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Frost touts giving candidates 'stipends' when they run for office — new rule allows it • Florida Phoenix [1]

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Date: 2024-06-03  

Orlando-area Democratic U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost said on Monday that he supports giving congressional candidates stipends to support them financially as they run for federal office for the first time — and a new federal election rule in place for only two months will allow candidates to do just that.

Speaking on Sirius/XM’s POTUS channel, Frost, at 27 still the youngest member of Congress, told host Julie Mason that he struggled mightily to stay financially afloat when he ran for Congress leading to his election in November 2022.

Noting that 95% of congressional elections are decided by who spent the most money, he said there is a need for campaign finance reform to level the playing field. He said his solution would be to have publicly funded elections, but he acknowledged that the public isn’t with him on that issue. The next best thing, he continued, would be to allow congressional candidates to receive stipends from the funds they raise in running for office.

“When you run for office, when you’re for Congress, often you have to quit your job,” he said.

“And if you quit your job and you don’t have a ton of money in the bank, you need money to pay your rent. You need money to live. Medicine. Food. I skipped so many meals when I was running for office. I got priced out of my home and didn’t have a place to live for two months. I had to Uber at night from like 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. every night while I was campaigning in the morning and throughout the day to be able to make ends meet. And look, if I had a family, I would have dropped out of my race midway through. I could slum it up for a year and a half by myself. But this is why working families aren’t represented as much as they should be in the halls of Congress.”

Frost made similar comments while speaking at a public hearing on congressional salaries with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) last year. And he made national news shortly after being elected at age 25 in the fall of 2022 in a series of tweets about how he struggled to qualify financially for housing in Washington, D.C. Campaign records show that he did take a salary of $9,382 from his 2022 campaign.

But help is already in place. Under a rule approved last December by the FEC, candidates can now use campaign funds to pay themselves up to 50% of the annual U.S. House salary or the equivalent of the average annual income they earned during the previous five years — whichever is lower. The measure went into effect on March 1, 2024. The annual compensation for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives is $174,000.

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[1] Url: https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/06/03/frost-touts-giving-candidates-stipends-when-they-run-for-office-new-rule-allows-it/

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