijalva were largely going after one another in the debate. And Fox kind of chimed in there and put herself forward as a stand out candidate. She also labeled herself as being super progressive, and she highlighted what you’ve been saying about how she’s very young and her generation is one of the first to have what she says are fewer rights than our mothers did.
After the debate, when I asked her if she’d be willing to work across the aisle, she said that she is an activist, and she’s willing to stand up to Trump and also to Democrats who she says maybe aren’t doing enough.
SCHUTSKY: Fox told me that Democrats need candidates like her to shake up the party, and she wasn’t shy about criticizing Democratic leadership for its role in ceding ground to Trump and Republicans. And going back to that party infrastructure, she criticized leaders for lining up behind the other candidates in the primary before voters have had a chance to weigh in.
(To Foxx) You had mentioned the low approval ratings the Democratic Party has right now. As someone who’s got — we’ve talked about — you’ve been involved for a long time. You’ve worked on a presidential campaign. You spoke at the DNC, but you’re also on the ground in the community.
What’s your advice to party leaders? Where does that change need to be that you believe would bring people back into the fold?
FOXX: Thanks for teeing me up. That’s a great question. Listen, it’s not enough for our party leadership to go across the country and stump and say, “We want newer and younger leaders.” You got to back it up.
When there’s newer and younger leaders like me, who have a decade of experience in this work, who have worked on the front lines, behind the scenes and in front of the cameras as a surrogate. When I stand up, stick my head up to lead, then the very same people who are stumping saying that they want newer, younger leaders, need to show their support. And at the very least should not be putting their thumb on the scales in an open seat primary.
This is an opportunity for voters to make a decision in this district, in a district that hasn’t seen a competitive congressional race in 22 years, practically my lifetime.
And so my word to the party is that we have an opportunity in this 2025 special election to show that we learned our lessons in 2024 and set the tone for our party and our country ahead of a consequential 2026 midterms. And our candidacy offers the opportunity to say. “We learned our lesson, and we are embracing the future of our party.”
SANCHEZ: So what would you say is Fox’s path to victory? In her view, she seems to connect. Well with Gen-Z voters. But young voters are not known for being a very reliable voting bloc.
SCHUTSKY: I asked her how she plans to translate that social media and online engagement into votes.
(To Foxx) How do you translate that engagement into votes when, as we know, young people aren’t always the best at turning out in elections, especially a special primary like you’re going to be running in?
FOXX: I’ll tell you two stories, both about a canvass two weeks ago. We have Friday night canvasses here in Tucson. And just a few weeks ago, three folks showed up who I had never seen before. I walked up to them, greeted them, welcomed them to our campaign and asked how they found us.
And these aren’t folks who are just voting. These are folks who are showing up to volunteer, right? That’s a step higher on that ladder of engagement, all of them young people. And they told us they found us on TikTok. I asked if they’d ever knock doors before. They said no, they’d never knock doors for a political candidate, but that they were excited about our campaign.
And these are two frat boys from the University of Arizona and one young woman who I took out with me. And as I was walking and talking with her, knocking the doors, I asked, “OK, so if you’ve never shown up before, why show up for this campaign”? Again — and I cannot stress this enough — a special election primary in the middle of summer in Arizona.
And she told me she considers herself politically active. She critiques things online, she pays attention, she has an opinion. But she had yet to find a political home that she felt she could build something better. And that is what we offer people.
SCHUTSKY: And Fox says she’s not just connecting with young voters. She says older Democrats, especially women that she speaks to on the campaign trail, want to see the younger generation step into positions of leadership and fight for things like reproductive rights.
SANCHEZ: All right. We’ll see if those voters turn out for her in the primary election, which is on July 15.
