Andy Kim
Who is Andy Kim?
What significant event influenced Andy Kim’s decision to pursue public service?
What was Andy Kim’s role in the Obama administration?
How did Andy Kim gain national attention after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol?
News •
Andy Kim (born July 12, 1982, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.) is the first Korean American elected to the United States Senate. A Democrat from New Jersey, he waged an uphill battle in 2024 for the Senate seat, taking on the state’s first lady and the Democratic Party’s political machine in the primary, before winning the general election over Republican real estate developer Curtis Bashaw.
Early life
Kim was born in Boston to immigrant parents from South Korea and grew up in Moorestown, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia. His parents came to the United States in 1974. His father became a scientist while his mother worked as a nurse. Kim has a sister, historian Monica Kim, who in 2022 was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” Following high school graduation, Kim studied at a two-year nontraditional school in California called Deep Springs College, where he was on September 11, 2001. Kim said he felt called to public service in the wake of the terrorist attacks. After transferring to the University of Chicago, he met an Illinois state senator named Barack Obama while working for a homeless rights group. Kim was a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford, where he became friends with another future national politician, Pete Buttigieg.
Government work
- Current role: Democratic U.S. senator, representing New Jersey
- Education: University of Chicago, bachelor’s degree in political science, 2004; Oxford University (Rhodes scholar), doctorate in international relations, 2010
- Family: Married to Kammy Lai, an attorney; the couple has two sons.
- Quotation: “I revere these buildings,” he told The New Yorker when explaining why he decided to pick up trash from the U.S. Capitol on January 7, 2021.
After Oxford, Kim began his career at the State Department, where he did stints in Iraq and Afghanistan, and advised Gen. David Petraeus when he was commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. At the age of 31, Kim was asked to join the staff of the National Security Council, where he advised President Obama on Iraq. When thousands of Yazīdīs, a Kurdish religious minority, were trapped by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Iraq’s Sinjār Mountains in 2014, Kim got word to Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough. Obama signed off on a plan that Kim drafted to airdrop supplies to the Yazīdīs and launch airstrikes on ISIS. Kim left the Obama White House in 2015.
Unexpected House victory
After Republican Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Kim moved back to New Jersey. In 2018 he defeated Republican Tom MacArthur, a two-term congressman and strong supporter of Trump, to represent New Jersey’s 3rd Congressional District. It was Kim’s first try for elected office. The seat was seen as so comfortably Republican that Democrats didn’t think they had a chance to win it, Kim later recalled, and he didn’t seek the party’s support. MacArthur had been the only member of the state’s congressional delegation to vote for Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, and Trump had raised $800,000 for MacArthur’s campaign while headlining a fundraiser for him.
“He is an extremely deliberate, thoughtful, careful guy. But also gutsy.” —Susan Rice, Obama national security adviser, about Kim
In his three terms in the House, Kim made reducing prescription medicine costs for seniors a top priority. A version of a bill that he sponsored was included in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. He comfortably won reelection in 2020 and 2022. After the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when a mob of Trump’s supporters stormed the building in an attempt to stop the certification of Democratic President-elect Joe Biden, Kim made national news: The next day, an Associated Press (AP) photographer, Andrew Harnik, took a picture of him picking up trash that had been left by the rioters. Harnik at first thought Kim was a staffer. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something like that before, a member of Congress on his hands and knees, picking up trash,” Harnik told The New York Times. In an interview with the AP, Kim said, “I was just really affected emotionally. I felt this kind of heightened, kind of supercharged kind of patriotism that I just felt take over.”
Senate run
Kim had planned to seek a fourth term in the House until New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez was indicted in September 2023 on bribery charges. Prosecutors accused the senator of accepting cash, gold, and a Mercedes-Benz in exchange for using his position to help the government of Egypt. Menendez was found guilty of all counts in July 2024.
The day after Menendez’s indictment, Kim announced that he was running for the Senate seat in the 2024 election. He soon found himself a decided underdog, when Tammy Murphy, the wife of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, entered the Democratic primary in November 2023 with the backing of the state’s Democratic machine. But she lacked political experience, and, after her campaign failed to take off, she dropped out ahead of the primary. Kim further upended New Jersey politics in March 2024, when a federal judge sided with him in his challenge to how ballots listed candidates in the primaries. The judge agreed that the ballot design favored certain candidates and ordered them to be redesigned.
After winning the Democratic primary with nearly 75 percent of the vote, Kim easily defeated Curtis Bashaw in the general election to win the Senate seat in the reliably Democratic state. (The last Republican senator elected from New Jersey was Clifford Case in 1972.) “We showed that politics isn’t some exclusive club, just for the well-off and the well-connected,” Kim said in a speech celebrating his victory, adding, “I believe that the opposite of democracy is apathy, and, by extension, I hope that you see our campaign as a means of being the opposite of that helplessness.”