Sen. Cory Booker speaks during the Democratic presidential debate in Houston, Texas, September 12, 2019. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

Cory Booker’s campaign is apparently on life support: “Booker campaign manager Addisu Demissie told reporters on Saturday, ‘We got in this race to win it, and if we cannot raise the $1.7 million to scale up our operation, then we don’t believe that we are going to be in a position to compete for the nomination.’”


A lot of the departed 2020 candidates — Eric Swalwell, John Hickenlooper, Bill de Blasio, Seth Moulton — have quit amidst a lot of laughter and scoffs of, “what was he thinking?” But compared to the other recent departures, Cory Booker has looked more prepared, more serious, more realistic, a stronger competitor . . . dare I say, compared to them, he looks like Spartacus?

If Booker departs the race before Halloween, he will be one of the more surprising early departures of the cycle. He’s been on the national scene for a long while, garnered big media attention (and some would say runaway hype) as mayor, when he at times could sound downright conservative in support of charter schools and denouncing big-city machine politics. He had strong ties to Silicon Valley and Wall Street, pretty good fundraising, and usually gives a good speech. He’s the lone African-American male in the race, unless you want to count Wayne Messam. Like Julian Castro and Kirsten Gillibrand, a mostly supportive national political press corps had touted Booker as a “rising star” destined for big things on the national stage for quite a while — and then, in a crowded field with a lot of candidates offering basically the same message, that star stopped rising.

For most of the also-rans, the first challenge was qualifying for the debates, and Booker did that easily. The next challenge was having a good debate performance, and by most measures, Booker did that, too. He was never high enough in the polls to attract much criticism from other candidates, and he rarely took direct shots at any rivals. Booker’s instinct — clearest before the Trump administration, when Booker clumsily tried to channel the base’s anger — is to play the Obama-esque post-partisan healer, shouting his speeches in his preacher’s cadence, assuring everyone that brighter days are ahead if we all just pull together. In a lot of cycles, this sort of style plays well.


Perhaps it’s as simple as Mr. Sunny Optimism didn’t match the mood of a Democratic party base that is mad as hell about the Trump presidency. He looks centrist by the standard of Bernie Sanders, and he looks progressive by the standard of Joe Biden. He’s a little bit of everything, and maybe that’s what’s holding him back.


His original instinct may have been the right one, as it’s genuinely shocking to hear a politician in this era declare: “How can you think that you’re going to beat darkness by spewing darkness? If Nelson Mandela can love his jailers, if Martin Luther King can love Bull Connor — we’ve got to be people of love!” He was never going to surpass the mad-as-hell-and-not-gonna-take-it-anymore outrage of Bernie Sanders, his past closeness to Wall Street meant he would never out-populist Elizabeth Warren, and the party establishment was always going to see Biden as the more familiar and safer bet. Perhaps Booker needed Biden’s age and gaffes to become a bigger issue faster, sending a lot of centrists and African Americans looking around for a new option.


Perhaps the prospect of Booker’s departure will prompt Democratic donors to open their wallets even further and keep him around longer. But the New Jersey senator is still looking for the early state that will be his big win. He’s currently tied for eighth in Iowa (tied with Tulsi Gabbard!), ranks eighth in New Hampshire (behind Andrew Yang!), seventh in Nevada (behind Tom Steyer!). For awhile, it looked like he was inching his way to becoming a player in South Carolina, but he’s hitting 2 percent and 4 percent in the polls down there lately.