WASHINGTON -- U.S. Sen. Cory Booker has jumped into an already crowded field of Democrats running for president.

Booker starts among the top tier of presidential hopefuls, according to both the Washington Post and National Journal. Republicans from President Donald Trump on down already are taking shots at him.

But while national polls show those familiar with Booker seem to like him, most Americans simply don't know enough about the New Jersey senator to form an opinion.

So who is Cory Booker? Here's what you need to know:

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(Andrew Harnik | Associated Press)

How old is Cory Booker?

Here's a quick tale of the tape:

Age: 49

Hometown: Newark. He grew up in Harrington Park.

Full Education: Stanford University, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, Yale Law School.

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Is Cory Booker married?

No. Booker would be the first unmarried man elected to the presidency since another New Jersey native, Grover Cleveland, in 1886. Cleveland, who was born in Caldwell, married while in the White House. James Buchanan was the only president never to marry.

Throughout his political career, Booker has been asked questions about his personal life, and answered one of them in December. "I'm heterosexual," Booker told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

He has been linked to several women on the gossip pages, including Chanda Gibson, executive director of the Council of Urban Professionals; Instagram poet Cleo Wade; actress and author Mindy Kaling; and, most recently, actress Rosario Dawson.

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You are making my day! Thanks for the clarification. And If the ❤️is really mutual... Come have dinner with me in Newark? #PleaseSayYes 🤞🏾 https://t.co/fI9IYJYZEX — Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) March 23, 2017

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When was Cory Booker first elected in New Jersey?

Booker was first elected to the Newark City Council in 1998. He then was elected mayor of Newark in 2006 and re-elected in 2010.

Trump spent the midterm elections taking shots at Booker's tenure as chief executive of New Jersey's largest city, which current Mayor Ras Baraka responded to by crediting Booker with helping the city's renaissance.

"If Donald Trump thinks otherwise, he should come to Newark and see the amazing things happening here with his own eyes," Baraka said.

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He played football in college

Booker attended Stanford University as a highly recruited tight end, but his college football career never took off. He was a role player, not a star as he was in high school.

"It was like the first time in my life I ever felt like I failed at something," Booker told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "And it was one of the toughest blows to my ego I've ever taken."

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Cory Booker as a football player at Stanford University.

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He's a vegan and a connoisseur of social media

Booker is a vegan, displaying his food choices on Instagram to his 552,000 followers.

He also is a prolific user of Twitter, with 4.1 million followers, and Facebook, where he first responded to Trump's victory by proclaiming: "This is not a time to curl up, give up or shut up. It is time to get up; to stand up, to speak words that heal, help, and recommit to the cause of our country."

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(Tim Farrell | The Star-Ledger)

Living the poor life

As mayor of Newark, Booker used his national profile and attention to show difficulties faced by the working poor in getting nutritious food.

Booker spent a week trying to live the way someone would on food stamps. It required a lot of rice and beans, and even dining on a burnt yam. The photo above shows the food that had to last him the week.

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President Barack Obama is greeted by Gov. Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Cory Booker as he arrives at Newark Liberty International Airport in July 2010. (John Munson | The Star-Ledger)

Most state Democrats backed Hillary in 2008. Booker backed Obama.

When Hillary Clinton, U.S. senator from the neighboring state of New York, ran for president in 2008, most prominent New Jersey Democrats lined up behind her campaign, led by Gov. Jon Corzine, the first governor in the country to endorse her.

Booker backed Obama.

Eight years later, Booker was strongly in Clinton's camp, helping her raise money for her presidential campaign.

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When was Booker elected to the Senate?

Booker won a 2013 special election to succeed the late U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and won a full six-year term in November 2014.

He is the first African-American to represent New Jersey in the Senate.

Booker is up for re-election in 2020. A new state statute, dubbed Cory Booker's Law, made it clear that he could run for both president and the Senate at the same time.

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Making a splash (like Obama did) with a convention speech

At the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Booker brought the crowd to its feet during his primetime address.

"We will not surrender our values, we will not surrender our ideals, we will not surrender the moral high ground," Booker said.

He brought the convention delegates to their feet with four words, "America, we will rise."

Booker was on the short list of potential Democratic vice-presidential nominees but Clinton instead chose U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.

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His top legislative priority became law

Since coming to Washington, Booker sought to overhaul the criminal justice system in order to to stop the practice of locking up so many people, disproportionately black, for nonviolent drug crimes.

Crossing party lines, as he had so many times on what was his top legislative priority, he helped shape the final bill that was signed into law by Trump on Dec. 21.

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Trashing Trump

Even before Trump took the oath of office in January 2017, Booker announced that he would speak out against the new president.

"We have to let folks know we're going to fight the good fight here," he told NJ Advance Media days before Trump's inauguration.

He's lived up to his promise.

In December 2017, he said Trump should resign due to allegations of sexual misconduct.

He said Trump left him "outraged and disgusted'' after the president blamed both neo-Nazi protesters and those who opposed them for violence during an August 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Booker has supported Trump just 15 percent of the time, according to Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight. Just four senators have lower scores, and all of them -- Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont -- are potential Booker rivals in 2020.

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President Trump said he would be ‘proud’ to shut down the government over his senseless & wasteful border wall—but real people & families are being hurt including low-wage workers who likely won’t get back pay. Trump must end his #TrumpShutdown now. https://t.co/K2iuRhjBlr — Sen. Cory Booker (@SenBooker) December 27, 2018

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He once was allied with Trump education chief Betsy DeVos

Booker, then mayor of Newark, sat on the board of Alliance for School Choice with current U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The group advocated using taxpayer dollars for charter, private and religious schools.

He had championed alternatives to the traditional public school system, where some inner-city students were struggling. That put him in conflict with the Newark Teachers Union, which opposed his re-election as mayor in 2010.

When Booker ran for Senate in 2014, however, the political action committee of the Newark union's parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers, contributed $10,000 to his campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group.

Booker said he voted against DeVos after she refused to meet with him and after she refused to rule out allowing guns in schools, saying they were needed "to protect from potential grizzlies." She also said enforcement of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, designed to provide an appropriate education to students with disabilities, should be left to the states.

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'I am Spartacus'

During the confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Booker dared Republicans to expel him for releasing documents that a Republican lawyer tried to keep from the public.

"I come from a long line, as all of us do as Americans, understand what that kind of civil disobedience is and I understand the consequences," Booker said.

Booker first had referred to the material during his cross-examination of Kavanaugh in violation of Senate rules. The lawyer, Bill Burck, then approved the papers for public release, while the senator continued to release documents before waiting for committee approval.

"This is about the closest I'll have in my life to an 'I am Spartacus' moment,'" he said.

Burck, a veteran Republican lawyer who has represented Trump administration officials. played an unprecedented role in deciding what the public should know about Kavanaugh because Senate Republicans were not willing to wait for the nonpartisan National Archives to perform its traditional role of reviewing a nominee's past writings.

Booker's "Spartacus moment" opened him up to ridicule.

Trump took a shot at Booker over that comment, preferring the actor who played Spartacus in the movie of the same name.

"I think we take Kirk Douglas in his prime," Trump said at a rally before the 2018 midterms. "Do we agree?"

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Weds—I broke committee rules by reading from "committee confidential" docs.



Thurs—Cornyn threatened me with expulsion.



He then changed his story & backtracked. Now he's back at it threatening an ethics investigation b/c we exposed this sham process. https://t.co/FEf4p65iDl — Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) September 7, 2018

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He slammed Sessions before Trump did

Booker broke with tradition and testified against the nomination of fellow U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., to become attorney general, joining civil rights icon John Lewis, a Democratic representative from Georgia, at the Senate Judiciary Committee witness table.

"It is a time of unprecedented challenges and we should all be willing to take actions that are out of the norm," he said after the hearing.

Then after joining the panel, he used his new committee seat to hammer Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in January 2018 for "convenient amnesia" after she said she didn't recall hearing Trump describing Haiti and some African nations as "shithole countries" during an Oval Office meeting she attended.

"She was lying to us, probably because she was instructed to do so to give cover to bigotry," he told NJ Advance Media afterwards. "Nobody of good conscience, Republican or Democrat, can believe the fact that she could not remember the dialogue that went on in the Oval Office. It touched a nerve to expose it in the way that I did."

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He backed legal weed before others did

Booker was an early advocate of marijuana legalization, introducing legislation to remove the federal ban on the drug. "Our country's drug laws are badly broken and need to be fixed," Booker said.

Five other potential or announced 2020 Democratic presidential candidates -- Gillibrand, Sanders, Harris, Merkley and Warren -- became co-sponsors.

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He's on TV. A lot.

When Stephen Colbert signed off from his Comedy Central program, Booker was among the celebrities serenading him with "We'll Meet Again," from the movie "Dr. Strangelove." He was interviewed by other Comedy Central hosts, Jordan Klepper of "The Opposition," and both Jon Stewart and Trevor Noha the "Daily Show."

He was a guest on Jimmy Kimmel's ABC late night program in May and on Colbert's CBS program, "The Late Show," in August.

And he had a guest- appearance on NBC's "Parks and Recreation" in 2015.

As Newark mayor, Booker famously appeared with then-Gov. Chris Christie on Oprah Winfrey's show to accept $100 million for his city's school system from Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

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Speaking of C-SPAN, Booker spoke on the Senate floor on 31 different days during the 115th Congress.

Among potential or actual 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, Merkley, 102 days; Warren, 88 days; and Sanders, 56 days, all were more loquacious. Less so were Gillibrand, 28 days; and Kamala Harris, D-Calif., 11 days.

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Who funds his campaigns?

Wall Street employees were his biggest industry source of campaign donations, giving him $2.8 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

He received $424,450 from employees in the pharmaceutical industry, a major employer in New Jersey. He was criticized for initially opposing efforts by Sanders to allow the importation of prescription drugs, saying there were not enough safeguards in the legislation.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact called the Sanders' provision more "symbolic than substantive."

Booker later joined Sanders and other Democrats on legislation designed to lower drug prices.

He announced last February that he no longer would accept donations from corporate political action committees. He said he also won't accept contributions from registered lobbyists for his presidential race.

Booker was the biggest congressional recipient of pro-Israel money during the 2014 election, though he later disappointed some supporters by supporting President Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran. He was the only current or potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate to sign onto legislation preventing American companies from supporting a boycott of Israel.

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U.S. Sen. Cory Booker joins hundreds of airport workers in January as they march at Newark Liberty International Airport to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy and echo his call for justice and equality for all workers. (Patti Sapone | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

How he voted

Booker voted against most of Trump's Cabinet nominees and both of the president's picks for the U.S. Supreme Court. He opposed Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the GOP tax law that targeted New Jersey by capping the federal deduction for state and local taxes.

He has introduced legislation to stop Trump from dismissing special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. He tried several times to bring it up for a vote on the Senate floor following its passage by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Booker holds lifetime voting records of 98 percent from the League of Conservation Voters and 100 percent from the AFL-CIO. Both scores are the highest in the state delegation.

Despite some efforts to reach across the aisle, he was ranked as one of the most partisan senators by Congressional Quarterly and by a study jointly conducted by Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy and the Lugar Center,, a public policy group headed by former U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind.

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He's been preparing for 2020

Booker has taken steps to attract progressives, a key constituency in Democratic primaries and the backbone of Sanders' 2016 insurgent campaign. He signed onto the Green New Deal, an effort to curb the emissions contributing to climate change and creating new jobs in the process, and Sanders' "Medicare for All" legislation to expand health coverage.

Booker traveled to 24 states during the 2018 midterms, campaigning and raising money for fellow Democrats and the party itself, And right after the election, he was back in New Hampshire at a state party event.

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Cory Booker talks to Coley Whitaker, who escaped the neighboring burning building on his own as Booker helped to rescue a woman from the fire in Newark in April 2012. (John Munson | The Star-Ledger)

He really did rescue a neighbor from a burning building

Booker, then Newark mayor, rescued his next-door neighbor from a kitchen fire, burning his hand and suffering from smoke inhalation in the process.

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Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant or on Facebook. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.

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