A big part of Cory’s life is being in public, but it’s not his whole life — he’s a really good husband,” Alexis Lewis, who married Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey late last year, tells me, iced coffee in hand. For proof, she opens her tote bag and shows me the cut-and-peeled apple, electrolyte powder, and protein bars Booker packed for her that morning. ALEXIS is written in boyish handwriting on the face of an attendant envelope. The 38-year-old real-estate-investment executive travels often, and she says Booker packs her a little treat before every trip. “There are a lot of people who have celebrity, but he happens to be well known for being a good human being — as well as tall and bald,” she says.
We’re at Tops Diner, the East Newark stalwart, part of Lewis’s introduction to her newly adopted state; she moved from Los Angeles to New Jersey last year to be with Booker. (One of the couple’s earliest dates was at Tops, where she met some of his closest friends for the first time: “It was kind of like my initiation.”) Though the DJ booth is empty — it’s a Friday around noon — the diner still feels vaguely clubby, filled with families toasting young women who wear going-out tops underneath their commencement gowns. We’re all — Lewis, myself, and Booker’s comms director, who joins us — using our outside voices.
Seven years ago, Booker jammed himself in the clown car that was the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, lasting five debates before dropping out. On an episode of Meet the Press earlier this year, Booker said he wasn’t “ruling out” another run; recent polling suggests between 2 and 7 percent of voters support his candidacy. Still, it’s early enough to be anybody’s game, and settling down never hurt anybody’s chances. Despite his reputation taking hits from the left — especially for his pro-Israel stance and his historic but ineffective 2025 “filibuster” against the Trump administration — Booker remains decently popular. “We walk around Newark on a Saturday, and everybody is yelling out of their car, and that has been awesome,” she says. “For the most part, people come up to him and say, ‘We love you for standing up for us,’ and they extend that same love and grace to me by association.”
In the past two years, Lewis has gone from being a private citizen to, like her husband, having a public life. (“It boggles my brain that so many people have seen my wedding photos,” she says.) Still, she can now direct attention to the causes she cares most about. Lewis is an avid proponent of fostering pets; at the Capitol, she, with the Best Friends Animal Society and the Brandywine Valley SPCA, hosted the first event for her Bipartisan Buddies initiative, through which Hill staffers can play with puppies. Dog rescues ask her to post about their organizations. “I have this bigger platform because of him, and he has taught me how to use that voice for good, and that has been so unexpectedly fun,” she says.
Before Lewis met Booker, she had a list of attributes she wanted in a partner: “generous of spirit”; “fun forever”; “a good communicator, which also means a good listener”; someone who “moves with intention.” “This is a list that, like, my best friends could rattle off. It’s very hard to find someone who has one or two, let alone all four,” she says. They were set up by a mutual friend; Lewis was initially apprehensive. (“I was like, ‘That sounds crazy. Are you well?’”) It seemed so far-fetched, going on a date with a guy she’d only ever seen on TV: “For a single girl in her 30s, it just sounded outlandish, without even considering the fact that we lived on opposite coasts or that he’s vegan — maybe the most surprising thing of it all,” she says. “We just operate in such different worlds.” But she was traveling to D.C. anyway, so she agreed to meet him, thinking, if nothing else, it would make a great story. They talked for hours. “If you ask Cory, he wasn’t necessarily waiting for the right person, but he was waiting to become the right person. If we had met at any other time in our lives, I don’t know if it would have worked. We’re both career focused, or we didn’t know what we were looking for. We had that timing.”
They hard-launched last year with a joint Instagram post announcing their engagement after a year and a half of dating. The announcement caught many off guard, especially considering Booker’s long-held bachelorhood and the rumors that he is closeted, which he has refuted. Lewis’s Instagram comments section has become a watercooler for this discussion. “When talking about mean comments on Instagram, people are like, ‘He married her because … whatever,’” she says. Her wish is for people to trust her when she says she’s happy. “The thing about Instagram is that people take other people’s happiness as an infringement upon themselves. My engagement photo — someone was like, ‘She smiles too big.’ I was like, ‘It’s the happiest day in my life.’” Lewis says they didn’t intentionally keep the public out of the loop. “We didn’t publicize the relationship by any means, but we certainly didn’t try to hide it,” she told me. They attended public events, were photographed together, walked around Newark hand in hand. “It just seemed, to our delight, that no one had really picked it up as a story.”
With a public life comes misconceptions about it, including that Lewis doesn’t have her own career or interests. “Cory married me at 38 — the cake is baked,” she says. “I have had a whole lot of time to do my thing. I’m very involved in Cory’s world, and I love it, but sometimes I have to take a work call, and people are like, ‘Oh, right, you have a job.’” And then there are the people who think she is Rosario Dawson, Booker’s movie-star ex-girlfriend with more than a passing resemblance to Lewis. (The same night she met Booker’s friends at Tops, a woman thanked her for a holiday card she had never appeared in. “In my head, I’m like, LOL, girlfriend, we just met,” Lewis says, laughing.) She waves away any idea that it’s a source of tension. “Maybe earlier in my life, if people compared me to someone’s ex-girlfriend, I would feel some kind of way,” she says. “Also, if it’s not meant to be a compliment — try harder.”
Lewis takes her role as a representative of the state very seriously. The couple spent many early dates on walks with Booker pointing out municipal improvements his office had made, like cleaning up a park or repaving a road. “I am still at the very foothills of my Jersey life,” she says. “I’m very honest about that. I love it, and Jersey has accepted me, but I’m very honest that I am learning. I’m trying to find my spots.” Booker’s veganism means their restaurant preferences don’t overlap as much as she’d like, but her Instagram followers are flooding her with suggestions, which she keeps in an Excel sheet. (Current favorite: Sunrise Bagels in Montclair, for a cinnamon-raisin bagel with onion cream cheese, lox, tomato, onion, cucumber, and a side of whitefish salad.)
When I ask what it would mean for her if Booker decided to run for president again, she gives me a noncommittal answer. “I would be happy supporting Cory in any decision,” she says. “I know that family is important to him, so as long as we’re building our family … I’m hoping to have some babies at some point! If we can do that, if we have our core, then I’m like, Okay.”
She’s got enough to adjust to as is right now; friends with whom she shares the details of her new life also revel in the “Can you believe this?” of it all. “It’s a funny thing when you say ‘I just have to text Elaine Chao about this event’ or ‘I saw an opera singer perform at the steps of the Italian ambassador’s residence,’” she says. “That’s wild, and I’m so fortunate, but I can’t tell many people except my best friends — like, ‘LOL.’”
