PolitickerNJ analyzes the reasons why former Newark Mayor Cory Booker (now U.S. Senator) didn’t lend a hand to Shavar Jeffries in this week’s mayoral race, noting that Ras Baraka, Booker’s “polar opposite” on education reform, “assumed power with what appears to be the acquiescence of local Booker world.”

Bottom line: Booker assessed the field and decided that Jeffries couldn’t win; therefore, “it was not in the political interests of either Baraka or Booker to demonize the other in this cycle.”

Booker’s people had no loyalties there, and there was widespread derision within the ranks for Anderson, a long since fallen-away Booker Team member… 

Sources say Booker street allies were willing to trade in B4K [Better Education for Kids, the David Tepper-funded school reform lobbying group]  for influence in Baraka world. 

Ideology be damned, was the attitude, sources said, likening Booker world machinations to the calculation Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop made when he chose Baraka over Jeffries. 

Playing for statewide office, Fulop abandoned the schools reform movement – his biggest single independent expenditure backers in 2013 when he ran for mayor – to back the public school-championing Baraka for mayor. 

The same public sector union t-shirted armies screaming anti-Fulop slogans in the streets of JC a year ago, this year embraced him as the anti-establishment cross-the-river soul political mate of the renegade Baraka. 

Lent cover by his office – “senators don’t get involved in local races,” an insider said – Booker could assess the divide between Baraka and Jeffries on the school reform question and stay personally out of the contest, while a majority of his political operatives folded into the nascent Baraka empire.