Booker raised nearly $1.7 million in Q1 – and that’s not including his big speech

Senator Cory Booker raised $1,651,651 for his 2026 re-election campaign in the first quarter of 2025 – and that barely includes any of the money he raised during his 25-hour Senate speech, a moment that seemingly won him legions of new Democratic fans around the country.

Booker, first elected in 2013 and now running for a third full term, starts out with a campaign warchest of $12,405,655, which is more than nearly every other member of the state’s delegation has combined (excluding Rep. Josh Gottheimer).

“Senator Booker is laser-focused on raising resources to not only support his re-election next year but ensure that Democrats take back control of the House and Senate,” said Mo Butler, Booker’s top strategist. “He recognizes that he is now one of the leading figures within his party and with that comes a tremendous amount of responsibility.”

On the evening of March 31 – the last day of the first quarter – Booker began speaking before the Senate, detailing all of the ways that he and his fellow Democratic senators believe that President Donald Trump is failing the nation. The next evening, Booker was still speaking, eventually smashing segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond’s 1957 record for longest-ever uninterrupted Senate speech.

The speech catapulted Booker into the national spotlight; clips from it got hundreds of millions of likes on social media, and Booker’s national name ID (and support levels for a potential 2028 presidential campaign) have shot upwards in some early polls. It also almost certainly led to a huge fundraising boom for the senator – his campaign sent out a fundraising text shortly after he came off the floor – but because most of the attention came the first week of April, that won’t be known until Q2 reports come out in July.

It remains to be seen whether Booker will face a remotely serious fight for re-election in 2026. Booker won his first three Senate elections with relative ease and no Republicans have yet stepped up to take on the senator, but after Trump’s surge in New Jersey in 2024 and with a major gubernatorial election this year, some Democrats in the state remain on edge.

As Butler pointed out, though, Booker isn’t necessarily just fundraising for himself. Democrats have a steep path next year to flipping four seats and taking back the Senate, and Booker, now the Senate’s #4 Democrat, may end up playing a key role in that effort.