Andy Kim, New Jersey Democratic congressman and Senate candidate, knows that people think his image is a strange match with his state. “When I first started running for Congress,” he told me during a recent interview, “it was not infrequent that people would say some variation of ‘You are too nice to be in Jersey politics.’”
That nice-guy brand followed him to Washington, where Kim was famously photographed helping to clean up the Capitol Rotunda after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Now, locked in a tough primary against New Jersey first lady Tammy Murphy to fill the seat currently held by indicted Sen. Robert Menendez, Kim is so used to being asked whether he is too nice for New Jersey that he has a quick response: “I’d say I am 12 points up right now in the last poll.”
Indeed, Kim’s early and surprising success against a formidable primary opponent suggests that voters in New Jersey — the third-rudest state in the country, according to one survey, and a place where politics is generally associated with hard-charging leaders, powerful party bosses, scandal-plagued officials and nepotistic political practices — might be looking for something different.
A son of Korean immigrants, Kim is a Rhodes Scholar and former national security official. When he first ran for Congress in 2018 — in a central Jersey district that was carried by Donald Trump two years earlier — Kim quickly saw just how ugly New Jersey politics can get. During that campaign, Republicans ran an ad that featured Kim’s name in a font Democrats later said was called “Chop Suey” and is most associated with Chinese takeout food.