A panel of criminal justice experts reflected on the results of the 2024 presidential election and its implications for Black Americans in the Burns Moot Court Room on Tuesday. 

Former Central District of California Federal Prosecutor Miram Krinsky was joined by Astead Herndon, host of the New York Times’ “The Run-Up” podcast, author DeRay Mckesson and Hawk Newsome, co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, to discuss how Democrats’ messaging during the 2024 election cycle led to historical demographic shifts among Black and Hispanic voters toward the GOP. The event was moderated by Jarvis Idowu, an adjunct law professor, and hosted by the Justice Innovation Lab, a group focused on improving public safety and reducing racial inequities. 

Idowu began the discussion by asking the panel what they have heard surrounding proposed Trump administration reforms. 

Krinsky said Trump’s legal reforms look to overhaul punishments for people who suffer from drug addiction. She said Project 2025 — an agenda created by a conservative group with ties to Trump that includes suggested executive orders and policies like cuts to Medicare and further limitations on abortion — and Agenda 47, Trump’s official platform, will be especially harmful for young people because of policy proposals like dismantling the Department of Education.

“If you look at Project 2025 combined with Agenda 47, it makes clear that he is looking to treat young people in an inherently punitive way and disavow the notion that substance use is a public health issue,” Krinsky said. 

Krinsky said Project 2025 and Agenda 47 also mention mass deportations of illegal immigrants and the abolition of mandates that grant them asylum in certain cities like D.C.

“His vision for criminal justice reform is all of the things that we’ve heard about, not just the roundups, but retribution against sanctuary cities,” Krinsky said. 

Herndon said GOP leadership’s apathy surrounding the recent nomination of cabinet members who have been accused of sexual assault, like Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz, represents a lack of trust in existing institutions among Republicans.

“They see those as reflective of a biased Justice Department, and so it fuels their sense of revenge,” Herndon said. “The informing part of it is that it kind of clarifies their lens for retribution.”

Herndon said when he attended an event that gathered formerly incarcerated men in Cleveland, Ohio, he noticed a sizable shift away from Harris among a cohort of Black men who are historically seen as solidly Democratic. 

“It was 95 percent Black men in east Cleveland, we could not find a single one of them who planned to vote for a Democrat,” Herndon said. 

He said when he asked the men why, he was told that when they returned back to their communities after carrying out their sentence, things had gotten “worse.” Herndon said he felt that official Harris campaign policies on criminal justice reform were released too close to the election.

Harris, a former prosecutor and attorney general of California, had a criminal justice platform that included a crackdown on gun violence, a promise to secure the Southern border and a call for Supreme Court reforms like a mandatory ethics pledge for justices. 

“But the fact that the criminal justice reform from Harris came two months before the election as the fifth bullet point in the agenda for Black men is unserious,” Herndon said. 

Newsome said many Black men don’t feel adequately prioritized by the Democratic Party anymore, especially with rising instances of police brutality toward Black Americans. 

“I hate Donald Trump,” Newsome said. “But at the end of the day, we’re not going to sit here and act like the Democratic Party hasn’t left us out to dry. 2021, 2022, 2023, each set a new record for police killings of our people.” 

Newsome said some payments made by the Harris campaign, such as the alleged allocation of millions of dollars in campaign funds to Oprah for a sit-down interview, illustrated a disconnect between Democratic Party leadership and those living in poverty. 

“We could have benefited from Oprah money. We could have took that to Kensington and Allegheny and fed some people,” Newsome said. 

Mckesson, author of “On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope,” said recent successes by the Biden administration in expanding the food stamp program have alleviated food insecurity for thousands of Americans. He added that an increase in police misconduct investigations can be attributed to the Biden-Harris administration as well. 

“We had the single biggest permanent increase in food stamps in American history,” Mckesson said. “The most police investigations in American history up until this administration was Obama.”

Mckesson said despite this, there is a gap in the Democratic party’s ability to convey these policy successes to voters. He said messaging on health care reforms, for instance, is paramount among them because Democrats have yet to find a communication strategy that works. 

“I don’t think we have laid the foundation on some of our key things like Medicare and Medicaid,” Mckesson said. “We just have to figure out how to tell it in a way that makes sense.”

Mckesson said increasingly, young men are gravitating to the right in excess of past generations which he attributes to conservative movements on social media sites like YouTube and X, formerly known as Twitter. 

“And when you look at 18-to-29-year-old men across race, the highest group that supported Trump were men who thought that masculinity was challenged,” Mckesson said.