With love, Cory Booker. Inside one long-shot bid for the White House.

Senator Booker’s message of love and unity has been dismissed by some as too soft. But it’s an approach he honed over nearly two decades of living and working in Newark’s toughest neighborhoods.

The first time New Hampshire state Sen. Martha Hennessey heard Sen. Cory Booker speak, he reminded her of a Baptist preacher. “He was so ‘love and hope,’” she says. “Frankly, I was almost in tears.”

At the same time, she thought to herself, I’m not sure America is going to like this. This might be a little touchy-feely.

Senator Hennessey and her husband hosted the presidential candidate overnight in early summertime, as part of his circuit of homestays to get to know the state. When he arrived at their home in Hanover, she was still driving back from a late session at the statehouse. It was up to her husband to figure out what to feed an ex-football star turned vegan. The verdict? Rice cakes with freshly ground almond butter.

The next morning, as the couple’s Maltese-poodle mixes climbed into Senator Booker’s lap, the 50-year-old bachelor chatted with them and, at his staff’s urging, told them about his new girlfriend, actress and activist Rosario Dawson. “It’s like he was a friend that was visiting us from college,” says Senator Hennessey. But while she enjoyed the visit, the New Hampshire Democrat – who’d been hoping to endorse a female nominee – wasn’t ready to commit.

In this season of political courtship, many voters so far seem to see Senator Booker as “friend” material. “He’s not the one that they have a romantic interest in,” says Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute in New Jersey, who has been following the senator since he first ran for mayor of Newark in 2002. The latest Monmouth poll shows Senator Booker in a five-way tie for 8th place among Democratic candidates, with 1% of the vote.