Cory Booker celebrates win, delivers fiery message
Nov 4, 2026
New Jersey voters are sending Cory Booker back to Washington. The Democratic incumbent defeated Republican Justin Murphy to win another term in the U.S. Senate, extending his time in office. But with a deeply divided political landscape and major challenges ahead, Booker says the focus now shifts from winning the election to the work that comes next.
(Video: Cory Booker livestream)
Look, I want to thank
this great state for my life,
your United States.
Listen, you all know this.
I've been in Essex County for half my life,
but the first half of my life grew up right here in Bergen County.
Yeah!
And I want to thank the chairman.
Paul is steadfast.
He is unyielding.
He is determined.
He is hardworking.
Dear God, he is the James Brown of Bergen County.
The doors are open now.
Give it up for our chairman, welcome him out, our county chair,
who also happens to be our great, great Essex County chair.
He's led all over the state. He's one of the reasons why we have
the nation's greatest governor, Mikey Sherrill.
I want to thank Leroy Jones for his leadership in everything
that he has done in this election and our last.
Look, I'm grateful for my family, grateful for my wife,
I'm grateful for all those people who worked on this election.
I want to thank Adam, my campaign manager,
who has been a phenomenal leader and a phenomenal friend.
But to everyone who worked on this campaign,
for everyone who worked on the whole ticket electing them,
those who knocked on doors and made phone calls and hung signs,
who organized and mobilized all over this state,
Working for people on the ticket in town council races,
in the Harbor Township,
all the way up to some of the most important house races in America,
including flipping one seat now with Rebecca Bennett going.
Politics is not an individual sport like
my old high school football day team.
It is a team sport. We do this together.
So tonight I especially want to thank all those people.
We kept working, kept working, and kept working through this election.
Now, we're going to see a lot of things happen tonight.
The results are going to continue to pour in.
And if there's anything we're seeing in America right now,
it is a wave of change going through our nation.
And mark my words, the results are not in,
but this is going to be one of the greatest rebukes
of a sitting president in the history of the United States of America.
This election, that this election is not right or left,
it is right or wrong.
What we've been seeing in our communities and our towns and
our neighborhoods has been wrong.
It is wrong to have people jumping out of unmarked cars, wearing masks,
going around our schools and our churches,
going around our hospitals and
dragging our neighbors into private for profit prisons.
People that have American spouses and American children,
what we're seeing around this country
is our citizens getting shot
and often killed by this reckless out-of-control agency. That is wrong.
It is wrong for us to find ourselves
in yet another unjustified Middle East war,
a quagmire that has cost us lives, billions of dollars.
It is wrong to see gas prices being jacked up to record levels
and Americans all over and people up and down the state of New Jersey
paying more and more and more even though they're not making more.
It is wrong to take a trillion dollars out of Medicaid,
to take a sledgehammer to the Affordable Care Act,
to drive up all of our health insurance costs,
all with the excuse of giving bigger
and bigger tax breaks to the wealthiest of the wealthy.
It is wrong to have tariff wars that are indiscriminate
and make no sense whatsoever.
It is wrong to declare war on Canada.
And all while these policies are hurting our people
and hurting our neighbors, it is wrong
for the corruption in Washington to spread
to such a level that we have a president now
that is grifting more than two billion dollars off of his office.
Like Marie Antoinette, he is getting richer
and richer while our nation struggles more and more.
I tell you all of this to say to you very clearly.
The challenges we face as a nation did not start with Donald Trump.
I will do everything in office to fight him,
to check and balance him, to hold him accountable.
But I want you to know something tonight.
We have challenges in our nations that predated him.
There are a lot of people in this country
that are beginning to lose faith.
We have politicians that try to exploit our fears
and our divisions and pit us against one another.
We are still one nation under God.
We have people trying to tell us that the problem
in this nation is left or right.
Well, I'm going to tell you something.
The difference that most should concern us in America,
the distance between us that is the biggest crisis,
is the distance between the American people and the American dream.
My grandparents told me about this great dream of America.
We're two generations from slavery.
And they believed in this nation.
And they got involved in politics like we all are tonight.
Back then, my grandfather knocked
on doors in Detroit for a man named FDR.
And he knew that this nation's dream had not been achieved,
but he believed in it.
Sweat and work, he worked assembly lines
During World War II, building bombers, and then organized and mobilized
and got a new president elected who said it's time for a new deal.
The new deal is necessary
because the dream is out of reach for too many people.
And they reset the economic table, lifted the economic poor,
gave work dignity, stopped the concentrations of wealth,
and let the free market and real competition spring up again.
What FDR, that generation, did, yielded the baby boomer generation,
and 90% of them did better than their parents.
When my generation came on, the next generation,
we benefited from all that work.
Almost 65% of us did better than our parents.
But around that time of the Reagan Revolution,
1980, I remind you I had a great afro in 1980.
Thank you.
But 1980 was that tipping point, but unfortunately in our country
it was a 50-50 flip of a coin whether you do better than your parents.
Every generation since,
millennials and z's have seen worse
and worse economic horizons for their generations.
America does not work if it only works for some.
We are a nation that has promised that we would be the country
that shows that our way of governance,
that our ideals work best in the world,
and the measure of that is not in how many billionaires we have,
but in how many of our people can access a quality of life,
a work with decency and dignity,
the ability to provide for your children and retire with security.
So I'm going to tell you right now what the mission is,
because we have ended an election,
but this has got to be the start of a movement.
It is not just a movement to deal with an out-of-control,
aging, autocrat wannabe in
the White House.
Thank you very much.
The mission is bigger than him.
He is not the main character of our story.
The main character of our story is the American people
and the job of our generation is to redeem the dream of America,
the dream of our ancestors, the dream of immigrants and laborers,
the dreams of former slaves and children of sharecroppers.
It is up to us to redeem the dream of America
and tonight's election must be the start of just that.
I'm telling you right now, America,
tonight is the start of our comeback, baby.
Thank you.
We now know the mission is to redeem the dream,
because when there's a dream in our land, as
the poet said, if it's back against the wall,
the only way to save the dream is to save
the dream for all.
Are you all ready for the work?
Yeah!
Are you all ready for the work?
Are you ready to redeem the dream of America?
Let's celebrate them tomorrow
morning and let's keep working
on the American dream again.