Andy Kim is between offices. The desk in his makeshift space in the back of Dirksen’s Senate building remains mostly empty. In the conference room, boxes containing monitors and other work supplies are stacked near the ceiling. His staff is waiting for news on when they will have access to more permanent excavations, but isn’t sure if it’s even worth unpacking everything.
“It’s really surreal,” Kim said of joining the Senate. During orientation in November, one historian estimated that about 500 million people have been called Americans since 1776, and only about 2,000 of them have served as senators. “It’s humbling in that sense. It’s very exciting,” he added. “I hope I can do something good in that position.”
Kim won a seat in November that was not expected to be vacant this election cycle. Since 2006, the organization has belonged to Bob Menendez, a former New Jersey Democrat who was convicted of corruption in a case that rocked the Senate last year and led to his resignation in August. Ta. Many members spend years preparing for the jump from the House of Representatives to the Senate, as failure to do so could mean the end of their political careers. Kim, who served three terms in the House of Representatives, had no plans to take over immediately when he announced his intention to replace Menendez the day after Menendez was indicted. His decision to run was largely based on intuition. His challengers were some of the biggest names in New Jersey politics.
Kim won, but other than that, details.
“It was a little bit scary and reckless,” Kim told Rolling Stone on January 6, the day Congress certified President-elect Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory. “If I had lost, people would have called it reckless. Now that I had won, people said it was great. But at 41, when I was just starting out, this was my political career. I was very nervous because I was facing the possibility of ending my career.”
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The senator openly admits that he doesn’t really like politics, at least in its current form. He joked that if he hadn’t become a civil servant in 2021, he would have wanted to open a bagel shop. Kim’s two sons, ages 7 and 9, remain the center of her world. They accompanied him and his wife, Kamie, to his second swearing-in ceremony on January 3, where they presented Vice President Kamala Harris with a handmade business card. If being an elected member of the House of Representatives is confusing, moving to the Senate poses an even bigger challenge. Longer sessions, more travel, and big questions to answer from his two young children, hoping that one day he’ll understand why he didn’t just open a bagel shop and stay closer to home. I hope. “Why am I doing this? Why am I doing something that takes me so far away from my kids?” Kim asked, sitting on a sofa in a small room she had adopted as her makeshift personal office. I sit there, deep in thought, leaving a large area that was technically supposed to serve as my work space as a staff conference room.
“I don’t want my kids to grow up in a broken America,” he says. “I don’t want my children to grow up in a world where senators shrug their shoulders when they’re accused of corruption. What will the next 50 years be like? That’s what keeps me up at night, and that’s what keeps me up. I think that’s why I’m doing this. This is what I’m aiming for. So what I always keep in mind is that I don’t want my actions in this job to be about self-preservation. I base my life on what’s going to help my career. I don’t want to make a decision or vote.”
Kim sits on the Capitol subway on his way to the Capitol on January 6th.
Maansi Srivastava writes for Rolling Stone magazine
Just weeks into his Senate career, Kim is already applying these principles to high-profile votes. On Thursday, Kim was one of only nine senators to vote against advancing the Laken Riley Act. If passed, the bill would require the federal government to detain undocumented immigrants accused of theft without bail. He was found guilty in court. The law would also allow state attorneys general to sue the federal government for immigration failures and petition courts to deny visas from certain countries.
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“Before our judicial system violates the constitution, we must detain those facing charges,” Kim said in a statement defending his decision to go against his party’s majority. “I believe we need to take immediate bipartisan action to fix our broken immigration system, and I stand ready to work across the aisle to get that job done.Constitutionally. Let’s start with the basics.”
Not only was Kim indicted, but Kim’s decision to run to replace a party member who refused to resign despite widespread public distrust, at least at the time, involved due process and a duty to voters. was given great consideration.
Kim’s victory in November was not an easy one. The upper echelons of New Jersey’s political establishment did not support the upstart, who is in his early 40s, instead supporting Tammy Murphy, the wife of current Democratic Governor Phil Murphy. Although the state’s first lady had never held elected office, she quickly attracted the support of prominent party leaders and county officials, many of whom had economic and political interests to keep Governor Murphy in good spirits. had a vested interest in Following a flurry of accusations of nepotism, the New York Times last January reported that Murphy’s campaign called the College of New Jersey Democratic Party to discuss its future prospects if the group and its staff chose to support Kim. He reportedly made vague threats. They did anyway.
“We have accepted a system that is clearly broken, but that system is perpetuated primarily by people within my party, and even if it benefits our party, we I just said I can’t accept that,” Kim said of her fight with Murphy. He stuck to his principles, focused on building a coalition government, and successfully restructured the way New Jersey conducts elections.
New Jersey has long had a controversial “county line” voting system in its primaries. Under this system, candidates supported by county-level leadership appear together on one ballot, rather than being separated into separate groups based on the office they are running for. The system has been criticized as a sneaky workaround that allows party leaders to effectively hand over the winner of a primary election by positioning themselves advantageously on the ballot. Kim sued 19 county officials seeking to abolish the system, and although a permanent ruling has not yet been issued, the lawsuit succeeded in securing a redesign of the ballots for the 2024 primary.
For Mr. Kim and millions of voters, this victory was a major step toward restoring confidence in New Jersey’s election system. That’s “what people want,” he says. “We’re showing that we can be disruptors, but in a different way than Donald Trump is a disruptor.”
Kim will take an elevator from the first basement floor of the Capitol building to the second floor on his way to the Senate chamber to begin the January 6 election certification process.
Maansi Srivastava writes for Rolling Stone magazine
Months later, having won the biggest electoral victory of his career, Mr. Kim remains committed to repairing what is broken, both within his party and in the American system at the national level. January 6, 2021, is a day that still weighs heavily, four years after Kim picked up trash bags in the Capitol rotunda and focused on cleaning up the aftermath of the incident. . attack. “It’s my favorite room in Washington, D.C.,” he told Rolling Stone about the heart of the Capitol.
In the early morning hours of January 6, 2025, Kim took time to walk alone around the National Assembly building, revisiting the scenes of devastation he had witnessed in 2021. It was snowing, but I remembered a little bit about what it was like walking that night. “The Capitol was very quiet that night,” Kim said of his experience in the early morning hours of Jan. 7, when lawmakers were finally allowed back into Congress to certify the vote after the riot.
“When you think about why January 6 happened, you can see the level of distrust that people have in government,” he says. “I’ve dedicated my life to answering the question of how do we heal this country, and a big part of that is about trust. We’re not going to get to where we need to be unless we can restore some sense of trust. I think so.”
Mr. Kim remains calm about Mr. Trump’s return to the White House. Like many other Democrats, he sees certification as a constitutional requirement, not a discretionary one, that shows respect for the will of voters, regardless of their feelings about the winner. Now that Trump’s victory is officially confirmed, Kim has a clear eye on the challenges he will face as he begins his new term in the Senate as a member of the minority party.
Kim is in a temporary office in the basement of the Dirksen Senate Building filled with boxes and moving supplies. He will be assigned to a new office in the near future.
Maansi Srivastava writes for Rolling Stone magazine
“It wasn’t just the 2020 election, it wasn’t just the 2024 election,” he says. “We’re going to have a difficult time for a long time to come. I think we can overcome many of the problems we face. The problem is that we are so divided as a nation right now. “We are losing the idea that we are part of something bigger than all of us.”
In Kim’s view, the Democratic Party needs to step up and provide not just vision but follow-through. “I don’t think this issue is just a messaging issue,” he says of his party’s defeat in November. “I think this was a realignment, but we can’t just try to reinvent the Obama administration. We need something different.”
“It’s clear that the status quo is not working for people. We live in an era of greatest inequality in American history, worse than the days of the robber barons,” he added. “A lot of people, myself included, are talking about protecting democracy and protecting these institutions. But to some people, that comes across as saying we want to protect the status quo. .”
Kim says this is not true. “We were able to tap into the same things that caused the apathy and dissatisfaction in New Jersey, and I feel it bubbling up across the country.” People are fed up with the status quo. They yearn for a new generation of leadership, and they yearn for a different kind of politics than what they’ve seen before. ”
Kim will leave the Senate chamber and head to the House of Representatives to watch the election results be certified on January 6th.
Maansi Srivastava writes for Rolling Stone magazine
At one point before certifying Trump’s victory, Kim showed Rolling Stone a series of photos taken that morning that recreated photos he had taken himself in the aftermath of the Capitol attack. It was something. The senator can point to small landmarks of damage to the Capitol during the riot, such as door frames that still have small dents from rubber bullets, but he said there is nothing substantive to commemorate the day. He is worried that there is no such thing. “I wish there was some kind of lasting symbol,” he says. “What still disturbs me is that we cannot agree as a country that what happened that day should not have happened.”
There are no monuments commemorating the day in the Capitol’s public spaces, but Kim has a small, shattered eagle statuette on a bookshelf in his office, among a collection of sworn-in Bibles and an impressive hourglass. is on display. It could have been sitting on a flagpole. Kim was working on his hands and feet to clean the Capitol building on January 6 when he discovered two pieces of plastic that had been roughly cut through one of the wings.
The bird with its shattered wing is a poignant reminder of what’s broken in America and what Mr. Kim wants to help fix.
