BASKING RIDGE — As the final stretch on the road to November’s election was about to begin, Rep. Andy Kim made a campaign stop at the environmental education center at Lord Stirling Park in Somerset County.
With the scent of cut grass and horse barns in the air, a guide pointed out a poison dart frog that survives by eating up all the insects it can find.
“My oldest son wants to be a green biologist,” said Kim, 42, the father of two boys ages 7 and 8, staring down at the unassuming but deadly amphibian. “I don’t know what sparked it, but that’s what he wants to do now.”
Up to this point, Kim, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, has survived a host of adverse forces who have tried to block his path.
In 2018, he defeated incumbent Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-03) by a slim margin in a district Donald Trump won in 2016.
In September, he became the first Democrat to announce he would challenge then-Sen. Bob Menendez for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, one day after federal prosecutors charged Menendez in a wide-ranging bribery scheme.
Kim faced strong opposition from first lady Tammy Murphy — who had entered the Senate primary as a front-runner, with support from key party officials — but in March, she ended her campaign, clearing the way for him to handily win the nomination.
Five days later, Kim helped defeat New Jersey’s ‘county line’ system in court, winning a ruling that temporarily scrapped the state’s controversial ballot design that gave party-backed candidates a major advantage.
And now for what could be Kim’s final big political challenge: defeating Republican Curtis Bashaw, a South Jersey hotelier who wants to be the first Republican sent to the U.S. Senate by New Jersey voters since 1972.
Kim may have to do this with only tepid support from Gov. Phil Murphy, who has so far declined to issue any formal endorsement of Kim’s campaign. In an interview, Kim said he has no reason to believe that Murphy doesn’t support him — but he may not need the governor to.
“I stayed in the race despite the most powerful political family in the state jumping in. I don’t need Murphy and every single Democratic leader in the state to say they endorse me. What I need is to be able to show that we’re building the same kind of campaign that we did at the congressional level in a district that Trump won twice,” Kim said. “Instead of about 80,000 people, we’re now trying to reach 9 million people.”
U.S. Senate candidates
Curtis Bashaw (Republican)
Rep. Andy Kim (Democrat)
Kenneth R. Kaplan (Libertarian)
Christina Khalil (Green)
Joanne Kuniansky (Socialist Workers Party)
Patricia G. Mooneyham (Vote Better)
As Kim and Bashaw compete for Jersey voters, they have clashed about both their backgrounds and policy.
In an interview with the New Jersey Monitor, Bashaw said that while he is a successful businessman, Kim has merely been a Washington, D.C., bureaucrat. Kim countered, saying Bashaw “should have some respect for what public service really means.”
“I was willing to risk my life for this country, out in Afghanistan as a civilian advisor embedded with the military, or the work that I did at the White House on counterterrorism, trying to keep our country safe,” said Kim, who has worked at the U.S. State Department and served as a U.S. National Security Council official. “When I thought about what I wanted to do with my career, it was to serve this country, not try to make as much money as humanly possible. There’s not a single human being I know in this country that thinks that we need more multimillionaires in the Senate.”
Kim also took Bashaw to task over reproductive rights. Bashaw is pro-choice but supports the U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Dobbs, which overturned a federal right to an abortion and gave states the power to set their own limits to the procedure.
Kim said it is “inconsistent” to claim to be pro-choice and support Dobbs.
“The only thing that Mr. Bashaw is pro-choice about, if he supports the Dobbs decision, is the choice of state legislatures to be able to take away the freedom of women to make decisions about their own body,” Kim said. “With Dobbs, you’re allowing legislatures to take away your decision to make about your own body even in the cases of rape, incest, and the life of the mother. You’re seeing huge amounts of harm being done to women in some of these states where these rights have been taken away. Mr. Bashaw thinks that he can just sidestep this by calling himself pro-choice, but it’s just not true.”
Bashaw spokesperson Jeanette Hoffman challenged Kim on both his professional and policy assertions.
“There’s more to public service than being a far-left career politician that votes with the interests of the Squad over that of New Jersey taxpayers,” Hoffman said. “Kim doesn’t get to lie about who Curtis Bashaw is. The bottom line is Curtis Bashaw is a pro-choice, married gay man who supports individual freedoms and liberties for all Americans. He’s unequivocally pro-choice and would never take away or weaken anyone’s right to choose, or compromise their access to contraception or IVF.”
An issue that hits close to home for Kim is immigration. He is the son of Korean immigrants who arrived in America 50 years ago, and is married to Kammy Lai, an immigrant from Canada.
Kim said it is not “mutually exclusive” to believe in respecting America’s history and culture of immigration and maintaining our national security. While he has in some cases supported increased border security, he also advocates for boosting legal resources, including hiring more judges, to help states like New Jersey handle the overwhelming immigration caseload. Kim expressed frustration with his Republican congressional colleagues, questioning their motivation to seek solutions.
“It’s clear that some of the people that yell the most about immigration in Congress don’t actually want to solve the problem,” Kim said. “We need to move forward.”
Kim first gained fame with progressives nationwide after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, which was trashed by pro-Trump protesters who sought to disrupt the certification of President Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential race. Kim was photographed on his hands and knees helping to clean up the building’s Rotunda.
Kim refers to that moment often on the campaign trail — he snagged a prime-time spot discussing it at this year’s Democratic National Convention — exuding an earnestness that clashes with New Jersey’s reputation as a haven for cynical, often-corrupt politics.
The current Senate campaign is further evidence that Kim doesn’t quite fit the central casting narrative of what a Garden State politician should be.
He is seeking to replace Menendez, a Democrat who resigned in disgrace from the Senate last month following his conviction in July on federal corruption charges. The Menendez chapter ended in a particularly lurid fashion. Prosecutors said Menendez accepted gold bars, cash, and other items as bribes from three businessmen and, in return, did favors for Egypt and Qatar and interfered in two criminal cases to help friends and associates.
Kim said that for many, even his neighbors, Menendez’s actions evoked just a shrug and a laugh. Forget it, Andy, it’s Jersey, they say. What else do you expect?
In many ways, Kim would rather skip running for the Senate and instead engage in nerdy pursuits with his young sons, like studying toxic frogs and building Star Wars Lego models. But something’s eating him.
“Wondering what kind of America my kids are going to grow up in, that’s the thing that keeps me up at night. The opposite of democracy is apathy. If people feel helpless, it’s over. What I’m trying to do is give people the sense that this country has a lot more bend in it before it breaks, that we can still fix these problems that we have,” Kim said. “The next four to five years are going to shape the next four to five decades in this country. There is nothing I can be doing right now that would be more impactful for me to do for my kids. That’s why I’m continuing to fight.”
