Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) has won election to the United States Senate, the New Jersey Globe projects, capping off a whirlwind year in which the three-term congressman took on a sitting U.S. senator charged with corruption and ultimately brought down a key part of New Jersey’s storied political machine.
As of 1:23 a.m., Kim leads Republican Curtis Bashaw, a hotel developer from Cape May, 53% to 44.7% – a lower margin than Democrats typically get in New Jersey Senate races, though some votes still have yet to be counted. Kim’s win maintains a Democratic victory streak that dates back to 1972, when Clifford Case became the last Republican to win a U.S. Senate seat in New Jersey.
With victory secured, Kim is set to take office in just a few weeks; appointed Senator George Helmy has pledged to step down once the results of the Senate race are certified, allowing Kim to get a head-start on his new duties as a senator.
“Are you proud of what we’ve built?” Kim said in his victory remarks. “Do you believe in the change we seek to build? Are you ready to keep fighting for our country? I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the incredible honor – for this Jersey kid who never thought he’d be able to say this – to be your next United States Senator.”
A little over a year ago, it looked like Senator Bob Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of the most powerful politicians in New Jersey, was all set to win re-election. While there were rumors about a corruption investigation into the three-term senator, he had survived previous federal charges in 2017, and few Democrats were keen to take any concrete steps towards running against him.
Then, on September 22, 2023, federal prosecutors unsealed a bombshell indictment against Menendez alleging that he traded his influence in Washington for gifts, cash, and gold bars. (A later superseding indictment also accused him of acting as an agent of the Egyptian government.) Even in a state known for its occasionally scummy politics, the charges against Menendez were far beyond what could be tolerated.
Within a day, most top Democrats, among them Gov. Phil Murphy and many members of the state’s congressional delegation, had called on Menendez to step down. And after Menendez angrily refused to do so, Kim – the first prominent Democrat to say Menendez should resign – announced he would run against him.
Kim, who first got to Congress by narrowly unseating a Republican congressman in 2018, did so having not secured the backing of any party leader in the state, typically the first step for anyone looking to run a statewide campaign. Instead, party leaders were preparing to support First Lady Tammy Murphy, the wife of Gov. Phil Murphy and a political powerbroker in her own right.
The resulting four-month primary between Kim and Murphy was among the most interesting in the state’s history. While Murphy had widespread party support – and thus was running on the county line, the unique ballot design system that groups party-endorsed candidates together on primary ballots, in much of the state – Kim built up his own support base and turned the race into a referendum on whether New Jersey politics could continue to be business as usual.
At county conventions up and down the state, it was clear Kim’s message was breaking through; Democratic rank-and-file in counties from Atlantic to Sussex gave their county lines to Kim, rebuking the party bosses that so strongly supported Murphy. Kim also led in publicly released polls and was keeping pace financially with Murphy, a longtime Democratic fundraiser.
Finally, one day before the filing deadline, Murphy ended her campaign, saying that her path to victory would require spending millions of dollars on a negative blitz against Kim that she had no appetite for. Kim had essentially defeated the party machine before a single primary vote was cast.
Less than a week later, Kim won another major victory: U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi ruled in his favor on a lawsuit against the county line, ordering that more neutral “office-block” ballots be used for the 2024 Democratic primary. While Quraishi’s decision only applied to one primary at the time, settlements agreed to since then likely mean that the county line is gone for good.
With Murphy out of the race, no other formidable challenger stepped up to take Kim on; he won the Democratic primary with 75% of the vote, with the remainder going to progressive activists Patricia Campos-Media and Larry Hamm.
Republicans, meanwhile, had a hard-fought primary of their own between the moderate Bashaw and Mendham Borough Mayor Christine Serrano Glassner, who ran a more explicitly conservative campaign. Serrano Glassner, whose husband is longtime Donald Trump aide Michael Glassner, got a coveted endorsement from Trump a month before the election, but Bashaw had substantially more party support and prevailed 45% to 38%.
When Bashaw won that primary, Republicans were optimistic that they could make the contest between him and Kim into a real race. President Joe Biden was dragging down Democrats’ poll numbers at the time, and Menendez had filed to run for re-election as an independent, raising the possibility of a split in the Democratic vote.
Over the summer, though, Biden dropped out of the presidential election and ceded the nomination to Kamala Harris, and Menendez ended his re-election campaign (and resigned from the Senate) after his conviction on all charges. That robbed Republicans of whatever momentum they may have had, and Kim opened up a lead that he never relinquished.
In public polling of the race, Kim led by margins ranging from 18 to 23 percentage points; he also had a substantial fundraising advantage, spending more than $4 million in the closing weeks of the race while Bashaw spent just around $1.4 million. The campaign between the two was a positive, largely issues-focused one, but it was Kim’s message that evidently resonated with New Jersey voters more.
Once he takes office, Kim will make a few firsts: as the first Korean American senator anywhere in the country, and as the first Asian American senator from the East Coast. At 42, he’ll also likely be the third-youngest senator, which means that if he wants to he could potentially serve in the Senate for decades to come and amass substantial power.