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.

 

- Marin Cogan

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.