What kind of senator does Andy Kim want to be?

The last 14 months of Senator Andy Kim’s life have been all about getting somewhere. Getting through a statewide Senate primary with virtually the entire state Democratic establishment arrayed against him; getting elected against Republican Curtis Bashaw in a year that turned out to be surprisingly poor for his party; getting his House office shut down and his Senate office ready for action under a second Trump presidency.

That phase of Kim’s life has now at last come to a close. Last week, Kim was sworn into the Senate, beginning his six-year term – potentially the first of many – a few weeks early thanks to the resignation of interim Senator George Helmy. After so much political to and fro over the last year and change, Kim can now settle down and focus on what is, theoretically, the point of everything in Washington: governing.

As Kim will readily attest to, he’s not going to be able to accomplish everything he wants to on day one. In the seniority-driven Senate, and with Republicans retaking full control of Washington, the 42-year-old Kim won’t immediately get all the committee assignments he wants or major bills with his name on them; that will take time, and effort.

But starting right now, his first weeks in office, Kim said he wants to be the kind of senator who can establish a bond of trust with everyone – even those he disagrees with, and even those he can’t help right away.

“I’m not somebody who, on day one in the Senate, can say I know exactly what people in every corner of New Jersey need. So that’s what I’m going to be building up – and I hope people are willing to talk to me, even if they disagree with me, about some of the challenges they’re facing,” Kim said. “I have that line that I often use: whether you voted for me or not, you’re my boss. And I really am trying to live up to that.”

What happened in November

Kim had to overcome a lot of foes to get to this point.

First, there was Senator Bob Menendez, whose indictment (and eventual conviction) on federal corruption charges set this year’s political chaos in motion. Menendez had withstood a prior corruption trial with the full backing of the New Jersey Democratic establishment, but the lurid details of the September 2023 indictment proved a bridge too far; virtually every prominent state Democrat, from the governor on down, called for his resignation.

The very next day, after Menendez had made it clear he wasn’t resigning, Kim announced he would challenge the senator in a Democratic primary. And in the weeks and months that followed, Kim said he heard from New Jersey voters in all corners of the state about how they saw Menendez to be only the latest in a long line of indignities.

“When I asked people what they thought of what happened to Senator Menendez, not a single person said something specific to him. Everyone was just like, ‘It’s all of them! It’s all of politics in New Jersey!’,” Kim said. “There was this guy who [I asked], ‘How did it make you feel when you heard the news?’ And he said, ‘I felt like a New Jersyean.’ He felt like it was part of his identity as a person from New Jersey to believe that politics is corrupt.”

That perception likely wasn’t helped by the state Democratic machine’s preferred candidate to replace Menendez: First Lady Tammy Murphy. Murphy was a mover and shaker in her husband Phil’s gubernatorial administration, but she had never before sought elected office, making top Democrats’ decision to support her so wholeheartedly a bit jarring – especially since they were passing over the blatantly qualified Kim, a three-term swing-district congressman and former national security official in the Obama White House.

Over the course of a multi-month showdown in county convention halls, on the airwaves, and even in federal court, it was Kim’s campaign that emerged victorious; Murphy dropped out months before the primary, recognizing that her path to the nomination had narrowed and preferring to avoid a bloody battle that may have just prolonged the inevitable.

Kim said that race – and the disappointing results for his party that have come since then – should prompt some introspection from top New Jersey Democrats about the way that they go about designing their ballots and choosing their candidates. He’s not holding his breath.

“I think Democrats would be stupid not to use this as a moment for deep self-reflection and change,” he said. “I’m not confident that New Jersey Democrats will make the kind of changes that I think they need to make. That’s something I’m going to keep pushing them on, as we see what’s happening with the ballots and other things like that.”

Finally, there was the general election against Bashaw, a hotel developer who pitched himself as a moderate Republican determined to reign in the excesses of both parties. The contest between him and Kim was a staid one; Bashaw was a compelling candidate in many ways, but he never convinced Republicans he had a real chance, and Kim was projected to win easily.

The end result was closer than might have been expected: Kim beat Bashaw 54% to 44%, a margin of 9.6 percentage points. It was the tightest New Jersey Senate race since 2006, when Bob Menendez – who had the whiff of scandal on him even back then – defeated then-State Senator, now U.S. Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) 53% to 44%.

Seen in another light, though, Kim’s win is much more impressive. Kim outran Kamala Harris in New Jersey by 3.6 percentage points – the best a Democratic Senate candidate in New Jersey has done relative to a simultaneous presidential race since 1988, when Frank Lautenberg won re-election even as George H.W. Bush carried the state.

Kim did better than Harris nearly everywhere, with the exception of some high-income suburbs in North Jersey (and Cape May County, Bashaw’s home base in the far south of the state). But his best performances came in heavily Hispanic and Asian American towns, many of which dramatically rejected Harris this year; in Palisades Park, perhaps the densest hub of Korean Americans anywhere in the country, voters opted for America’s first Korean American senator 65% to 34%, a 24-point overperformance compared to the top of the ticket.

There was one other area in which Kim did noticeably well: his own congressional district. Kim won the 3rd congressional district under both its new and old district lines (the latter being something even Joe Biden couldn’t manage in 2020); the voters who have gotten to know Kim the best have tended to like him.

The problems for Democrats in New Jersey this year, then, doesn’t seem to lie with Kim – or perhaps with any single Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris included. Donald Trump’s shocking 46%-52% loss (the closest Republicans have come to winning New Jersey since 1988), Kim said, was in large part a product of broader, pent-up frustration with the politics as usual that Democrats writ large represent.

“The Democratic Party cannot be a party that looks like it’s trying to protect the status quo,” Kim said. “People clearly want a disruptor, and they got that in Donald Trump. Even right now, with all the [cabinet] nominees he has, we have to be careful that we’re not saying, ‘We don’t like this person because they’re trying to disrupt things.’ That’s the point!”

“Sometimes the language that Democrats use, myself included at times, where we talk about protecting democracy, protecting our governance – it can come across to people as saying, we want things to stay as they are, and we don’t want somebody else changing it,” he continued. “I was successful in disrupting Jersey politics over the last year, but I feel like I did it in a different way. It wasn’t a ‘blow the system up,’ I’m not creating personal vendettas against people. I’m talking about it as a system; I’m trying to find solutions to it.”

Since New Jersey holds elections every year, the political consequences could be immediate if Democrats don’t right the ship. The governor’s office and all 80 seats in the State Assembly are up next year, and history is against Democrats, who haven’t won three consecutive gubernatorial terms since 1965.

Kim said that if Democrats want to break from that history, they’ll need to be careful about how they move forward. Six major candidates from very different wings of the party are running in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, which Kim said he’s planning to weigh in on, but all of them will have trouble outrunning the negative associations many voters have in their minds about the New Jersey Democratic Party.

“I think it’s important for the Democrats to be moving towards reform, but a reputation as deep and settled as what I’ve encountered in New Jersey isn’t going to change in less than a year,” he said. “People are still going to go into the voting booth in June and November feeling like Jersey politics is corrupt and broken. There needs to be some acknowledgement of things that have gone wrong, and I don’t necessarily see that.”

What happens next

The nice thing about being elected to a U.S. Senate seat, though, is that politics does not always have to be top of mind. Unless struck by disaster or higher office, Kim has a guaranteed six years to work on New Jersey’s behalf before he has to face voters again. That’s a lot of time to start getting stuff done.

Unfortunately for him, Democrats are heading into 2025 at their lowest point since 2018. Trump will be in the White House, Republicans kept control of the House, and Democrats lost their hold on the Senate; Kim will be part of a 47-seat Democratic minority that will have to decide how to proceed in GOP-controlled Washington. The Democratic strategy from the first Trump era – resist Trump everywhere, all the time – probably isn’t workable anymore.

“America has been through four years of Trump in the Oval Office before, and another four years of him potentially coming back in – this is not a shock to us like it was to many in 2017,” Kim said. “There’s just a fatigue and an exhaustion that comes from eight years of that type of resistance. Clearly there needs to be a different tactic from an organizational standpoint.”

The first big test of how Senate Democrats will handle Trump 2.0 is cabinet nominations, a mix of bread-and-butter GOP politicians (Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, Elise Stefanik for UN Ambassador) and further-out picks (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services Secretary, Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary). Kim said that he has thoughts on many of them, and is skeptical of Hegseth in particular, but that he’s willing to start out with an open mind on nearly all of them.

“I want to be able to make my strongest possible case to the people of New Jersey and to the country on why I voted a certain way,” he said. “I’m not somebody that’s coming in saying, ‘I’m going to oppose them all outright,’ because I do think that that takes away some of my leverage. I want to actually meet these nominees. I want to get to know them.”

Of course, even if every Senate Democrat were to vote no on a nominee, they’d need to be joined by at least four Republicans to sink them; that’s something that only stands a realistic chance of happening on a handful of nominees. Kim, then, said he has good reason to save his sharpest rhetoric for where it will actually make an impact, like when he was among the first senators to say he was a hard no on now-withdrawn attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz.

“I’m learning where to use my voice, where not to,” Kim said. “Sometimes, my voice might feel good for me to say something – like, yes, there are certainly some people where if I came out very aggressively against them, I’d get a lot of attention on social media, I’d get more news coverage – but does that help me do my job? Does that potentially create problems that will hurt me in governing?”

Kim will now also have the chance to shape the federal judiciary for the first time, especially with regards to judges from New Jersey. For more than a decade, Menendez and Senator Cory Booker worked together to recommend judges to the sitting president’s administration (or, during the first Trump administration, block all district judge appointments entirely); Kim said that he, too, plans on coordinating heavily with Booker on all things judicial.

“I want to make sure that Cory and I are lockstep,” Kim said of Booker, a member of the Judiciary Committee. “I very much look to Cory as a mentor to me here… This is still new to me, but I do think that the most fundamental principle for us to be successful as a delegation, between me and him, is to be in lockstep as much as humanly possible.”

Because ten of New Jersey’s 17 District Court judges are Biden appointees, Trump may not get the chance to make many nominations to the court, especially if Booker and Kim use blue slips to effectively block his choices. A vacant New Jersey-based seat on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals that Biden tried and failed to fill, though, will be an early test of the two senators’ mettle when it comes to nomination fights.

As for legislation, Republicans are currently strategizing on how to use reconciliation, a procedure that allows bills to sidestep the filibuster and pass the Senate with just 50 votes, to advance their conservative agenda on tax policy and border security. Given the nature of the reconciliation process, Kim and other Senate Democrats are likely to be largely shut out of those negotiations.

Kim said that he does still hope he can find common ground on less fraught issues, however, like how some Republicans were willing to cooperate with Democrats on the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS and Science Act during Biden’s presidency.

“I am interested in seeing if the CHIPS and Science Act bipartisan coalition might be willing to do a 2.0,” he said. “That could potentially be on AI, that could potentially be some other type of technology… If [Republicans] want to get some things done – like Biden was able to do with infrastructure – that’s something that I’d be willing to work with them on.”

Some of what Kim focuses on in the Senate will depend on his committee assignments, which haven’t been determined yet. Kim is spending his first two weeks in office on Menendez’s old committees, but he said that when his own assignments are decided, he’d ideally like to serve on a national security committee like Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, or Armed Services and an economic-focused committee like Banking or Finance.

Kim’s rise has, more than anything else, sprung up from a deep distrust in politics. His first House race in 2018 came against a Republican congressman whom he cast as an architect of the GOP’s failed efforts to repeal Obamacare, and his Senate campaign this year found easy foils in Bob Menendez and Tammy Murphy, two people who seemed to many voters like the physical embodiment of the political establishment.

Now, he’s arrived at the inescapable point where, no matter what his own reformist credentials are, he is the political establishment. That’s part of what being a U.S. Senator entails. It will mean working with the New Jersey party bosses he once scorned to deliver for New Jerseyans; it will mean becoming enmeshed in a Senate chamber that often values seniority and decorum over integrity and results.

But Kim said he intends to keep in mind that most of his constituents have no desire to see politics continue as usual.

“Most people just cannot stand politics,” he said. “In this moment in this country, no one looks at the stuff that’s happening in government and politics and thinks that this is inspiring, that this is something that is focused on the right things.”

And even as he works to learn from the senators with whom he’s now colleagues, Kim said he hopes those senators, and his fellow Democrats back home in New Jersey, can learn a bit from his own path to power.

“I hope that they take away from how I got here – I am somebody that wants to see things change,” he said. “I feel proud that I was able to win this seat without owing anybody anything… I am a very strong believer that things need to change, and I think that’s shared by people across the political spectrum.”