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New Jersey Senator Cory Booker has thrown his hat into the increasingly crowded 2020 presidential race, first announcing his candidacy on the Tom Joyner Morning Show today.

He explained:

“Publicly, I wanted to come on this show, Tom, cause of what you mean to so many people in this country. I want everybody to know that I am running for president of the United States of America and just really excited to do so. We live in a nation where people are beginning to lose faith in what we can do together. Folks are feeling left out, folks are feeling left behind, and I think too many people are beginning to think that the things that are tearing us apart are stronger than the things holding us together. I’m running for president to change that, to reignite our sense of what’s possible and reignite the moral imagination of what we can become together. I believe in this nation. As difficult as our past has been we’ve always overcome. We got a better future ahead of us if we come together, work together, stand together, and I believe America and the days ahead we will rise.”

He joins a slew of Democrats who are also vying for the Democratic nomination including Julián Castro, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; Kirsten Gillibrand, Senator from New York; Kamala Harris, Senator from California; Tulsi Gabbard, Rep. from Hawaii’s 2nd District; and John Delaney, former representative from Maryland’s 6th District.

Booker, who was elected to the Senate in 2013 developed a reputation while Mayor of Newark, New Jersey as a champion of the people, once responding in person to a Twitter request to shovel an elderly man’s driveway, another time saving a woman in a house fire and once even helping a constituent propose to his girlfriend.

Booker was born in Maryland, but raised in New Jersey. His parents Carolyn and Cary (who passed in 2013) were two of the first African-Americans to work in the executive ranks at IBM. Booker has an older brother, Cary.

Booker played football in high school and in college at Stanford University where he earned both a Bachelor’s in political science and a Master of Arts in Sociology. He’s also a Rhodes Scholar who ultimately earned a law degree at Yale. Booker’s political history includes being both the mayor and a city councilman in Newark, and now as the junior senator from New Jersey.

Listen to his interview with the TJMS above and tell us, do you think Booker has a good chance of earning the Democratic nomination?

 

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