On the train, he recounts how, when he ran for Senate for the first time, he insisted to his pollsters that criminal-justice reform and gun policy would again be his priority. In Milwaukee, he sat with a small group of gun-violence survivors and activists to hear their stories, vowing to fight the NRA and promising that finding creative solutions to the issue would be front and center in his White House.
Booker is a few months into his presidential campaign, and he’s recently started publicly bristling at the way compromise is being treated like a bad thing, and how progressive purity tests are fashionable now, as he looks to break away from the overstuffed pack of candidates.
#CORY BOOKER SPARTACUS SERIES#
The New Jersey senator and former Newark mayor is in the middle of a high-intensity campaign swing hitting a series of politically important states - Donald Trump will visit Wisconsin four days later - where he’s talking about a wide range of politically potent issues (voting rights, criminal justice, environmental justice …) as he looks for some much-needed momentum heading into the summer, when the party’s debates will begin. 1 concern when I ran for mayor of Newark the first and second time: safety, violence,” says Cory Booker. We’re sitting on an Amtrak train from Milwaukee - where Booker’s just wrapped up a roundtable discussion on gun-violence prevention in a coffee shop - to Chicago, and Booker is trying to make sure I understand how central the issue is to his political career, and what he wants to do now. My pollster said he’d never seen anything like it - it was the No.
“I’ve run for three offices in my life - this is the fourth - and it was a massive issue when I ran for city council.