Sen. Cory Booker Drops Out of Presidential Race
WASHINGTON – Sen. Cory Booker announced Monday that he is dropping out of the presidential race, just three weeks before the Iowa caucus.
In a message to supporters, Booker cited fundraising struggles and his failure to make the debate stage, and said he no longer sees a path to victory.
“Our campaign has reached the point where we need more money to scale up and continue building a campaign that can win — money we don’t have, and money that is harder to raise because I won’t be on the next debate stage and because the urgent business of impeachment will rightly be keeping me in Washington,” Booker wrote in an email Monday morning.
Booker did not qualify for the December debate nor the one in Iowa on Tuesday.
The New Jersey senator, and former mayor of Newark, has long been considered a rising star in Democratic politics. But he never broke out of the low single-digits in polling in the early primary states.
Though he’s now leaving the presidential contest, Booker vowed to do “everything in my power to elect the eventual Democratic nominee for president, whomever that may be, and to elect great Democrats to the Senate and up and down the ballot.
“2020 is the most important election of our lifetimes — we have to beat Donald Trump … but beating Trump is the floor, not the ceiling,” he said. “We must remember that throughout the campaign to come, and as we work to build a more just America in Trump’s wake.”