41° and Mist
Academy Award-winning actress Susan Sarandon supports Lisa McCormick for US Senate
There's a race for the Senate in New Jersey that you probably haven't heard much about, though it tells us something about the state of our democracy.
Susan Sarandon—the Academy Award-winning actress from Edison, who has spent her life on both the screen and the front lines of social justice—has thrown her support behind Lisa McCormick, a reform Democrat from the same Middlesex County community who is challenging incumbent Cory Booker in the June 2nd primary.
Now, McCormick is no stranger to long shots or bold progressive positions on important issues.
A few years back, she ran against Bob Menendez, pulling in nearly 160,000 votes against a machine-backed incumbent who now sits in a federal prison cell.
McCormick's running on a platform that would have sounded radical not long ago: capping personal wealth at $100 million, prosecuting oil executives who lied about climate change, and replacing Chuck Schumer as Majority Leader.
The case against Booker, as McCormick and Sarandon see it, is rooted in the votes he's cast and the company he's kept.
Since going to Washington, women have lost the right to choose, the Voting Rights Act was gutted, and the middle class has shrunk while trillions were siphoned from workers' pockets.
Booker, they note, has raised nearly $100 million, taken cash from dozens of billionaires and hundreds of thousands from the pro-Israel lobby, and
Booker stood with Donald Trump on matters ranging from cryptocurrency to the confirmation of Charles Kushner—Trump's pardoned felon-in-law—to an ambassadorship.
He was the only Democrat to support Kushner.
"We grew up in the same county, in the same towns, but we're separated by more than twenty years," McCormick told me. "In that time, the moral compass in Washington hasn't just drifted—it's been dismantled."
Sarandon's journey from Edison High School to UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, from Thelma & Louise to being arrested in a Senate office building protesting family separation—it all circles back to this question of what we owe each other.
And in backing McCormick, she's betting that New Jersey voters are ready to ask that question, too.
McCormick’s campaign has sharply criticized Booker’s voting record, noting that he was the only Democrat to vote for the confirmation of Charles Kushner as U.S. ambassador to France.
Kushner, a convicted felon pardoned by President Donald Trump, faced unanimous opposition from every other Democratic senator.
Booker also voted to confirm several of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
On matters of war and peace, McCormick has accused Booker of enabling human suffering.
She points to his votes to approve weapons sales to Israel, including shipments of 1,000-pound bombs, even as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and displaced millions.
Booker has also voted against efforts to block such arms transfers, drawing criticism from progressives who argue he has abandoned the party’s principles.
The political winds have shifted, as one supporter put it. The question is whether the leadership will follow.
