While most political pundits have been predicting we won’t know the winner of the 2024 presidential election on Tuesday night, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker thinks Kamala Harris supporters may have turned out in such great numbers that “we could shut this thing down” faster than expected.
“I’ll give you my honest gut [feeling] right now, I felt worried as Harris/Walz were three points behind. But something happened about seven or 10 days ago,” Booker said on MSNBC, referring to the reaction to Donald Trump’s divisive rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
“You say this election is going to be close. I say we could shut this thing down. I say it could be called even tonight, because I’m seeing things I haven’t seen before, or at least not since 2008,” said Booker, referring to the year when former President Barack Obama became the nation’s first Black leader in the White House.
He continued: “This momentum-building, a Zeitgeist in our country, where we already seeing things with the Iowa poll that are beginning to say, ‘Well, maybe there’s something more going on than the pollsters are seeing.’ I am seeing people saying, ‘Enough is enough. I want to choose joy, I want to choose light, I want to choose possibility.’”
Watch the full segment below:
He told MSNBC host Katy Tur, who was covering the election for the network along with Chris Jansing and the outgoing Andrea Mitchell, “Good luck America. I hope it’s a girl. Women are doing it. They’re outvoting men. They’re voting in greater numbers,” he said.
Booker quipped that he’s had men come up to him and say, “I really have no choice. My girlfriend will kill me, my wife will kill me if I don’t vote for Kamala Harris,” citing issues such as reproductive rights and bodily autonomy and avoiding “horror stories like we just saw in Texas with somebody going to an emergency room three times because they’re having a miscarriage, but can’t get the healthcare they need, and it ends in tragedy.”
He added that his friends who are out knocking on doors have told him they’re seeing “older women who are just fed up, who might have voted for another Republican candidate” but appear to want nothing to do with Trump.
Booker also praised sitting President Joe Biden for his “heroism” in stepping down as the Democratic nominee and handing the race over to Harris, who he referred to as a “shooting star.”
“I respect our president that we have now, but she’s a shooting star,” Booker, who mounted his own presidential run in 2020, said. “She has been illuminating us all with her brilliance, luminescence, and I think, inspiring our country at a time that many of us have needed it.”
Watch Booker’s full MSNBC appearance from Tuesday in the video above.
