Leave it to Cory Booker to find a way to anger both liberals and conservatives within just a few hours.

The New Jersey senator's unprecedented decision to testify against attorney general nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions earlier this month infuriated the right. That evening, it was the left’s turn to rip him after he joined mostly Republicans to vote down a symbolic amendment aimed at importing prescription drugs.


To Booker’s critics, the high-wire moves are all part of his positioning for 2020, when there’s likely to be a crowded Democratic primary. His emergence as a face of the Democratic resistance to Donald Trump while the party is desperately searching for new leadership is not lost on his fellow senators, party strategists or Washington’s chattering classes, even if Booker himself insists he’s not itching to take on Trump in 2020.

“I don’t care if it’s the left that gets mad at me or the right that gets mad at me,” Booker said in an interview in his mostly spare Capitol Hill office last week. “It’s not about some distant office or even my reelection … it’s about advancing the cause of my country right now, today. Because it’s on.”

“This is not calculating to me. And the things that we do that you don’t know about, the trips that we take that you don’t know about, the national trips,” added the senator. “I’m not advertising things that I could if I was trying to make myself that.”

But in interviews with over a dozen lawmakers, donors and operatives, Democrats say that whether he likes it or not, the 47-year-old senator is in the mix for the Democratic nomination in 2020 simply because of who he is — and what he’s doing now.

Booker is younger than Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, more charismatic than Sherrod Brown, better known than Martin O’Malley. He’s mastered social media and built a unique profile over the past 15 years as a telegenic politician that stands to resonate with an increasingly young, urban party. And his voting record is reliably liberal, despite critics on the party’s left flank.

Some of his moves seem to encourage the speculation, between last summer’s veepstakes, his hobnobbing with early state delegations during July’s convention, an interview with one of New Hampshire’s top TV reporters in January, and even his move to join the Foreign Relations committee.

“He obviously is interested in running for president, and he’s decided to position himself as vocally anti-Trump. There’s certainly an appetite for that,” said Bob Shrum, a veteran lead strategist for Democratic presidential campaigns. “He’s obvious, and I don’t find anything wrong with being obvious.”

Once comfortable keeping his head down and building his Senate profile from the ground up despite pre-existing national fame, Booker realizes his party and constituents are expecting him to become one of Trump’s chief critics. The youthful and buoyant former mayor of Newark, New Jersey, has been engulfed by buzz, a longtime “next big thing” in the party now undergoing a Trump-era evolution.

Just months after making a serious push to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate, that means taking on Sessions, hitting the Sunday show circuit, and sitting for a 30-minute interview with a national outlet after several years of concentrating almost entirely on New Jersey media. It all adds up to a perfect storm of attention around Booker, who insists he’s not interested in the presidency and whose behind-the-scenes maneuvers suggest that’s largely, if not entirely, true.

“He’s going to naturally get more attention because you’re going to want to write about him as a presidential candidate,” said Ohio’s Brown, who's also drawing attention as a 2020 prospect for his appeal to blue-collar voters.

“Anybody who steps up to the national stage is going to be talked about it in that context. And I think that’s appropriate,” said Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz, a close friend of Booker’s in the Senate.

For now, however, people close to Booker are wary of pushing his national message too far, since the traditional presidential campaign playbook is in tatters during the era of a celebrity president.

In the words of longtime party fundraiser and DNC member Robert Zimmerman, “Clearly his positioning and messaging is not subtle about 2020, but, as we learned from 2016, subtlety is not a prerequisite for running for president."

Booker remains more comfortable talking about Newark, Trenton and the rest of New Jersey as his future. “I can name the people that I know that are affected by the policies that I know the Trump administration is going to be pursuing. And that’s why I try to be very cold about this,” Booker said. “What can I be doing right now to stop the stuff?”

His cautious approach to Oval Office talk is backed up by his meager political infrastructure: just a few hands and a fundraiser in New Jersey. He’s gotten to know scores of the party’s leading donors and operatives in recent years, but there's little to suggest that Booker currently harbors a well-laid plan to go national.

His manner in a recent interview buttresses that posture. The first-term senator comes across as far less stage-managed than the likes of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, two other 40-something colleagues who dug in for White House bids shortly after President Barack Obama was reelected. Booker can go a mile-a-minute on disparate topics, giving long, thoughtful answers that are a far cry from the rehearsed sound bites of many of his colleagues.

At one point during the interview, an aide informs it's time to wrap it up. But Booker ended up chatting for 10 more minutes: “The problem isn’t you, the problem is me,” he said of his verbose answers.

Booker’s short-term playbook includes questioning Sessions’ “hostility” to civil rights, grilling Trump’s EPA nominee on asthma in Newark, and lacing into secretary of state hopeful Rex Tillerson about transparency with the news media. He’s also joined Sen. Chuck Schumer’s leadership team, amplifying his voice within the Senate at party strategy meetings.

Nonetheless, Clinton’s loss has created an inescapable vacuum atop the reeling Democratic Party, and any ostentatious move in Washington is now inevitably viewed as a move toward the party’s likely crowded 2020 primary. That’s a lesson Booker is learning alongside Warren, Sanders, Brown, Connecticut’s Chris Murphy and California’s Kamala Harris.

So when Booker took a stand against Sessions, Republicans said he was merely using it as “a platform for his presidential aspirations,” as Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton put it. And when he voted on a relatively meaningless prescription drug vote amendment in the middle of the night, Sanders supporters criticized Booker as too close to big business — a barb he’s faced ever since he defended the Bain Capital private equity firm in 2012.

“If there’s anything to learn from the Trump victory, the idea that another version of what I would call corporate Democrats is going to gain popular support is hard to even imagine,” said former Communications Workers of America president Larry Cohen, now leading the board of Our Revolution, a vestige of Sanders’ campaign. “Cory Booker is already in danger of being viewed as a corporate Democrat.”

Though he’s generally well-liked by progressives, to Cohen’s point, Booker faced criticism on that vote from in New Jersey: Democratic gubernatorial hopeful John Wisniewski skewered the move as “inexplicable."

But rather than irk Booker, criticism like that underscores his main point: That what he’s doing doesn’t help him pursue the presidency, or even win reelection in New Jersey in 2020. Unprompted, he brings up another stance that puts him at odds with much of his party: school choice.

“Who’s attacked me most about my education stances? The left. Now what is my rubric? It’s not what some author writes in a book, it’s not what the left criticizes me on,” Booker said, growing animated. “It’s the fact that when I go home you have literally thousands of kids born in poverty that now have some of the best schools in New Jersey.”

Still, Booker’s team maneuvered swiftly behind closed doors shortly after his drug vote. Donors and supporters received a letter from his state director three days after the vote that said while the pharmaceutical industry is important to New Jersey, "the Senator's first priority is to make sure that New Jerseyans, and all Americans, have access to safe, effective and affordable medications."

Indeed, in Booker's world at the moment, it all comes back to New Jersey. In a recent interview, one day before Trump was inaugurated, he expressed worry about Trump’s chilling effect on the media and observed that national publications might wither as they have in New Jersey. When he discussed his emotional state seeing Trump sworn in, he pointed to a map of Newark’s Central Ward on his wall as his motivation. And when he asked about his ambitions, Booker said he’s been hearing the same thing since 2002, when opponents said he viewed Newark as a steppingstone.

But Booker did go onto something bigger by winning election to the Senate. And he can’t deny that Trump’s presidency has raised the stakes for him. It’s no longer enough to work quietly with other senators and keep his head down.

“I’m really proud that in the three years with Obama as president ... I was able to deliver real stuff for my state,” Booker reflected. “But the world changed on Election Day, Nov. 8. It just changed."