Booker starts out 2026 cycle with $11.2 million on-hand

The end of the 2024 elections means that it’s once again re-election season for Senator Cory Booker, whose seat will come before voters in 2026 – and he’ll have plenty of money to run his campaign.

Booker began 2025 with an enormous $11,192,486 in his campaign account, after raising $921,798 in the last three months of 2024. Over the course of the last two years – when most New Jerseyans were focused instead on the state’s other Senate seat, eventually won by now-Senator Andy Kim – Booker raised nearly $7.9 million in total.

The race to take Booker on has not even begun to take shape yet; no challengers from either party have announced campaigns, and it may be a long while before any step up. (Last cycle, the eventual GOP nominee for Senate, Curtis Bashaw, didn’t announce his campaign until January 2024, barely four months before the primary election.) One independent Senate candidate, Nick Carducci, has filed with the Federal Election Commission to raise money.

Booker was first elected in 2013 to replace the late Senator Frank Lautenberg, defeating Republican Steve Lonegan 55% to 44%; he won a first full term 56% to 42% in 2014, and won re-election 57% to 41% in 2020. He also ran for president in 2020 – a campaign for which he raised nearly $23 million – but dropped out before the primaries.

Republicans may hope that New Jersey’s recent swing to the right may augur a more competitive race for Booker in 2026; Kim’s ten-point win in 2024 was the closest U.S. Senate election in the state since 2006. But given Booker’s strength as a candidate, as well as the fact that midterm elections usually go poorly for the party in power, they have a tough road ahead of them.

Today is also the fourth-quarter filing deadline for New Jersey’s 12 House members, but that comes with a caveat.

Since the House was up for election last November, House members’ 4th quarter reports will only include fundraising from December and late November, when most representatives were winding down their 2024 campaigns and getting ready to be sworn in for the 2025-2026 term; most members raise little during that interim time.

Case in point: Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield), who just won an extremely expensive campaign against Democrat Sue Altman last year, reported raising only $8,731 in the last month of 2024, and starts out the 2026 cycle with $48,287 on-hand; it’s safe to expect that his fundraising will pick up dramatically again in the first quarter of this year. Another New Jersey member from a swing district, Rep. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon), has not filed her 4th quarter report yet.