What Sharpton wants to hear from 2028’s Democratic contenders

The nine potential Democratic presidential candidates set to speak to Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network this week will face pointed questions about a topic that’s tricky for the party — how to restore Biden-era racial equity policies that Donald Trump erased.

“I want to know how they will deal with issues like DEI, which has been a major template of Trump 2.0,” Sharpton told Semafor. “How will they deal with hate crimes? How will they deal with the fact that we’re seeing, in the military, people not promoted based on gender and on race?”

Sharpton, who unsuccessfully sought the party’s presidential nomination in 2004, has ever since invited influential Democrats to address his group. Amid a flourishing of liberal and Democratic organizing under Trump, he said that he wanted — at least for a few days — to refocus that energy on civil rights and Black Americans.

Held over four days, his group’s conference will be the largest single gathering of potential Democratic candidates since their party lost the White House. They’ll face a host and audience that view the Biden-Harris administration favorably, and fear an irreversible rollback of civil rights policies that helped Black voters.

“I helped out on the front line of the No Kings March in New York, right?” Sharpton said. “I’m all for [a] coalition, but we need to also address the entire coalition and the concerns that we have in different parts, different silos of the coalition.”

Heeding Sharpton’s call to defend DEI policies could prove a challenge for Democrats who have worried that they’re playing into conservatives’ hands by sounding “woke” without gaining anything for it, from white or non-white voters.

Sharpton is also concerned about last week’s arguments before the Supreme Court on the administration’s bid to dismantle birthright citizenship. He warned that conservative justices might dismantle Section II of the Voting Rights Act, a move that would pave the way for the redistricting of some Black lawmakers’ House seats, while using a ruling against the Trump administration’s birthright position as cover.

“How will they try and relitigate that?” Sharpton said he would ask the presidential contenders-in-waiting who are coming to New York. “Do you have a plan for that?”

In his second term, Sharpton argued, Trump embodied “the bigotry that he demonstrated in New York” when he called for the death penalty to be used against young Black men who were later exonerated of rape charges. Dismantling affirmative action in federal contracting and laying off Black federal workers, as Sharpton saw it, necessitated a response.

And Sharpton will get a response this week from nearly every Democrat he invited. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, he said, had a scheduling conflict that proved impossible to get around. (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. was also unable to make it.)

He said he expects Harris to talk about what would be happening differently under “a Harris presidency,” while the other Democrats, who’d mostly impressed him with their work over the last year, would get other questions.

“I think being at a civil rights organization, they should discuss civil rights issues,” he said. Trump’s eager use of executive powers could also inspire some questions: “Will you be willing to make executive orders to bring back balance where he’s brought an imbalance?”