Cory Booker’s 2020 presidential campaign

Cory Booker spent the majority of his presidential campaign delivering an urgently upbeat message: that love could prevail and help heal a divided nation.

Ultimately, that strategy didn’t work; the New Jersey senator announced Monday he’s ending his campaign after consistently low numbers in national and early-state polls. The exit of Booker, a prominent black candidate, is yet another sign that a once-diverse field is getting whiter.

Sen. Cory Booker is down in the 2020 polls — and yet has long seemed poised for a breakout moment. He is more qualified than some frontrunners, quite popular among Democratic activists, and the last black candidate with a decent shot after Sen. Kamala Harris’s withdrawal. He’s an acceptable choice to many people across the party’s big ideological divide.

He’s also been somewhat difficult to peg on the ideological spectrum. Slate’s Jordan Weissman, who plans to vote for either Sens. Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, recently called him “the best moderate in the field.” But is calling him a moderate right? It’s true that Booker has a record of centrism on some economic issues, particularly relating to education and finance, but he also co-sponsored the Green New Deal resolution. He’s the most progressive candidate in the field on criminal justice, and a vegan who recently proposed legislation aimed at shuttering factory farms.

Mass shootings get most of the attention in the headlines, but the majority of America’s 14,000 gun homicides every year come from smaller-scale, everyday urban gun violence.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), a presidential candidate, is now pushing to do something about that urban violence.

CNN’s climate crisis town hall on Wednesday night was an unprecedented seven hours of discussion on climate change with 10 of the Democratic 2020 presidential contenders. It was also the most substantive discussion of climate change policies ever broadcast on primetime television.

Each candidate was given a 40-minute segment, meaning they could provide long, nuanced answers to hard questions on the most far-reaching issue of our time. There was a lot that could have gone wrong, so it’s remarkable so much went right. The town hall easily outshone the muddled discussion in the paltry half-hour or so devoted to climate change across eight hours of official Democratic debates.

Sen. Cory Booker wants Democrats to go bolder on guns — and says they’re playing into the hands of the National Rifle Association and the corporate gun lobby by rejecting bolder ideas.

“For Democrats to play into the hands of the corporate gun lobby, and just letting them define what the realm of possible is, it’s so defeatist to me,” the New Jersey senator told me during an interview this week. “At a time with the levels of carnage in our country, we don’t need people who are defeatist in their thinking about what’s possible.”

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), who’s running for president, unveiled a new, aggressive criminal justice reform proposal over the weekend that would make it easier for people, particularly those older than 50, to get an early release from federal prison.

The Matthew Charles and William Underwood Second Look Act, first reported by Leigh Ann Caldwell for NBC News, would let people who have served more than 10 years in prison petition a court for early release. Inmates 50 or older would get the presumption of release if they petitioned — so judges would need to show that the inmate is an actual threat to society to keep them incarcerated.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) isn’t currently a top-tier candidate in the Democratic primary polls — but the first night of the party’s first presidential debate Wednesday made clear he could be.

It’s not that Booker’s message and policy proposals were noticeably different from those of the other contenders onstage; they weren’t. Booker’s advantage was in style and delivery — he’s a good speaker who can command attention, weave in personal anecdotes, and combine outrage-inducing and inspiring rhetoric.

2020 Democratic candidates were surprisingly critical of the Iran nuclear deal during the first presidential debate.

Signed by the Obama administration in 2015, the accord between Iran, the US, European powers, Russia, and China put tight restrictions on Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. The Obama administration’s goal was to block Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon diplomatically instead of by force.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) announced a plan on Thursday to use the presidency’s expansive pardon and clemency powers to reform the criminal justice system and scale back the war on drugs — without Congress — if he were to become president.

Booker’s plan calls for granting an early release to as many as 17,000 to 20,000 people in federal prison for drug offenses, and establishing a panel within the White House that would make recommendations for more clemency applications in the longer term.

Presidential hopeful Sen. Cory Booker has united policies he proposed during his time in Congress into a new affordable housing plan, which he unveiled while on the campaign trail late last week.

Booker has made affordable housing central to his campaign, and often tells the story of his parents’ struggle to buy a home in stump speeches. He told that story once again in an op-ed published in the Reno Gazette Journal that promotes the plan.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) is bringing back legislation that takes aim at the big banks by severely curbing their use of overdraft fees.

These fees come up when people spend or withdraw more than their available checking account balance, and they’ve become a crucial source of revenue for financial institutions that have long targeted low-income customers who struggle the most to stay out of debt.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) sums up his ambitious new gun control plan in one sentence: “If you need a license to drive a car, you should need a license to own a gun.”

On Monday, Booker unveiled his proposal to tackle America’s gun problem as part of his bid for the presidency, detailing a plan that sets a high bar for the rest of the Democratic field.

As the Trump administration continues to expand immigration detention to unprecedented levels, and (with the help of the Supreme Court) continues to restrict which immigrants can post bond to get out of detention while their deportation cases are pending, a group of congressional Democrats — led in the Senate by presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) — is proposing a bill that would throw the detention machine in reverse.

The bill, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, was first introduced in the 2017-’18 Congress (with Washington Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Adam Smith co-sponsoring it in the House and Booker introducing the Senate version).

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) has had trouble separating himself from pack in the crowded Democratic presidential field, but on one count at least he’s stood out: He has by far donated the largest percentage of his income among the candidates.

Business Insider reported on Thursday that Booker donated $24,000 of his $152,639 income in 2018 to charity. And over the past 10 years, CNN reports that Booker has given about $460,000 to charity. That’s a serious, long-standing commitment to giving back — and it’s enough money to have potentially done a ton of good.

As mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker took up the treacherous task of overhauling the city’s schools, betting big on charter schools, teacher accountability, and philanthropy.

It was a different time. Shortly after Booker was elected mayor in 2006, Michelle Rhee, the radical reformer who remade the Washington, DC, school district, became a national star. Education reform was the next great cause. Disruption was the modus operandi of the day, even in deeply Democratic urban areas, where a generation of malaise had motivated local leaders to think far outside the box to fix their schools.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) was ready to take a victory lap during a press conference with reporters outside of his home in Newark, New Jersey, on Friday, hours after announcing his bid for the White House, but he accidentally created a firestorm on health care.

Booker, who signed on to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) Medicare-for-all plan, a sort of litmus test for progressives, was asked by a reporter on Friday whether he would “do away with private health care.”

Even if political junkies are already sick of hearing about the presumed top contenders in the 2020 Democratic presidential field, most of America isn’t yet familiar with them.

Cory Booker? Never heard of him. Kamala Harris? Doesn’t ring a bell. Elizabeth Warren? Yeah, I guess, maybe on the news.

America has a massive, growing racial wealth gap. The median white family today holds nearly 10 times the wealth of the median black family.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) is introducing a bill aimed at closing that gap. His idea is to give lower-income kids a sizable nest egg (nearly $50,000 in some cases) that they could use for wealth-building purchases, like a down payment on a house or college tuition.

Sen. Cory Booker is taking aim at bank overdraft fees, which users incur if they spend or withdraw more than their available checking account balance. These fees have become a crucial source of revenue for financial institutions and have long targeted low-income customers who struggle the most to stay out of debt.

Booker’s newly proposed legislation — informed by a survey of several large banks that his office conducted last year — would bar financial institutions from charging overdraft fees on debit card transactions and ATM withdrawals. The bill would also restrict the frequency of such charges on payments made by check.

A few weeks ago, I traveled to a border community in South Texas to witness firsthand the human impact of the crisis brought about by President Trump’s cruel immigration policies.

I’m emotionally raw from the trip. How our country treats immigrants coming to our nation — many fleeing violence and oppression in their home countries — will haunt me for a long time. Many of us have ancestors who came to the US fleeing famine or oppression. None of us would want one of our ancestors treated like we are currently treating people at the border.

“I am so frustrated with the obvious changes going on between my dad’s age and now,” said Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) delivering a stem-winder of a midday keynote address Tuesday at the Ideas Conference, hosted in Washington by the Center for American Progress to celebrate its 15th anniversary. “It’s like we inherited this incredible house from our parents and we trashed it.”

Booker is, of course, black. His dad, Cary Booker, was born in 1936 in North Carolina and grew up under a brutal Jim Crow system that systematically disenfranchised people like him. Virtually any other Democrat speaking in 2018 would have dwelled at length on the progress America has made since Cary Booker’s time on racial issues rather than a narrative of decline. But not Booker.

Republicans promised that last year’s massive corporate income tax bill would lead to a surge in investment and thus bigger paychecks for working Americans. Instead, it’s been a boon to shareholders.

A Bloomberg analysis shows that of America’s $54 billion corporate tax windfall, so far $21.1 billion has been kicked to shareholders in the form of “buybacks,” almost twice as much as has gone to employees in higher compensation and far more than has been spent on capital investments or research and development.

A new bill in the Senate would not just end the federal prohibition of marijuana, but encourage states to legalize pot as well.

The bill, proposed by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) on Tuesday, would remove marijuana from the federal scheduling system, which is the basis for its federal criminalization. That isn’t new in the Senate; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), for one, also put forward a bill that would deschedule marijuana back in 2015.