Sand and a Few Drops of Water
“Put not your trust in princes…” — Psalm 146:3
The primary, the pulpit, and the promises that arrive only after they need us
Every election season the knock comes. I have written about it so many weeks running that I sometimes feel I am beating a horse that should have been buried long ago, but the horse keeps getting up because the Democratic Party keeps riding it. A candidate arrives in our neighborhoods, in our churches, and on our favorite morning shows with a carrot in one hand and a warning in the other. Vote for me, the message goes, or else. Or else the other side wins. Or else everything our grandparents marched for is lost. The carrot changes from cycle to cycle. One year it is healthcare, another year it is student debt, another it is down payment assistance. This year the carrot is reparations. What never changes is the timing, and what never arrives is the delivery.
The party had its lesson handed to it in 2024 and refused to learn it. Kamala Harris did not lose because of Gaza. In my view she lost because she was disingenuous with the very people she needed most. She sold herself to American Black voters as one of us. She borrowed our stories, including the busing story she claimed on a debate stage in 2019, a story I actually lived as a nine-year-old in New Brunswick in 1977. She leaned on our history and on our voting bloc to carry her toward the top seat in the American government. Yet when the question turned to what she would do for American descendants of slavery, a people with a specific lineage and a specific claim on this nation, she had nothing to offer us by name. Whatever she proposed was proposed to everyone, which meant it promised nothing to us in particular. Our stories were good enough to campaign on but never good enough to govern for.
The party should have learned from that defeat. Instead it learned something more cynical, and the evidence sits in three races spread across three states.
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Democrats know they have a problem with their far-left and Democratic Socialist candidates, and they figured it out in New York. In the June 2025 mayoral primary, predominantly Black neighborhoods went to Andrew Cuomo over Zohran Mamdani by 16 points. The voters who carried Mamdani over the line were young, white, college-educated, and concentrated in the corners of the city where students and new arrivals live. American Black New Yorkers looked at the democratic socialist and said no. Then something happened between June and November. Mamdani's campaign turned its attention to southeast Queens and eastern Brooklyn, to the historically Black neighborhoods that had rejected him, and in the general election he won majority-Black precincts by 26 points. The party watched that swing and drew its conclusion. You can lose the American Black vote in the primary and buy it back in the fall. All it takes is attention, promises, and a few Sunday mornings. Outside of the college towns these candidates need us desperately, and now they believe they know the price.
So what have the people who swung to Mamdani in November actually received? He campaigned on taxing the wealthy, and as mayor he went to Albany asking for a 2 percent income tax increase on millionaires and a higher corporate rate. The state budget that passed contained neither. What his office did circulate to state lawmakers was a proposal to cut New York's estate tax exemption from $7.35 million to $750,000 and to raise the top rate from 16 percent to 50 percent. Think about who that net would catch. Nobody in southeast Queens would call a $750,000 estate rich. That number describes the families of Cambria Heights, Laurelton, and St. Albans who bought modest homes decades ago, paid them off, and planned to leave them to their children, and for many American Black families that house is the entire inheritance. Albany did not adopt the idea, but a mayor who put it on paper has told us what he thinks our grandparents' houses are for. He also threatened a 9.5 percent property tax increase if the state refused his demands, then apologized to Black state legislators for floating it before he ever spoke with them, while Queens Borough President Donovan Richards called it a nonstarter. The homeowners who would have paid were the last people consulted.
His record on the street tells the same story. Days into his term he paused the encampment sweeps of the Adams years, and by February he had reversed himself after a double-digit death toll from cold exposure. In September he unveiled a $4 million pilot for seventeen public restrooms, roughly $235,000 apiece, each with a ten-minute limit, after which the door opens automatically. The operator says the clock is there to discourage loitering and drug use, which tells you the people most likely to need those toilets were treated as the problem to be managed, and homeless advocates have already asked how New Yorkers without smartphones are supposed to get in. In fairness, his administration did open 2,000 free childcare seats for two-year-olds this fall, some of them in Canarsie and Brownsville, and the families who received them will be glad of it. But that program rests on $1.2 billion from Albany, it serves 2,000 children in a city of more than 50,000 two-year-olds, and it is offered to every family regardless of lineage. I have searched his first nine months for a single policy directed at the injury and the claim that belong to American descendants of slavery, and I cannot find one. The carrot that brought Black New York to him in November has yet to be delivered.
Texas is running the same play. James Talarico knows that a great many American Black Texans stood with Jasmine Crockett against him, and he knows his general election is a hard sell in our communities. In the March primary, Crockett won 86 percent of the vote in the heavily Black precincts of Harris County while Talarico carried the predominantly white precincts three to one. During that primary, when he was asked whether he supported reparations, his campaign and his legislative office declined to answer. Crockett answered. She supported the House bill. Talarico stayed silent, won the nomination anyway, and then found his voice. At a July town hall in DeSoto, a voter asked him about reparations, and he said that repairing past harms was part of his faith tradition. He spoke of tuition relief, homeownership grants, and baby bonds. He named no bill, no eligibility, no funding source, and no cost. Around the same time he pledged $25 million to Black voter outreach and began touring Black churches he now calls his "spiritual homes away from home." In August he sat down on The Breakfast Club. On another podcast he had already told listeners that Black churches understand what it means to follow Jesus more accurately than white churches do. Flattery is the oldest carrot of all, and it costs the candidate nothing.
Michigan completes the pattern. I wrote "A Warning From Detroit" before the votes were counted, and the returns proved the warning true. On August 4, Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary by a narrow margin, running up his numbers in college towns and liberal enclaves. Detroit, the largest Black-majority city in the state, gave Haley Stevens more than 60 percent of its vote, and El-Sayed became the first Michigan Democrat since 2018 to win a statewide primary without carrying the city. His explanation for losing Detroit tells you everything. He blamed the money, more than $60 million in advertising by his own count, much of it reminding voters of Stevens's ties to Barack Obama. In his telling, Detroit was moved by a television commercial. The possibility that Detroit heard him clearly and decided against him never seems to enter the conversation.
Three weeks after the primary, Jesse Watters asked El-Sayed directly whether he supports reparations. He answered that we need "an honest conversation" about the debt owed to Black folks, and before the sentence was finished he had turned to making Detroit's schools "whole." Compare that to his 2020 book Healing Politics, where he wrote that the country needed "a policy of reparations for Black and Native Americans." His spokeswoman now says his opinions have evolved. Follow the carrot as it shrinks. A policy in 2020 became a conversation in 2026 and a school funding plan by the end of the same answer. Notice also how he folded two peoples into one sentence, as though the claim of American descendants of slavery and the claim of Native Americans arose from the same history, the same injury, and the same ledger. Our claim rests on lineage, and anyone who blurs that lineage in a book will blur it in a bill. Then the establishment fell in line. The Congressional Black Caucus PAC, whose members had largely backed Stevens, endorsed him. Jim Clyburn, who cut ads for Stevens, endorsed him. And Kamala Harris began raising money for him. The woman who taught the party its lesson in 2024 is now helping fund the same approach in 2026.
Set the three races side by side and the sequence is identical. The candidate loses American Black voters in the primary to an electorate of young white progressives. The candidate wins the nomination anyway. The candidate then discovers reparations, discovers our churches, discovers our podcasts, and discovers a budget line for outreach. Behind every one of those discoveries sits the same assumption: that American Blacks do not follow politics, do not read the Bible, and will not remember what was said in March by the time November arrives. They come as though we are gullible. They come as though we are blind and easily led. The returns from Brooklyn, Harris County, and Detroit say otherwise, and that is exactly why the carrots came out.
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What strikes me about this season's pitch is how redundant it is and how ridiculous it is at the same time. It is redundant because we have heard every line before: free healthcare, free education, affordable housing, and a long list of caveats that never make it into the brochure. It is ridiculous because the same candidates who promise to care for our families from cradle to grave also tell us that abortion is reproductive healthcare. They offer to protect our children's futures while defending the ending of our children's lives.
Talarico goes further than most, because he brings the argument into the pulpit and wraps it in Scripture. On The Joe Rogan Experience he argued that before the Incarnation, God asked for Mary's consent, and that this shows "creation has to be done with consent." In a later interview he said plainly that Jesus never talks about abortion and that the Bible is silent on it. So the message to our congregations becomes this: Mary had a choice, so you have a choice, and Jesus would bless whatever you choose. But read the passage he relies on. When Gabriel finished speaking, Mary answered, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word" (Luke 1:38). Those are the words of a servant surrendering to the will of God. Mary was not negotiating terms with heaven. And even if we granted his reading, a woman's consent to conceive says nothing about the right to end a life that has already been conceived. The child in the womb is the very creation he says requires consent, and that child is never asked.
Talarico also preaches a Jesus so loving and forgiving that He forgives the murderer, the harlot, and everyone living in sin, with no mention of what is required of them. His Jesus has compassion and no boundaries. But the God of Scripture drew the first boundary in the Garden of Eden: "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Genesis 2:16-17). Death entered the world through Adam's disobedience (Romans 5:12), and salvation comes through Jesus Christ, but it comes with repentance. "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish" (Luke 13:3). Even with the woman caught in adultery, the very story candidates like Talarico love to tell, Jesus refused to condemn her and in the same breath commanded her, "go, and sin no more" (John 8:11). Mercy and boundary stood together in the mouth of our Lord. A Jesus who forgives without calling anyone to change is a Jesus built for a campaign stop. Still, the pulpit remains the richest place to harvest votes, and a candidate who steps into it to tell a congregation half the gospel is counting on that congregation not to know the other half.
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The healthcare promise deserves its own look, because it rests on the same condescension. El-Sayed ran on universal health care and tells us the system is broken. I recently finished Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist, and something in its final chapters stayed with me. Kendi's wife developed cancer. His mother developed cancer. Then Kendi himself developed cancer. Three American Black patients walked into the American healthcare system, received treatment, and lived to tell about it, and yet he proclaims that same system racist. I will return to Kendi in another essay, but the point stands on its own here. We have access to healthcare. Could it be improved? Indeed it could. Does that mean we need the government to run the industry and spend our tax dollars handing us the version of care that politicians decide we need?
When I listen to El-Sayed, I hear a man who does not seem to realize that our families have been taxpayers in this country for generations, and that our ancestors paid before that in labor that never once came with wages. His family's story in America is one generation long. Ours is measured in centuries. That fact should humble the posture of a man who speaks as though he is extending us access to a house our ancestors helped build. We do not need to be managed. We need to be respected, and respect begins with telling us the truth when you need nothing from us.
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In the old story, the Sandman comes at night and sprinkles sand into children's eyes so they will fall asleep. These candidates come to us like the Sandman, carrying sand in one hand and a few drops of water in the other, walking into what they imagine is a desert. The sand is meant to put us to sleep. The drops of water are meant to make us grateful. They pour out a promise of reparations with no bill behind it, a church visit with no repentance in it, and a healthcare plan that asks for our trust and our tax dollars while telling our daughters that their children are optional.
But we are awake. We read the Bible, and we know the difference between the Jesus of Scripture and the Jesus of a campaign. We read the returns, and we know who voted for these candidates in the spring and whom they came looking for in the fall. So before any of us gives a vote to a candidate standing in our pulpit or sitting across from Charlamagne, ask one question and insist on an answer: What did you say about us when you did not need us? The answer to that question is the only promise worth believing.
