Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) will be making a post-campaign announcement in Iowa this weekend, including a visit to the Rising Leadership Forum 3 p.m. Saturday at the Kum&Go Theater in Des Moines.

New Jersey’s junior senator and former Newark mayor entered the growing field of Democratic candidates Feb. 1. He is the fourth senator to announce a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Booker entered the Senate after winning the 2013 special election. He was reelected to the Senate in 2014.

The now-presidential candidate serves on the judiciary committee, where he gained fame for his questioning during the Brett Kavanaugh nomination hearings and infamy among those on the right for his “I am Spartacus” moment.

Booker compared himself to the gladiator of antiquity in his decision to release “confidential documents” from the now-Justice Kavanaugh’s time as a lawyer in the Bush administration. Derision from the right followed as the documents were no longer marked confidential at that point and had been released the night before.

The senator first made his entry into politics as a city councilman in Newark. After an unsuccessful 2002 run, he was elected to his first term as mayor in 2006. As mayor, Booker grew his national profile by remaining a resident of the Central Ward and through living in a similar manner to many of the city’s residents, surviving on $30 worth of food for one week in 2012.

In December 2018, Booker co-sponsored a bill that would have made lynching a federal crime after more than 100 years of attempts to pass similar legislation. 

Booker, 49, has previously highlighted his personal upbringing in a Democratic party that has an increased focus on racial issues. His father Cary was born in the segregation-era south and rose to become one of International Business Machines Corporation’s first black executives.

Booker’s parents, with volunteer lawyers’ assistance, broke the color barrier and moved into what had been a nearly exclusively white school district in Harrington Park, New Jersey, where he played football in high school.

He went on to play for Stanford University, where he received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Booker then graduated from Yale Law School and moved to Newark’s Central Ward, where he still resides.