Is Cory Booker the rising star Democrats need?

Could a vegan be president?

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A few weeks ago, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker managed to do what no Democrat has really managed to do since Donald Trump took office: break through into the national conversation and generate some excitement about a fightback.

The way Booker did it was by giving a speech on the floor of the Senate which lasted 25 hours, beating the previous record, set by segregationist Strom Thurmond in 1957 (who was a great guy, according to Joe Biden).¹ In the speech he lambasted Trump, talked about his party’s values, and generally tried to create the impression that the country is going through a crisis during which the routine operation of politics ought to be interrupted.

It’s easy to roll your eyes at Booker’s antics, and I’m tempted to do so myself. I tend to be quite a literal person, and if you ask yourself what concrete good he accomplished in terms of fighting Trump, the answer is basically zero. You also can’t escape the fact that one senator pulling a stunt to paralyze the Senate for a single day is not the same as the party as a whole using every tool possible to stop routine business until the present constitutional crisis is stopped. This was a made-for-TV moment, not a coherent strategy.

Booker has also established a bit of a reputation for political stunts. While eyeing a run for president in 2018, he flamboyantly leaked a set of confidential documents about Brett Kavanaugh, one of Trump’s nominees for the Supreme Court. Except, it turned out, the documents were due to be released anyway, and so it looked like he had just manufactured the moment for headlines. And then there was the time that he went on a hunger strike and lived in a tent.

But there’s also a reason not to roll your eyes at Booker. The fightback against Trump needs activists and politicians, and if you’re a senator, what you’re really auditioning for is the role of the latter. As much as it benefits Trump for everyone to think that the ordinary rules of politics somehow don’t apply to him, if his approval ratings plummet and Democrats are on the rise, then that’s going to have a meaningful impact on the behavior of Congressional Republicans.

And as a political stunt, Booker’s speech wasn’t actually too bad. It grabbed national attention and immediately propelled him to number two on in polls of 2028 Democratic presidential hopefuls. Primary polls at this stage are pretty much just about name recognition (in first place is Kamala Harris!) but Booker showed good instincts by grabbing this opportunity. And that’s good! Democrats should want their senior politicians to show good instincts.

Of course, one speech isn’t really going to matter all that much in the future, and what really matters right now are more concrete forms of fightback. Nevertheless, Booker is inviting people to take his 2028 aspirations seriously.

So let’s do that. How might Booker run for president? Why did he flame out so badly last time he tried? And, most importantly of all, could a vegan ever really be president?

The Impossible Candidate

I’m going to start with the vegan thing because I think it’s the most interesting.

To my knowledge, Booker is the only openly vegan member of Congress except for Senator Adam Schiff. In a country that loves meat as much as the United States and which has a politically powerful agribusiness lobby, that could be a real liability when running for president (I say this as a near-vegan myself).

One thing I found notable about Booker’s speech was the way that it seemed designed to counter negative ideas that people have about vegans. According to stereotype, someone who doesn’t eat animal products must have low energy and stamina. Standing up and giving a speech for 25 hours seems like a good way to bat that criticism away.

But I’m not sure that it’s really enough. Food is important to people’s identity, and there’s a strong identification within American culture between eating meat and strength, patriotism, and Americanness. European travelers to the United States noted as early as the nineteenth century that Americans ate an unusual amount of meat, a result of the country’s vast agricultural productivity. And Americans today still eat an insane amount - about 125kg per person as opposed to 80kg in the UK or 70kg in South Korea. For all the talk of plant-based diets, meat consumption is actually going up, not down.

There’s a long history of conservatives weaponizing meat-eating identity against liberals, and I expect Booker to suffer the same sort of attacks. Veganism is often portrayed as weird, judgemental, inflexible, and neurotic. It’s hard to run for president as an average Joe while openly not indulging in one of the nation’s favorite pastimes. Only about a third of American voters view vegans favorably.

A second problem for Booker is going to be agribusiness. Here again, the United States is an outlier. Factory farming is horrific everywhere, but in the United States it is even worse, a result of loose regulation and little public scrutiny. Billions of animals live and die in atrocious conditions every year, and they do so in farms which benefit handsomely from government subsidies.

If Booker says he wants to do something about this, then he will bring the full force of the agribusiness lobby down on his head. He’ll also face intensified accusations that he somehow wants to ban meat or force people to eat less meat, an attack that Republicans used to great effect against the Green New Deal. Meanwhile, if Booker says he doesn’t want to do anything about factory farming, he’ll risk looking inconsistent and unprincipled.

How might Booker run?

Last time Booker ran for president, none of this stuff really came up because he flamed out so early. He never rose above a few percentage points in the polls, and so never appeared as a serious threat to anyone’s beefsteak or farming subsidy. So how can Booker ensure that he at least gets far enough for his diet to become a problem?

When Booker ran in 2020, he rested his candidacy on two things. The first was his background. He grew up in an affluent suburb and went to elite colleges but then moved to Newark, a working class city in New Jersey, and eventually became its mayor. This, Booker claimed, meant he understood the problems of the working class, particularly people of color. The second prong of his campaign was a vague message of unity.

Booker flamed out for a number of reasons, but mostly because he just couldn’t differentiate himself from the pack. He’s a charismatic performer, but his message never caught fire. Running on a gritty background is kind of difficult when you actually had a wealthy upbringing. The message of unity was too vague. His campaign felt a bit like an attempt to redo Obama 2008 in what were vastly different circumstances and with a candidate who was not as electrifying as Barack Obama.

For whatever reason, African American candidates since Obama have often felt drawn to a unity message. Tim Scott tried it on the Republican side, and Booker and Kamala Harris tried it on the Democratic side.

The appeal of this track stems perhaps from the fact that African Americans are often painted by racists with negative stereotypes in which they are viewed as radical and overly emotional. A moderate message can help to counteract that. On the other hand, any African American president would by definition by a trailblazer (even if they weren’t the first one), and their achievement should in theory be a focus of national pride and unity.

Whatever hopes lay behind that approach, we now have a lot of evidence that it doesn’t really work. Booker is going to have to try something different in 2028. What might it be?

If I had to hazard a guess, I think Booker will appeal to a few things:

• His ability to connect with working class voters, particularly black and brown ones, whose defection and lack of enthusiasm were one of the things leading Kamala Harris to defeat;

• His ability to generate viral social media moments to help Democrats break through media environments favored by the young, where the party has been performing badly;

• What he hopes will be a concrete record of standing up to Trump between now and 2028, and a promise to undo the damage that Trump has done.

In the end, that bring us full circle. What matters in the here and now is stopping Trump. And if Cory Booker wants people to take him seriously as the guy to do it in 2028, he needs to start doing concrete things that matter in the here and now. That goes for the Democratic Party as a whole.

So they should enjoy the afterglow of Booker’s speech - and then get back to work.

Thanks for reading America Explained. If you haven’t already, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. This will enable you to read all of this post and access the full archive. It will also enable me to put more time and energy into this newsletter, something that I’m hoping to do in order to cover the new administration more thoroughly. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thanks for supporting independent media and making it possible to do what I do.

1. N.B.: Strom Thurmond was not actually a great guy.