Alexis Frank, a 26-year-old political novice, never considered vying for Congress until...
First She Marched, Then She Ran
Alexis Frank, a 26-year-old political novice, never considered vying for Congress — until she saw Hillary Clinton lose.
By Marin Cogan
June 1, 2017
8:00 am
The 2016 presidential election unfolded for Alexis Frank as a kind of awakening. She was 26 years old, a mother of two, and the biracial daughter of a single mom, living on base at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina with her husband, an active-duty Marine, about 250 miles away from her home in South Carolina. Before the campaign, she had never considered herself particularly political. Now, though, she was posting furiously to Facebook: “A man who fought so hard to find a way not to fight for his country, has the audacity to insult our most precious POWs. If you are a vet and support this scum, I don’t get you. This is despicable …”
By Election Day, she saw sending Hillary Clinton to the White House as a moral imperative. That night, she fell asleep watching the returns. She woke up around 2 a.m. to feed her infant daughter. Soon after, Clinton was calling Trump to concede. “I cried,” Frank says. “We had elected a man who had pushed all of these hateful platforms.” In January, she went to the Women’s March on Washington, putting a banner on her daughter’s carrier that said MOMMY MARCHES FOR ME. “The greatest thing I have received from this election is the realization that I care about this country way more than I ever thought I did,” she wrote on Facebook a few days later, “and it might be high time that I started working towards putting that care into action.” In late February, she saw a YouTube video that gave her an idea of what that action might be. The video had been made by a 34-year-old freelance photographer named Frankie Norstad, who’d started uploading videos breaking down how progressives could fight Trump. In the one Frank saw, Norstad gave an overview of special elections happening in the first half of 2017.
“Let’s talk South Carolina’s District 5,” she says in the video. The district encompasses the north-central part of the state. Near the top is Rock Hill, a quaint college town south of Charlotte, North Carolina. From there, it stretches down to the Midlands, stopping just outside Columbia. The seat had been held by a Democrat for nearly 30 years, until 2010, when the district elected Mick Mulvaney, who made a name for himself as a founding member of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus. After winning the presidency, Trump picked Mulvaney to be the director of the Office of Management and Budget. That meant his seat was now open. At the time, the only candidates running to fill it were Republicans, which made sense, since a Republican would almost certainly take the seat. There needed to be at least one Democrat in contention, Norstad argued. “Find me a person of color, an activist, a pastor, an educator, a woman.”
Frank emailed Norstad that day. Less than two weeks later, she was driving down to Columbia with her mother to file the paperwork to become a candidate for South Carolina’s fifth district. Which was how Frank found herself, in late April, at the annual state Democratic Party dinner in Columbia. Around her, the local Establishment waited to hear DNC chair Tom Perez speak, while Frank sat at a table with her mother. If she won, she would become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. “We’ll see,” she said, picking at a piece of lettuce from her salad. “I can’t go back to being a stay-at-home mom, I know that much.”
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