Why Cory Booker failed to inspire young voters of color

After Donald Trump was elected, many of my friends purchased bright red caps that read “Make My President Black Again”. Humorously nostalgic for President Obama, I do not think they anticipated their new options would be Senator Cory Booker, Senator Kamala Harris, or Deval Patrick. Now, Senator Booker is out. He announced via Twitter that he was suspending his campaign for president.

My first ever Twitter fight was with Senator Booker. After a string of police killings and fresh non-indictments, he was tweeting about vegan recipes. After I expressed disbelief at the timing of his culinary thread, he drowned me in lecture about how black people were dying from cooking and eating habits. He randomly followed me right after. He still does.

Ironically, I did not know at the time of our brief Twitter beef that Newark police department was under a federal consent decree. The American Civil Liberties Union was pursuing more than 400 cases of police brutality against the Newark police, and the city has paid millions of dollars to victims of police violence. When Vice-President Joe Biden called out Booker’s police department’s misconduct during a debate, Booker explained: “You’re dipping into the Kool-Aid and you don’t even know the flavor.”

Related: Cory Booker drops out of 2020 race and promises to 'carry this fight forward'

Here’s the flavor of the month: as of December 2019, the Newark police department disproportionately stops, frisks, and arrests poor, black people.

I’d been following Booker for a little while because I saw him as the Superman mayor of Newark, New Jersey. Snowed in at your house? Tweet Cory. Electricity out on your block? DM the mayor. Traditional public schools need support? Well, it’s complicated. In one of his recent tales from living in the Newark projects, he met a mother who asked him to get her son into a private school. Booker carries this story with him as mayor, where he worked with corporations and the Republican governor Chris Christie to expand the charter school landscape, a public enemy of teachers’ unions, who typically back Democrats in elections. Today, Newark’s charters are “thriving” and traditional public schools are still suffering budget constraints.

Beyond education, Senator Booker also gained a less-than-stellar reputation for being in the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry. He’s taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from pharmaceutical companies and donors throughout his career, though he did return at least one donation after he said that he did not accept any funds from the industry during a presidential debate last year. In the same debate, he suggested that pharmaceutical executives responsible for the opioid crisis should be held criminally liable.

Senator Booker’s criminal justice outlook was not particularly inspiring. His Next Step Act, for example, proposed shorter mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenders instead of simply freeing that group. Instead of decriminalizing crack or cocaine use, he offered to end the sentencing disparity. Refusing to side with Senator Bernie Sanders and argue that all prisoners should be allowed to vote, Booker instead wanted to end mass incarceration not by enfranchising the most politically vulnerable people in prison or freeing anyone from cages, but in the same way all centrist Democrats aim to fix the carceral state: one non-violent, low-level drug user at a time.

Similar to Senator Harris, Senator Booker especially struggled to gain traction with young voters of color. In this political moment, Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum have been the only two black candidates who garnered their levels of national momentum while having modestly liberal platforms. Booker, and his diverse political peers including Julián Castro – who was the only Latinx candidate – Deval Patrick and Senator Harris, are caught between moving further left to capture young people of color, or further right to prove their potential as future establishment candidates. Harris’s, Castro’s and Booker’s liberal platforms were not enough to cultivate a Black and Latinx voting base. I doubt Patrick will emerge as a favorite. Senator Sanders is currently polling the highest among young people of color.

Senator Booker’s plan to use “our common pain to reignite our common purpose” has ended. Hopefully, through more nuanced study and relationships, he will come to see that America has reignited a common purpose: to make America great again. What we need is for America to discover and create a new and better purpose.

• Derecka Purnell is a social movement lawyer and writer based in Washington DC