Andy Kim’s underdog Senate campaign broke barriers and actually excited voters

Andy Kim was early. He’d just dropped his kids, 6 and 8, at their bus stop on his way to a volunteer shift with Meals on Wheels, one of his final primary campaign events.

As he parked his Ford Escape at the meeting place at Rider University last month, a representative hustled over to apologize that the school’s president wasn’t there to greet him.

“Oh, it’s OK,” Kim told her. “I’m a low-maintenance guy.”

It’s the sort of thing politicians like to say, but with Kim, casually dressed and rolling around coolers of meals to deliver to seniors, it rang authentic.

» READ MORE: Andy Kim wins Democratic Senate primary

Kim, a current congressman, won the Democratic nomination Tuesday to run for a U.S. Senate seat representing New Jersey. He stands a good chance of winning in November, as the state hasn’t elected a Republican to the chamber in more than 50 years. He’d be the state’s first senator from South Jersey since World War II, its first Asian American senator, and, at 41, one of the youngest senators in Washington. Taken together with his underdog trouncing of the state’s political machine to win the Democratic primary, Kim has become an anomaly in a moment of political fatigue — a young, popular Democrat who is exciting voters with a pitch for service over showmanship.

“If there’s one word I try to associate with the politics I practice, it’s ‘humility,’” Kim said. “I don’t know everything. The problem with politics is so much is hubris, where people are like, ‘If you only elect me king or queen for the day, I’ll solve everything.’”

Before his Senate run, photos of him helping Capitol staff clean up after the Jan. 6, 2021 riot went viral. Kim wasn’t looking for the spotlight in that moment, he’s said, just a broom.

“He’s magic,” said Senate historian Ross Baker, a professor at Rutgers University. “He caught lightning in a jar. The image of him in that blue suit cleaning up the Capitol was one of the greatest launches of a political career I’ve ever seen and now look at him.”

Kim took a huge risk when he became the first New Jersey Democrat to call on Sen. Bob Menendez to resign after Menendez was indicted in September on federal corruption charges. Kim then jumped into the race to run for Menendez’s seat despite the state’s political power brokers coalescing around Tammy Murphy, the wife of the state’s governor.

“When I first jumped in … I was kind of on the wrong side of everything,” Kim said as he rode around South Jersey last month. “I’m too young. I’m from the wrong side of New Jersey. I’m the wrong kind of minority. The number of people who told me I was throwing away my career. I felt very isolated.”

But Murphy dropped out in March after voters rallied around Kim as the reform candidate. A legal victory that took down the county line balloting system boosted Kim’s profile even more, and he cruised to victory in Tuesday’s primary.

Kim will need to continue campaigning. Menendez, who is still on trial, filed petitions to run as an independent. Republican Curtis Bashaw, a Cape May County hotelier and developer, will take him on in November.

Some New Jersey Democratic strategists noted that in fighting a race that put him on the opposite side of much of his state’s delegation, Kim will have some relationship rebuilding to do.

“He hasn’t been a guy who has reached out to a lot of people or built a lot of bridges,” said a New Jersey Democratic strategist who didn’t want to be quoted publicly criticizing the state’s likely next senator. “He ran a good race, he’s most likely gonna be the next senator, but he’ll be judged on what he’s able to accomplish down there, not that he got there.”

But supporters are celebrating Kim’s historic nomination.

A son of South Korean immigrants, Kim would be only the 10th Asian American ever elected to the Senate and the first to represent the East Coast.

“That has enormous significance for that community,” Democratic political consultant Trip Yang said. “He automatically becomes a national AAPI [Asian American Pacific Islander] figure.”

Asian Americans are the fastest-growing population in New Jersey and make up about 11% of residents.

But part of Kim’s impact, Yang added, was disproving a false stereotype that Asian American politicians can only represent other Asian Americans. The New Jersey congressional district that Kim flipped in 2018 is 90% white, and Trump won it in 2016.

Kim’s political brand is rooted in his upbringing in Moorestown, where he still lives with his wife and two kids.

He grew up a few doors down from a former Eagles coach and remembers players visiting and playing with the neighborhood kids. “Cars would slow down, like, ‘is that Randall Cunningham playing football with a tiny Asian American kid?” Kim said.

Kim’s mother worked as a nurse, and his father was a geneticist. Kim initially was considering a career in medicine or science, said Peter Erickson, his roommate at Deep Springs College, a tiny liberal arts school on a working cattle ranch in California.

“Andy was this city kid, from New Jersey, who had this endearing way of getting injured on the ranch,” Erickson said. “But he was very warm and worked really hard and I think it was there that some of his deep interest in public service took root.”

Kim and Erickson both went to the University of Chicago after Deep Springs and then Kim continued on to Oxford, where he studied U.S. and international policy.

He worked at the State Department, serving in Afghanistan as a civilian adviser to Gen. David Petraeus before becoming a national security adviser under President Barack Obama. If he’s elected, he’d be the only former career diplomat in the Senate.

Stacey May, who worked with Kim at the State Department starting in 2014, said Kim knew how to build consensus and was critical in pushing for the administration to respond to a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan among a small ethnic and religious minority threatened by ISIS.

“You have good people who get dropped into that system and they get twisted and bent over time,” she said. “Andy is one of those that you can drop into that system and it will not warp him. He’s kinda like the hobbit. He can carry the ring without being warped by proximity to power.”

May, who still works in human rights but now lives in San Francisco, said Kim is full of surprises — he was a punk rocker in high school, and he’s written a novel. “He’s like the world’s most interesting man and also a super boring dorky dad.”

Raising two young kids between South Jersey and Washington is hard.

“There is no actual balance. Every minute that I’m away from my kids is something that I hate,” Kim said while riding to a Meals on Wheels stop. He’s missed almost every birthday and his sons have stopped asking whether he can make a recital or sports event.

After former President Donald Trump started calling COVID “China flu,” Kim said, his son got teased at school. “They’re calling him ‘Chinese Boy,’ and it’s because the president of the United States makes that behavior normal,” he said. “I don’t want this to be the America that they grow up in.”

Kim started a congressional dads caucus to connect fathers in Washington. That group includes U.S. Rep. Colin Allred (D., Texas), who shared a D.C. apartment with Kim when they both took office in 2019. Allred, who is also running for Senate, vying to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz, said the two had a lot in common. They both represented swing districts, liked Game of Thrones and whiskey, and were raising little kids.

“We’d always say, like, when you’re worried about some politically inconvenient thing that will ultimately probably be fairly minor — go see your kids, it helps you forget about it,” Allred said.

Asked about close colleagues on the other side of the aisle, Kim mentioned U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.), who cosponsored Kim’s first piece of legislation, and Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa), with whom he’s worked on national security issues.

“D. C. just feels like it’s performative governance right now,” Kim said as he wrapped up the campaign event, eager to catch a train back to D.C. to review proposed legislation. “People are just trying to get viral videos, yelling and screaming. That’s another thing I learned on this campaign. People just want somebody that wants to actually do the work.”