How Andy Kim turned New Jersey’s Senate race into a real fight

WEST ORANGE, N.J. – A few weeks after he entered the race for U.S. Senate, New Jersey Rep. Andy Kim stood in his umpteenth living room house party and gave his umpteenth stump speech.

Few in the north Jersey crowd had met the south Jersey Democrat before. Many had been involved in the party’s post-2017 suburban surge, when swing seat Republicans faced weekly protests from new “resistance” groups like Indivisible and NJ 11 for Change. A memento from that year hung on a nearby Christmas tree: A sparkly ornament, reading “many snowflakes create a storm.” Democrats had done the impossible then, said Kim, and winning the primary to replace Sen. Bob Menendez should be easier.

“There was a journalist who asked me: What’s it like to be the underdog in a Senate race?” Kim told the room. “I’m like: I’m 23 points up in the polls! In what other state is someone who’s 23 points up considered to be the underdog?”

Nowhere else, he said. Kim, the first Democrat to announce his candidacy after Menendez’s Oct. 13 indictment, faces no real competition from the senator, who polls in the low single digits and has until March 25 to decide whether he’ll run again. The June 5 primary is really between Kim and New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy, who has never sought office on her own before, but started the race with a bucket of endorsements and a loaded rolodex.

The early consensus on this race was that Murphy would lock it up. In the first fundraising quarter, she outraised Kim $3.2 million to $2.8 million, despite entering the race six weeks after him. She also quickly nabbed the support of nine of the state’s 21 county Democratic party chairs. That was invaluable, thanks to a peculiar New Jersey institution known as “the line” — in many of the state’s key counties, candidates endorsed by the party are listed on one ballot line, while unendorsed candidates are shunted off to the side.

Academic studies have found that the line gives parties’ preferred candidates a double-digit advantage. Therefore, if polling showed Kim up by a low-double digit margin, as this month’s Fairleigh-Dickinson survey did, the margin would be erased.

That conventional wisdom has begun to erode, however, with race now looking increasingly up for grabs as Murphy and Kim prepare for their first debate Sunday.

Few policy differences separate the two contenders, so Kim has drawn another contrast: An insurgent campaign against a machine. He’s joined less well-known candidates in urging most counties to abandon the ballot line system and he’s highlighted reporting on how Murphy’s team, in vain, pressured state College Democrats not to endorse him. (“This is why people lose faith in democracy and our system,” he posted on X, linking a New York Times story about the quiet pro-Murphy lobbying.)

“I’ll be honest with you — my stock amongst independents and even Republicans in the state is through the roof,” Kim said at another house party, in Montclair. “Never again will the Republicans ever be able to say I’m just some ‘yes man’ for my party, when I’m literally running against the senior senator and the governor’s wife.”

That difference has won Kim some national Democratic support. In early January, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman told Semafor he was endorsing the congressman because Murphy was a “nepo candidate.”

The contrast was also an asset for Kim last weekend when he beat Murphy handily at the Monmouth County Democratic convention, the first “open” process with a delegate vote. Kim represented about a third of the county in Congress, but Murphy came into the event with high-profile local endorsements, and the result was covered like an upset.

“I don’t think we need any more dynasties,” said Alyssa Casazza, who came to one of the Kim house parties to meet the Murphy alternative. She did not, she said, “know a heck of a lot about him.” But he was not married to the governor.

Kim, a former diplomat who flipped a swing seat in 2018, gained national attention when he cleaned up trash in the Capitol after Jan. 6; Jack Gavin, who came to meet Kim in West Orange, called the moment “clean-up on aisle democracy.” His agenda largely overlaps with Murphy’s, who summed up her own plans this way to a local news station last month: “I want to work on abortion, I want to work on affordability, I want to work on gun safety, I want to work on climate change; and ultimately, I want to help defend our democracy.”

Still, Murphy’s campaign is looking to exploit what policy daylight does exist between the two candidates. Earlier this week, it went after Kim for voting with Republicans on two immigration-related amendments – one on a border wall, one on non-citizens getting COVID benefits – designed to jam Democrats.

“It’s not the only time that Andy Kim chose to vote with Trump Republicans on immigration matters and other important issues,” Rep. Albio Sires, a Murphy endorser, said in a statement. In an interview, Kim said his opponent was “grasping at straws” to attack “a son of immigrants, married to an immigrant who has voted to give a pathway to DACA recipients and Dreamers.”

Kim also argues that Murphy, who picked up the support of EMILYs List this week, simply hasn’t proven herself as a Democrat. The first lady got credit from Democrats for her focus on reducing infant mortality in New Jersey, a cause that took her across the state. But she has been answering questions about many issues for the first time. When those answers got crosswise with the college-educated liberals who have disproportionate sway in party primaries — telling New York magazine that she didn’t have a position on the Senate filibuster, then coming out against it, for instance — it helped Kim.

“I’m not really sure what her positions are,” Kim told Semafor. “I have five years of a voting record, showing what it is that I believe in — including some tough votes in a district Donlad Trump won twice. The only voting record we have for the First Lady is that she said she was a registered Republican until 2014. I don’t know what her beliefs are on different issues. I think she has to answer those questions to the people of New Jersey.”

Murphy’s response, from spokeswoman Alex Altman, was that “Tammy is the progressive candidate in this race, and the only candidate with the strength, resolve, and experience to stand up to extremist Republicans and push for key Democratic values in DC.”

One X-factor in the race is that the battle for ballot lines is even more complicated than it sounds. Murphy does have the line locked up in some of the counties that produce the largest number of votes in Democratic primaries. The county chairs in Hudson and Essex have already endorsed her, securing the line in populous, racially diverse communities just outside New York City.

But in other counties, the chairs don’t have that power. In Trenton’s Mercer County, any candidate who gets 40% at the upcoming convention shares the line. Bergen County, which might make up one-tenth of the total primary vote, endorses via secret ballot. Salem County casts just a few thousand votes in competitive primaries, but it doesn’t have a line at all.

Fifteen weeks out from the primary, Murphy runs stronger with non-white voters than Kim; Kim runs stronger with white liberals. And he has taken every opportunity to portray himself as the underdog, turning every Murphy endorsement into a question about her tactics and the Trenton machine.

Murphy has tried to attack Kim over his high-profile supporters as well, with mixed results. After ex-Rep. Tom Malinowski came out for Kim, Murphy hit Malinowski over his violations of the STOCK Act, which regulates congressional stock trading, noting that Kim “did not call on Congress to ban trading stocks until after former Congressman Tom Malinowski was investigated by the House Ethics Committee.” That was a sore point for local Democrats who watched the congressman narrowly lose in 2022, and will weigh in on the fight for a ballot line.

“She’s behind in the polls,” Malinowski told NJ Spotlight News. “She desperately needs the support of the very people she insulted by going after me in such a personal way.”

• In New York Magazine, Simon van Zuylen-Wood followed Murphy and Kim on the trail, and saw how the battle for the line was affecting the race: “Local press coverage of Tammy Murphy’s candidacy has been jaundiced, and Democrats across the state have been moaning about her undeserved advantages.”
• In Politico, Matt Friedman saw Murphy “facing resistance, verging on hostility, from the rank and file of her party,” after what had been an immaculate campaign launch last year.