Senator from
New Jersey announces candidacy in video
Booker joins crowded Democratic field
Senator
Cory Booker on Friday morning jumped into the already busy field of Democratic candidates running for the White House in 2020 in a bid to turf out
Donald Trump.
The New Jersey senator and former mayor of Newark emailed supporters promising to “channel our common pain back into our common purpose”.
He also issued a video.
“The history of our nation is defined by collective action; by interwoven destinies of slaves and abolitionists; of those born here and those who chose America as home; of those who took up arms to defend our country, and those who linked arms to challenge and change it,” Booker said.
Booker’s main thrust is a message that can be summed up as “love and unity” and he has professed a refusal to hate Trump.
“When you listen to him speak you realise that he’s not always bashing the other side like some politicians do,” Demers said. “He’s a real unifier and I do believe that more than anything in this country, people want to see Washington function,” attorney Jim Demers, who co-chaired Barack Obama’s campaign in New Hampshire in 2008 and advised Hillary Clinton in 2016, said when Booker put his toe in the water at a series of events in New Hampshire in early December.
Booker, 49, has served in the Senate since 2013. He made his announcement on the first day of February, which is designated Black History Month, a time on the calendar for commemorations and educational programs about significant people and events in the history of the African diaspora.
On Martin Luther King Day in the US last month, Booker spoke in South Carolina, as did a potential Democratic rival for the nomination, Bernie Sanders.
Ostensibly, the politicians were on hand to celebrate the life and work of the civil rights leader. But for both, it was an opportunity to speak candidly about race to black voters who will play a gigantic role in selecting the Democratic nominee for 2020.
“The Democratic nomination runs through the south,” said Seth McKee, a political scientist at Texas Tech University, at the time. For Democrats, “the south” has rapidly come to mean one thing more than anything else: the black vote. Black Americans now make up about 60% of Democratic voters in South Carolina.
Following Kamala Harris’s announcement about her run on MLK Day, Booker is the second black candidate in the race. No Republicans have yet announced they will challenge Trump for the GOP nomination.
On Friday morning, Booker has planned call-in interviews with radio shows that are especially popular with African American and Latinx listeners. Later in the morning he will go on TV to be interviewed on the popular daytime chatshow The View, which has a majority female audience. His mother will be sitting in the audience.
Born in Washington DC, but raised in New Jersey, Booker made a name for himself as Newark mayor, the state’s largest city, by personally shoveling the snow of residents. He has $4.1m left in his mayoral campaign coffers that could also be used to assist his presidential run. Rather than opening an exploratory committee to test the waters, Booker took the direct step to open a campaign straight to the public, seeking the Democratic nomination.
He is aligning with many other prominent Democratic White House contenders by forswearing all donations from corporate political action committees (Pacs) and federal lobbyists to his campaign, which he has titled “Cory 2020”. A prominent Booker supporter, San Francisco attorney Steve Phillips, says he is working on millions of dollars in committed donations to a so-called super Pac that would boost the senator’s candidacy, but Booker’s campaign is openly against super Pacs playing any role in the presidential race.