Why Does Cory Booker Think This Time Will Be Different?

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A touch of annoyance flashes across Cory Booker’s face as we talk about fighting. “Why do people preemptively, continually, mistake kindness for weakness?” he asks. By “people,” he means, at this moment, me. I had just brought up the festering concern, expressed by fans and critics alike, that he is simply too nice to win the presidency. Booker has been trying to convince me that he’s tough enough for this uncivil American era—that a pathologically genial New Jersey Democrat who preached love in his (mostly unloved) 2020 campaign could, if called to, knock a guy on his ass.

To make this case, Booker must reach back more than 30 years, to his days as a second-string tight end at Stanford. He told me how he almost started a fight with Junior Seau, the future NFL Hall of Famer, after the first snap in a game against the University of Southern California. (A teammate wisely pulled him away.) A coach once told Booker, “Between the whistles, when the play starts, you are ferocious. But when the whistle’s over, you help the guy up. And there’s something about that that’s even more scary to those who go against you.”

Booker is telling stories like these to audiences around the country for a reason. Over his dozen years in Washington, his image has grown soft, and he needs Democrats to remember the brash up-and-comer who became mayor of Newark, New Jersey. (Declarations such as “I love Donald Trump” in response to an insult from the then–presidential candidate may have helped his reputation among Christian theologians, but not necessarily with voters.) Booker has criticized his party for not confronting the president aggressively enough during his second term; during a debate over police-funding legislation last summer, he angrily accused two Senate Democratic colleagues of complicity. Most memorably, Booker spoke out against the Trump administration for more than 25 hours, breaking Strom Thurmond’s record for the longest Senate speech—and performing miracles of bladder control.

Booker’s shift over the past year isn’t a complete transformation. He still gives out hugs and selfies, tells dad jokes, and occasionally sounds like a motivational speaker, sprinkling half a dozen inspirational quotes into any speech he delivers. But he wants the country to know that he’s got an edge to him, too. “You can be someone who believes in the values of loving your neighbor and fight like hell,” Booker told a crowd in South Carolina in January. Then, for emphasis: “You could love your neighbor and punch somebody in the face.”

Booker spent the Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend in an traditionally early-primary state very much on purpose. This was as clear a sign as any that he is preparing for another presidential run. He visited New Hampshire in the fall and is publishing his second book on March 24. Booker is releasing a policy agenda—national in scope but timed to his Senate reelection bid—filled with the kind of proposals he believes Democrats need to embrace to win back working-class voters: digestible, deliverable, and designed to appeal across ideological and geographic lines. His model is Trump’s “no tax on tips,” the 2024 campaign pledge that some Democrats mocked but that many now regard as a stroke of genius. First on Booker’s list is a proposal to eliminate federal income taxes on most earnings up to $75,000.

The way-too-early surveys of potential Democratic candidates place Booker about where he languished for most of the 2020 primary—in the low single digits. Over the past few months, voters in New Hampshire and South Carolina greeted him warmly if not rapturously. Few Democrats can match his oratorical and storytelling skills (even if they don’t quite measure up to the politician to whom he’s long been compared, Barack Obama); nearly everyone I spoke with left Booker’s events equal parts impressed and inspired. Yet doubts persist, even among his longtime friends and advisers. They aren’t sure Booker’s brand of relentless hope and optimism—notwithstanding his recent effort to portray himself as both a lover and a fighter—will resonate any more in 2028 than it did in 2020, when Booker could not break out of a crowded Democratic pack.

Booker, who married for the first time in the fall, will be 57 in April but doesn’t look it; one advantage of a closely shaved head is that it keeps any gray hairs in hiding. He remains a vegan teetotaler and a fitness buff: With his wife’s permission, he wears a health-tracking Oura ring in place of his wedding band. (On the day of our interview, the Oura app told him he’d had more “restorative time” than usual, which he attributed to skipping leg day at the gym.)

The next White House campaign will occur 30 years after Booker first won a city-council seat in his adopted hometown of Newark, which also happens to be 30 years after a New Jersey newspaper first printed the prediction that he would one day be president. Every friend, adviser, and ally I spoke with for this story said that Booker has changed very little, if at all, in that time. Not all of them meant the observation entirely as a compliment.

Spencer Platt / GettyCory Booker in Newark during his 2006 mayoral campaign

Booker seems to be on a quest to rediscover the young politician with the otherworldly resume (high-school football star, Rhodes scholar, degrees from Stanford and Yale) who dazzled national Democrats during his rise in Newark. In his 20s and 30s, he deployed his considerable charisma and no small amount of bravado—“I’m the most ambitious person you’d ever meet,” he once told a reporter—to challenge the city’s entrenched machine while drawing media coverage both to his causes and to himself.

His exploits on the Newark city council included launching a 10-day hunger strike in 1999 to protest open-air drug dealing and, the next year, living for months in a van that he drove around the city to point out blight and crime. When critics accused Booker of attention seeking, he proudly defended his tactics. “Publicity stunts? You’re darn right,” he said in 2000. “You’ve got to attract attention to a problem sometimes to get something done about it.”

Booker grew up in an affluent New Jersey suburb and chose to build his career in Newark after he graduated from Yale Law School—a fact that left some residents skeptical. Booker lived in a boarding house when he first moved to the city three decades ago, and paid about $400 a month to live next door to an abandoned building that had been used as a drug den. (He told me he wanted to buy the house he once lived in—“I thought it’d be a full circle for me”—but real-estate speculators beat him to it. It is now decrepit, its windows cracked or boarded up.) Booker later moved into the Brick Towers housing project nearby, where he lived until after he became mayor; he was among the last tenants to leave before the building was demolished.

Booker’s exploits didn’t always go over well with constituents, but they helped him stand out in a crowded media market. Newark is about a 20-minute train ride from New York City, but the dense suburbs, heavy industrial zones, and wetlands separating them makes the distance feel far greater. “People know about Newark by the EWR, by the airport. Not much else,” Mo Butler, a Booker adviser who has known him for more than 25 years, told me. “It’s not a place that people, to be frank, talk about the same way they talk about great American cities. So we had to come up with all kinds of creative ways to get people to think about Newark in a different way.” Booker was “one of the best at doing that,” Butler said.

Booker’s early years in Newark also gave him a deeper familiarity with political retribution than most Democrats now confronting the excesses of Trump’s second term. Former Mayor Sharpe James governed the city like an autocrat, and when Booker challenged him in 2002, he lobbed insults that even Trump might deem too harsh. (Among the lowlights: James said Booker “would have to learn how to be an African American”; he also claimed Booker was “a Republican who took money from the KKK,” and, incongruously, “collaborating with the Jews to take over Newark.”) The police tapped Booker’s phone, and during his campaign against James, residents who lived in public housing feared eviction by the city if they displayed Booker signs in their windows.

Booker reminded me that he nearly punched James in the face during an altercation outside a youth basketball game. (The mayor, unhappy at Booker’s presence at the event, had tried to have him kicked out.) Booker called the incident “one of the more ignominious moments of my life.” But he retells the story with delight (and devoted a chapter of his upcoming book to it), much like someone fondly recalling an epic but embarrassing party from their college days. Booker lost the 2002 race to James—the campaign became the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary Street Fight—but won the mayoralty four years later after James decided not to seek a sixth term. Time eased their rivalry, and Booker, ever the nice guy, does not hold a grudge. When James died last year, Booker lauded the man who once called him a “faggot white boy” as “a beloved pillar of our shared community.”

These tales from Booker’s political rise bear repeating because, as fresh as they may be in his memory, they are now nearly a quarter century old. His years as Newark mayor also feel like a bygone era. Facebook and Twitter were hot new websites and allowed Booker to attract outsize attention. He tweeted dozens of times a day, at all hours. Residents tagged the mayor when they needed help, and he often delivered—rescuing a dog left out in the cold; delivering diapers during a snowstorm; acting as an emergency dispatcher during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

He directly responded to direct messages (there was a small kerfuffle when mildly flirty private messages between Booker and a woman who worked at a vegan strip club in Portland, Oregon, were made public). Then, as now, he made a lot of corny jokes (“‘Sleep’ and I broke up a few nights ago. I’m dating ‘Coffee’ now. She’s Hot!”) and offered meditations on personal growth (“Life is about purpose not popularity, significance not celebrity. If u have no detractors, critics or adversaries ur probably not doing much.”) He briefly starred on Conan O’Brien’s The Tonight Show, declaring that the comedian was on Newark’s no-fly list after he made a joke at the city’s expense. Then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a guest appearance to broker a truce.

Booker was looking for his next move when Senator Frank Lautenberg died in 2013. Running for Senate was not an obvious choice. How would a politician as active and energetic as Booker make the shift from running a city to plodding along in the world’s most deliberative body? “I don’t think the idea of it initially appealed to him,” Butler said. Booker gave some thought to challenging Governor Chris Christie in his bid for reelection, but Harry Reid, then the Senate majority leader, persuaded him to run for Lautenberg’s seat instead, Booker told me. “You can make more of a difference here than you think,” Reid told him. By the end of his first full term, Booker was a lead Democratic negotiator on the First Step Act, a criminal-justice-reform package that became one of the few significant bipartisan bills that Trump signed during his first term. The law remains one of Booker’s biggest legislative accomplishments.

Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii told me that Booker’s talent as a communicator obscured his equally strong skills as a legislator, citing Booker’s work on the First Step Act in addition to less sexy negotiations over funding bills that make up the bulk of a senator’s work. “He understands the need to execute on things better than some legislative leaders do, because he’s got that background as a mayor,” Schatz said.

Christie, who is good friends with Booker, told me that Booker has simultaneously become “more of a practical politician” and moved further left, particularly on education. (Booker denied this.) The two worked closely together on expanding charter schools in Newark with a $100 million gift from Mark Zuckerberg that had been announced on The Oprah Winfrey Show—a stance that put Booker at odds with teachers’ unions and some progressives. Christie and Booker would sometimes give each other a heads-up before criticizing each other publicly. In private, Christie said, Booker’s “language gets a little bawdier and maybe less lofty. But this is basically the same guy.”

To some on the left, Senator Booker hasn’t lived up to the hype that Mayor Booker brought to Washington—a young star who could use his creativity to take on entrenched interests. Progressives see him as too chummy with Wall Street and Big Tech, and they aren’t particularly impressed by his legislative record. Booker was an early backer of the expanded child tax credit enacted under President Biden, which lasted just a year before it expired. “None of those hopes have really been fulfilled,” one progressive advocate told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “He’s an okay senator from New Jersey, but nothing transformative, and nothing all that inspirational.” When Booker earlier this month unveiled his proposal to eliminate taxes on most income up to $75,000, some in the party panned the idea, saying it would still benefit the wealthy more than working-class Americans.

Both Booker and his confidants insist that he has come to genuinely enjoy the Senate, despite its frustratingly glacial pace. (He is clearly a natural at one key part of the job: delivering long speeches.) Yet during our interviews, most of the stories Booker told—and Booker always has lots of stories—came from his time in Newark. During one animated moment in his Senate office, Booker leaned forward over his desk and said, “I’m a mayor.” He quickly corrected himself, perhaps realizing that he has not held that job for more than a dozen years.

Erin Schaff / GettyBooker and Kamala Harris await a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 2018.

A few weeks after Trump took office for the second time, when the new administration seemed to be chopping down the federal government at will while Democrats bickered among themselves, Booker was at the Whole Foods in downtown Newark—a brand, he makes sure to add, that he personally recruited to the city when he was mayor. As he was shopping in the frozen-food aisle, an older man approached him. He told Booker that Democrats were not doing enough to push back against Trump. Booker, who was familiar with the frustration, explained that Democrats were fighting hard, but without the majority in Congress, they couldn’t do very much.

The answer did not satisfy the man, who told Booker that he had been voting for the senator since he first ran for city council. “Where is the guy who beat the machine in ’98?” he asked Booker. “Where’s the guy that did the 10-day hunger strike?....Why is that guy not showing up now?”

Like many Booker stories, this one sounds a bit apocryphal, as though it were written for the screen by Aaron Sorkin. But it is how Booker explains his reawakening. He had spent his first years in the Senate trying not to stand out—a way of demonstrating to his colleagues that he was a serious legislator. That changed during Trump’s first term—Booker ran to replace him as president, after all—but he receded again during the Biden years, seemingly content to be a team player with a Democrat in power. The grocery-store encounter “really lit a fire underneath me to do what we used to do in Newark,” Booker told me. “I really believe that imagination is the best weapon you can have, to think of creative ways to get out of problems.”

Greg Kahn for The Atlantic

Soon after, Booker told his staff that he wanted to make a stand in the Senate, and asked them to prepare enough material so that he could speak, as he would later say, “for as long as I am physically able.” Booker’s aides were initially flummoxed by the idea, Butler told me. He was not planning to filibuster any particular legislation, and they knew he would be asked to explain the point of his gambit. “I think the majority of his aides didn’t really understand it, but it was something he was focused on,” Butler said. At a time when Democrats were consumed by angst and anxiety, Booker felt he could do something that, Butler said, “would allow the base to see that we heard you, and we’re fighting, and we’re doing the best we can with the tools that we have.”

To prepare for the talkathon, Booker fasted for a weekend and limited his water intake so that he wouldn’t need to use the bathroom. He had passed on the suggestion that he wear a diaper. “I believe in courageous vulnerability, but peeing in my pants on C-SPAN is a step too far,” Booker writes in his forthcoming book, Stand, a copy of which The Atlantic obtained ahead of its release. He ended up speaking for more than 25 hours, blowing past the 21-plus hours that Senator Ted Cruz had held the floor for in 2013—unlike Cruz, Booker did not resort to reading Green Eggs and Ham to fill the time—and beating Thurmond’s 1957 record for the chamber’s longest speech by nearly an hour.

The symbolism of a Black senator surpassing a segregationist’s stand against civil-rights legislation was lost on no one. Booker’s office was inundated with supportive messages during the speech, including one, he writes in his book, from Thurmond’s granddaughter, Wanda Williams-Bailey. (In 2003, Williams-Bailey’s mother, a Black woman, revealed in a press conference that she was the late senator’s daughter.) When Booker finally yielded the floor, the entire Senate chamber erupted in applause, including the Republican presiding at the time, Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming.

As expected, the speech did not result in any policy change. But it broke through the Trump-dominated din more than just about anything else that Democrats did during the early months of 2025. This was the moment that had eluded Booker in his run for the presidency, and many months later, several Democratic voters I spoke with in New Hampshire and South Carolina brought it up as soon as the conversation turned to Booker.

[Read: Cory Booker, endurance athlete]

The speech also helped with another 2025 Booker project: reclaiming his status as a star on social media, where he had faded into a more generic politician. Booker launched his official Senate TikTok page (he has had a personal account since 2022) the morning of his speech and livestreamed the entire thing; at one point, more than 300,000 people were watching the address across all of his platforms. Booker is now overseeing the Democratic caucus’s strategic communications, educating and advising his less digitally savvy and in many cases much older colleagues on how, where, and what to post on social media. According to Booker’s staff, Senate Democrats collectively have increased their follower counts across platforms by 80 percent and boosted their engagement by 430 percent over the past year.

Yet nearly a year after Booker’s 25-hour speech, the moment now seems like less a catapult to the top tier of Democratic politics than a viral blip. His aides say that on social media, Booker has sustained the momentum that the speech generated, and that his TikTok accounts drive the most engagement of any member of Congress, Republican or Democrat. At the same time, being a senator does not afford Booker nearly as many opportunities to stand out as does, say, being the governor of California. He hasn’t come close to recapturing the nation’s attention, and he still lags far behind in surveys asking Democrats whom they might support for president in 2028.

Kent Nishimura / ReutersBooker fist bumps Senator Eric Schmitt outside the Senate chamber last year.

Last summer, Booker fought with two of his Democratic colleagues, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota (a 2020 rival) and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, after he objected to the passage of a bipartisan package of police-funding bills. He argued that the legislation would allow the Trump administration to continue withholding money from blue states such as New Jersey; Booker pushed for an amendment to prohibit federal officials from conditioning funding on support for the president’s agenda. Booker accused Democrats of being “willing to be complicit” with Trump. “No, not on my watch,” he thundered. “I’m protecting Jersey today. I’m protecting the Constitution today. I’m standing today.” The outburst angered Klobuchar, who noted that Booker had skipped a key committee meeting where the legislation had been discussed. “I like to show up,” she said in response.

Klobuchar’s critique echoed a complaint that progressives both nationally and in New Jersey occasionally make about Booker: that the dramatic stands he makes are too selective and highly choreographed to be authentic. “It’s all so performative,” one progressive advocate told me.

Booker can also be more comfortable speaking in platitudes than in specifics. And if he is now more eager to denounce his party as a whole, he still shrinks from criticizing individual Democrats—especially those with whom he has a warm relationship. During Trump’s second term, Booker has aligned himself with the Senate’s unofficial “fight club,” which seeks more confrontation with the administration, and has taken the side of shutting down the government each time Congress has reached a funding impasse. After last fall’s government shutdown ended just before he arrived in New Hampshire, Booker issued a statement that said, in part: “The Democratic Party needs change. It is time for a new generation of leaders to stand up to Trump.” Reporters and potential voters pressed him on whether he was calling for the ouster of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, but Booker pulled back. When the topic came up during his January swing through South Carolina, Booker made a gentle jab at Schumer’s use of a flip phone, then deflected the question.

The same friendly deference applies to his potential 2028 rivals. During our interviews, Booker was uninterested in relitigating Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign with any specificity, and his forthcoming book does not dish on his fellow Democrats. (The reader feedback that Booker has loved the most—“This is not a politician’s book”—probably won’t juice sales inside the Beltway.) At one point, Booker declared, “I don’t want a Democratic version of Donald Trump.” I wondered if he was referring to anyone in particular. Could it be a sly reference to Gavin Newsom’s Trump-style mean tweets and online mudslinging? Nope, Booker said: “Gavin and I have been friends for a long time. I find his tweets hilarious.”

There’s plenty of time, of course, for Booker to start throwing elbows at his political opponents like he insists he once did as an athlete. The 2028 campaign won’t really begin until after the midterm elections. But showing this sharper edge, his friends and allies say, is a necessary, if uncomfortable, part of Booker’s effort to correct a perception that held him back in 2020. “People need to know that you’re not a pushover,” Jaime Harrison, a former Democratic National Committee chair who considers Booker his “political brother,” told me, “and I think that’s going to be particularly important for somebody who is genuinely one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.”

Showing off a feisty side was not part of Booker’s calculus in 2020. His presidential campaign had begun in late 2018 with a meeting at his modest home in Newark, only a few blocks from the boarding house where he lived before becoming mayor. Booker told his new campaign manager, Addisu Demissie, and a longtime political adviser, Matt Klapper, that he wanted to run a race true to himself—an earnest, positive, hope-filled campaign. “Basically, what he is, what he always has been,” Demissie recalled. Booker would pitch himself as the antidote to Trump’s “hate and division.” “If that’s what the party wants, it will meet me here and I’ll win. And if not, I will lose,” Booker told them.

Over the next year, Booker never really deviated from that path, and his campaign never really took off. During his Newark days, Booker had always been a big fish in a relatively small pond, but in a crowded national campaign—as in the 100-member Senate—he struggled to stand out. “He doesn’t neatly fit into a bucket,” Klapper told me. Booker was never going to be a progressive favorite like his fellow senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Polls showed that Democratic-primary voters, meanwhile, did not consider him as experienced or electorally safe as Biden. Pete Buttigieg seemed to impress moderate white voters in Iowa and New Hampshire more than Booker did. Neither Booker nor then-Senator Kamala Harris could win over Black Democrats in South Carolina, who stuck with Biden.

Booker’s polling languished in the low single digits for most of the campaign, and he could not pull off the signature viral moment that just about every candidate was seeking. With money running low, he pulled out of the race in January 2020, just a few weeks before the Iowa caucus. Booker also suffered from voters’ perceptions about his electability, Demissie said: “They were looking for the person who could beat Trump, and they did not believe that a Black guy from Newark preaching about love and unity could do it.”

Demissie points to a what-might-have-been moment before the first primary debate when the DNC, unable to reasonably fit 20 candidates onto a single stage, split the field in half. Biden, the front-runner, and Booker appeared on different nights. Sharing a stage with the former vice president, Harris sharply—and memorably—confronted Biden over his opposition to busing students to desegregate schools, recounting the story of one California girl who traveled every day by bus to an integrated school. “That little girl was me,” she told him. The moment generated a huge fundraising boost for Harris, and briefly catapulted her to the top tier of candidates. “We were dying to be onstage with Biden,” Demissie said. “Imagine how different things would be if that literal lottery had gone differently.” Perhaps, he argued, Booker would have had that moment instead of Harris, and perhaps he would have made it last longer than she did.

Booker did mix it up with Biden at a later debate and, at one point, called the author of the 1994 crime bill an “architect of mass incarceration.” But other Booker advisers I spoke with doubted that he would have gone after Biden as directly and as personally as Harris did. “That’s just something that Cory wouldn’t do,” Butler, his longtime adviser, told me. “He was a happy warrior.”

The usually voluble Booker wasn’t eager to dissect his 2020 race. “We ran a great campaign,” he told me. Why didn’t he do better, I asked. “I have no idea.” Neither Booker nor his advisers believe the 2020 failure damaged him as a national candidate. According to data collected by the campaign, Democratic voters liked him better at the end of the race than at the beginning, even if he was never their top choice for president. “If anything,” Booker said, the 2020 experience “left me with more of an appetite to potentially run in the future.” How, I asked, would this time be different? “I’m far more fed up than I was in 2020,” he said. “I’m far angrier.”

Matt Smith / AlamyBooker at an August 2019 presidential-campaign rally in Philadelphia

Booker says he hasn’t decided whether to run for president again. He must first tend to his reelection in New Jersey, and, like other Democrats with national stature, he’ll help the party in its bid to regain power in the midterm elections. Booker often mentions his recent marriage during speeches, and he is open about his desire to have children. “Lord, pray for me,” he’ll say, before pivoting to the kind of so-bad-it’s-funny dad joke he’s been telling for years. (“What do you call a guy who tells dad jokes but isn’t a dad? A faux Pa.”) During a roundtable conversation about health insurance in Newark, he talked about how he and his wife, Alexis Lewis Booker, now had to consider whether their plan covered IVF treatments.

When I asked Booker what might cause him not to run in 2028, he brought up Alexis. “She and I are going to have to have a different kind of conversation than I’ve ever had before,” Booker said. But he quickly added that being a family man for the first time makes him “more effective in my public life.”

In every other respect, Booker seems to be all in. The 2028 Democratic field is likely to be just as crowded, if not more so, than it was in 2020. Booker could be competing for attention with rivals from his own generation and from a younger crop of candidates who might better satisfy primary voters’ yearning for a fresh face. Yet the case that Booker’s advisers sketch out for his viability is plausible, even compelling. Without Trump on the ballot, voters may want to turn the page on an era of nastiness and division, back toward hope and healing and inspiration. Booker will be better known than he was eight years ago, with more experience—neither a gray-haired has-been nor too much of a youthful risk. “He’s in sort of a sweet spot,” Butler argued.

As I followed Booker around New Hampshire and South Carolina, I found plenty of Democrats who saw precisely that balance in Booker and wanted him to run for president again. (Several urged him to do so directly.) “I have not seen anybody else that I would prefer to run,” said Lonnie Hosey, a South Carolina state legislator who, like many Black Democrats in the state, supported Biden in the 2020 primary. “As of today,” Hosey told me, “he is my choice.” Others weren’t exactly pining for Booker, but they wanted to give him a longer look. After seeing Booker speak in Beaufort, Susie Gombocz, a 78-year-old real-estate agent, told me she loved his message. “He’s aggressive,” she said, “but he’s got a lovely way about him.”

But in many ways, Booker can’t move beyond being mayor of Newark. The climax of his stump speech is a new riff on an old storm: Hurricane Sandy. The (long) story is a paean to a gentler political moment, when leaders in both parties could get along and be decent to one another. (This is not a tale that features a young Booker decking a guy on the field.) Mayor Booker is driving around the city assessing damage when President Obama and Governor Christie call to offer their assistance. The hero ends up being an ordinary citizen who is standing outside in a dangerous storm, waving a light in the driving rain so that his neighbors won’t get electrocuted by a downed power line.

Sean Rayford / GettyBooker during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in South Carolina in 2019

“That is who we are. That is the story of America!” Booker tells the crowd, his voice rising in a familiar crescendo. “Not people with position, but people with purpose! Not people on high, but the grassroots soldiers in the trenches! That’s how America is made. That’s how we redeem the dream!”

I watched Booker tell this story to Democratic audiences throughout South Carolina. The largest crowd he addressed was in front of the state capitol on MLK Day. This crowd was also the toughest for him; by the time he finally stepped to the podium, most had been standing in the cold for several hours, listening to a cavalcade of more than 30 speakers paying tribute to King’s legacy. “I will not be speaking for 25 hours,” Booker began, drawing laughs. “The hour is late, and the temperature is cold.”

Most in the crowd had stuck around to hear him. And when, near the conclusion of his story about the storm, Booker summoned them to rise—“South Carolina, I ask you right now, will you stand up?”—they dutifully obliged. People stayed on their feet all through Booker’s stirring peroration, the kind that feels more natural on the eve of a big election than during the dead of winter.

This is Cory Booker returning to form. As much as he wants to show that he’s a fighter, he has no intention of morphing into anything too far from the idealistic law-school graduate who moved into a housing project. There is a danger in changing too much, he told me in his Senate office a few weeks later, citing Vice President J. D. Vance’s sharp turn from Trump critic to loyal running mate as a cautionary tale. Booker then repeated the same theory of the election that he pitched to his aides more than seven years ago. He held one hand steady in front of him and slowly moved the other up to meet it. “This is who we are. We are not moving,” Booker said. “And if the time and the moment meet us, that’s great.”

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