Cory Booker

Biography & Campaign Analysis

Background

Cory Anthony Booker was born on April 27, 1969, in Washington, D.C., and was raised in Harrington Park, New Jersey; his parents were IBM executives.

After Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan, he attended Stanford University, playing tight end on the football team and completing a political science degree in 1991 and a sociology master's in 1992.

As a Rhodes Scholar he studied United States history at The Queen's College, Oxford, finishing in 1994, and he received a law degree from Yale Law School in 1997. He then worked as a staff lawyer at New York's Urban Justice Center and coordinated programs for the Newark Youth Project.

Career

In 1998 Booker unseated four-term incumbent George Branch for the Central Ward seat of Newark's Municipal Council, where he served until 2002; during that term he held a 10-day hunger strike to draw attention to drug dealing in the city.

He lost the 2002 mayoral race to incumbent Sharpe James, 53% to 47%, then won the May 9, 2006, election with 72% against Deputy Mayor Ronald Rice and took office as Newark's 38th mayor on July 1, 2006. He won a second term in 2010 with 59%.

He won a U.S. Senate seat in a 2013 special election, becoming the first African-American senator from New Jersey, and won further terms in 2014 and 2020. He sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and ended that campaign on January 13, 2020.

After Bob Menendez resigned on August 20, 2024, Booker became the state's senior senator, and over March 31 and April 1, 2025, he held the Senate floor for 25 hours and five minutes, the longest speech in the chamber's history, to protest the second Trump presidency.

2026 race

Booker is running for a third full term in the November 3, 2026, election and was unopposed in the June 2 Democratic primary. His Republican opponent is Justin Murphy, a former deputy mayor of Tabernacle, who won his party's primary with 33.3%, defeating Richard Tabor and Alex Zdan.