During the run-up to the 2024 presidential election contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, I convened a group of incarcerated Black college students at Valley State Prison for a roundtable discussion about their views on race, culture and Harris’s candidacy [link]. Informed by that feedback, I urged Democrats to “pay attention” to the opinions of prisoners—I warned readers that captives were a “bellwether”—and predicted that “a larger portion of the Black electorate” would vote for the Trump ticket, provided he wasn’t “in prison or dead by then.”
Kamala lost, Trump secured more Black votes than any Republican presidential candidate in history, and an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania nearly fulfilled my piece’s lethal prophecy.
Though my sampling of captive opinions accurately foreshadowed the electorate’s shift—rebuking the legacy media’s consensus prediction (driven by incorrect polling) that Black voters would support Harris, and Trump would lose handily—because parolees could not vote at the time, political actors had no cause to be concerned about what incarcerated people thought about politics. However, because California has since made voting accessible to people living under the carceral conditions of parole, the political attitudes of the state’s incarcerated population now represent an emergent vector of power waiting to be consolidated.
Contrary to the prevailing polling painting Trump as underwater with his own supporters, six of the eight Black college students I talked to—an evenly divided group of liberal and conservative imprisoned males—predicted that, apart from likely losing races in Michigan, North Carolina and Kansas, MAGA Republicans will break the incumbent Midterm curse, prove the polls wrong, and hold both the House and the Senate.
Antoine, a 36-year old former gang member serving life for a home invasion robbery, who despises Trump, but also derided Harris for “sending Black men to prison for marijuana possession” as California’s Attorney General, said “though young folks with no skin in the game will be quick to protest for a government check, the DSA platform is too toxic for Democrats with stake in the economy to support it.”
Marcus, a lifelong 53-year old Democrat, cited “the left’s support for men in women’s sports and trans policies in public schools” as the “crazy ass policies” causing him to view the economy—instead of social issues—as most important.
Darius, a 43-year old former drug dealer serving life for murder, who was raised in a Democrat household, lamented that “the left has abandoned the working class—my father was a union man—supports increased taxes, wants to expand the role of the government, and has put immigrants ahead of our existing poor. Serving coke taught me about supply and demand, how the economy works, and how wealth operates when you can own property; but Nixon killed off the emergent post-war Black middle class by offshoring our manufacturing base to China, Clinton criminalized the urban poverty that resulted from that deindustrialization, and my generation was left to get it how we could get it. I think Trump’s policies have proven to work for Black people.”
Clayton, a 26-year old serving 8 years for fraud and robbery, scoffed at what he called the “media hype” and “fear mongering” driving negative opinion about the economy. “The economy is actually strong as hell, despite the price of gas, and everything energy touches,” he said. “The leftist fed is using rate increases to throttle wage growth and hurt Trump, but the tariff strategy has worked, manufacturing investments are booming, and choking off Iran in a game of chicken—I predict—will prove to be one of Trump’s most daring and correct decisions he’s ever made.”
Robert, a 41-year old Muslim serving LWOP for kidnap and murder, said “I will never support a Republican, no matter who is running. I reject racist ideologies, view the right as the racist face of capitalism, and support radical ideas. I hope the left turns Trump into a lame duck, impeaches him, and elects AOC in 2028.”
What stands out from talking to Black people who can only consume televised media from a prison cell—ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS, Al Jazeera, Newsmax and RAV are the only channels captives can access—is how effective conservative counter-programming is when made available to people who have never been exposed to it.
Derrick, a 46-year old lifelong liberal serving life for a drive-by shooting, said “watching Steve Bannon’s War Room completely shifted my world view. Only after I learned about fiscal policy and capital markets, was I able to see through Obama’s refrain about how those lost manufacturing jobs weren’t coming back. Trump didn’t just prove him wrong, Trump exposed why the left never tried to bring our manufacturing capacity back to support our middle class—because the middle class was sold out. I’m convinced that liberals, the party of slavery, Jim Crow and Covid lockdowns, is an anti-Black ideology rooted in social control.”
This group debated about the more than 300,000 unaccompanied minors Biden “lost” while ushering in millions of immigrants some view as the less expensive labor force imported to replace them, the fraud being exposed in Democrat-controlled states, and the left’s opposition to voter ID. One moment of agreement came when the group was asked to compare how the left stood with BLM protestors, with how the left has activated around the deportation of immigrants.
“White leftists were shot and killed placing themselves between ICE officers and illegal immigrants,” noted Malcolm, a 33-year old independent, “but weren’t that radical over anti-Black police shootings. Black lives matter less.”
Regardless of their current party allegiance, issue identification, or historical leanings, the Black captives I spoke to seem to have mapped a pattern of leftist pro-immigrant activism that has caused them to question where they stand with the Democrat party. According to some of them, because Biden’s DHS allowed the border to be overrun, created a government-sponsored app in order to coordinate the chartered flight arrival of millions of immigrants who were then deposited into Democratic districts, placed them into lush American hotels using FEMA funds, lavished them with welfare benefits, and then afforded them in-state legal cover that prevented federal voter ID law enforcement from restricting their participation in elections via mail-in ballot, there is good cause for Black voters to feel replaced by the emergent immigrant constituency. As well, in light of the highly visible on-the-ground coordination of white activists working in multiple cities to physically impede and violently antagonize ICE operations in service of immigrants—something not seen when police killed multiple unarmed Black citizens during the decade preceding the murder of George Floyd—there is reason for Black voters to feel as if the wrongful deaths of unarmed Black arrestees are less important than the wrongful deaths of white activists gunned down while advocating for immigrants against ICE agents. Black lives haven’t just taken a back seat to immigrants, they’ve slipped into third place behind white activists.
These are some of the more sublimated racialized sentiments pulsing through the non-monolithic Black experience in America being ignored by pollsters, party operatives, and the media. If Trump and his MAGA candidates hold on to their majorities in the House and Senate, and the Democratic pickups only occur where there Biden’s DHS routed heavy numbers of immigrants, the left might regret abandoning the Black vote.
The 2026 midterms could be 2028’s early reveal.
