Andy Kim, who would be the first U.S. senator from South Jersey since 1955, defied the state’s political bosses. Will they get over it?

ELIZABETH, N.J. — Andy Kim was the guest earlier this month of Charles N. Hall Jr., president of RWDSU Local 108, a North Jersey union that represents the kinds of workers you encounter all the time: supermarket cashiers, bus drivers, parking authority enforcers, nursing home aides.

A three-term Democratic congressman from Burlington County, Kim, 42, is barreling toward a historic U.S. Senate race win: if elected, he would be the Senate’s first Korean-American, its fourth youngest member, and the first senator from South Jersey since Robert Clymer Hendrickson of Woodbury left office in January, 1955. And he’d be the first Asian-American senator ever from New Jersey.

On that morning, he was jumping on and off the shuttle buses at Loading Zone 15 of Newark International’s Terminal A, reaching over the meat counter to shake hands with the butchers, being pulled into the back stockroom of the former ice rink that is now the Twin City Supermarket in Elizabeth.

“Con Kamala?” Margarita Carchi, a 20-year cashier originally from Ecuador, wanted to know.

Con Kamala, Kim assured her.

Indeed, New Jersey’s Democratic majority electorate seems on track to both give its 14 Electoral College votes to Kamala Harris and to usher Kim into the U.S. Senate, in a campaign trajectory that (in both cases) turned party machinery on its head.

A Phillies fan and graduate of Cherry Hill High School East (campaigning now for all those Mets and Yankees fan votes), Kim likes to say he’d be the closest the Philly area has to a home senator. (U.S. Sen. Bob Casey is from Scranton, his opponent Dave McCormick is from Pittsburgh, and Sen. John Fetterman is from Braddock, outside Pittsburgh.)

He is facing Republican Cape May hotelier Curtis Bashaw for the seat formerly held by ex-Sen. Bob Menendez, a long-entrenched Democrat from Hudson County who was convicted of federal bribery and corruption charges before finally resigning.

Kim seems not in the slightest bit entrenched. He’s never been a George Norcross guy, not even given a nod to the bare-fisted South Jersey Democratic power broker over the years. And he brazenly stared down New Jersey first lady Tammy Murphy, the wife of Gov. Phil Murphy, in a crusading primary battle in which he managed to get a judge to throw out New Jersey’s practice of allowing each county Democratic Party to grant preferential primary ballot position (”the line”) to their chosen candidate.

Phil and Tammy Murphy believed that the seat would be hers, that people would line up as usual. She ultimately dropped out as Kim’s grassroots support grew, and the party seemed about to revolt.

The governor still hasn’t endorsed Kim.

In fact, later the same day that Kim was navigating through Essex and Union Counties cashier by cashier and driver by driver, Murphy went on radio and said he would be willing to endorse Kim — but Kim would have to ask him. Never mind. Kim has said he has other things to worry about. It’s people’s health care and housing costs, the world his kids will grow up to inhabit, that keep him up at night, he said, not Murphy’s endorsement protocols.

“I know that right now there’s a lot of challenges with high costs in New Jersey, and different challenges for families, and I want to be somebody that can really try to help solve these problems for you,” Kim told the workers.

He also told them, “We’ve become a nation addicted to anger. My family has been on the receiving end. We’re having a crisis of empathy.”

Kim, the child of two immigrants from South Korea, is married to tax attorney Kammy Lai, an immigrant herself, as he mentions regularly, from Canada. They are the parents of two boys, 7 and 9. He plays blues guitar, attended a college where he worked on a cattle ranch before graduating from the University of Chicago, and then went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

Before running for Congress, he was a national security adviser, serving in Washington under the Obama administration and in Afghanistan under Generals David Petraeus and John Allen.

He’s a relaxed if hyper-focused campaigner with an easy laugh who seems keenly interested in what people are telling him and will stick around to hear them out. Supporter Peter Rosario of Newark joked, after a recent roundtable meeting, that Kim is “probably the only politician that wants to go extra long because you listen so much.”

Rosario organized the round table of Latino social service providers at his La Casa de Don Pedro neighborhood revitalization center, where providers like Amina Bey of the Newark Emergency Services for Families detailed for Kim the many and urgent obstacles they face. After, Rosario summed up his feelings about the legacy machine’s coolness toward Kim this way: “Who cares.”

“The idea of the closed room, someone has a super secret meeting, and out of that we have candidates, [Kim] broke that,” Rosario said.

It was in a Wegman’s supermarket in Mt. Laurel where Kim’s career as an elected politician caught fire. As he tells it, he put out a Facebook post telling people to meet him upstairs at the Wegman’s and expected a half dozen to show up. He bought a jug of iced tea. More than 60 people showed.

He ended up unseating the Trump-aligned Rep. Tom MacArthur, an architect of the attempt to repeal Obamacare, in 2018 and went on to twice win a district that Trump won.

It was the day after Jan. 6 when he was photographed cleaning up trash in the Capitol that crystalized his national reputation, though about half of New Jersey voters surveyed in a recent poll said they were not that familiar with Kim.

It’s an instinct that can surface in less hallowed places, like when a pile of notes tucked under the elbow of a reporter from North Jersey’s Local Talk Weekly newspaper fluttered to to the ground of the airport median earlier this month. Kim was the only one to get down to the ground to gather them up.

“He defends us, you know, the working people,” declared Twin City Supermarket produce manager Victor Felipe, 62.

Menendez had been a high point of Latino representation in New Jersey, but Felipe said he had moved on. “Whatever he did, he has to pay now,” he said.

He’s all in for Kim, whom he’s known since he was YMCA director in Ocean County, then part of Kim’s 3d Congressional District. He’s confident Kim can fully represent the state.

“I’ve seen those town halls when folks with MAGA hats would come up to [Kim] and say, ‘You’re the first Democrat I’m voting for because of what you did for veterans,” Rosario said.

Hall, the union president, said his union members would be hitting the streets to promote Kim’s candidacy. “He’s a good man,” Hall told Twin City supermarket workers.

» READ MORE: Andy Kim’s underdog Senate campaign broke barriers and actually excited voters

Both times Kim decided to run for an office, it was on impulse. The first time, it was after hearing that the incumbent, MacArthur, was sponsoring an amendment that would have undermined Obamacare.

This time, it was seeing Menendez refuse to step down after being indicted on the corruption charges. Kim leaped into the race, apologies (or not) to Tammy Murphy.

As a senator, he noted he’d be one of just three statewide elected officials in New Jersey, and, he said, “could really step up and be a bigger voice for my state.”

“I’m excited to represent nine million people, to represent the entirety of my home state,” Kim said. “A lot of the issues I’m trying to fight for, lowering costs, it doesn’t just end in my congressional district.”

As a senator, he’d also have a vote on U.S. Supreme Court justices and other officials in the Senate. Bashaw, his opponent, says he supports abortion rights, but has also said he would not use that as a litmus test for Justices.

But there’s another draw to the upper chamber, Kim said. He thinks the Senate has been actually been more productive than the House for bipartisan negotiations, like on the Infrastructure bill and the CHIPS and Science Act. “It might be a greater place where I can have deeper legislative engagement,” he said.

The campaign has been mostly agreeable. After Bashaw froze in the first debate and seemed like he might pass out, Kim crossed over to see if Bashaw was OK and gestured for help. But Kim bristles at the way Bashaw has characterized him as a career bureaucrat and D.C. insider.

Reflecting in the sunshine of the very Jersey location of Newark’s Terminal A, Loading Zone 15, with every one trying not to have their cars ticketed, Kim said he believes the people of New Jersey recognize those “who are actually, earnestly trying to serve them.”

“I just find it disrespectful for someone to denigrate public service in the way that he has, ” Kim says. “I work hard. I’ve worked in war zones, and for him to try to reduce me down and try to denigrate and say that I’m out of touch, I just find to be really disrespectful. We need to fight that distrust, not inflame that distrust.”