Andy Kim is in between offices. The desks in his temporary space in the bowels of the Dirksen Senate Office Building remain mostly bare. Boxes holding monitors and other work supplies are stacked nearly to the ceiling in the conference room. His staff, waiting for news on when they’ll get access to their more permanent digs, is unsure whether it’s even worth unpacking it all.
“It’s really surreal,” Kim says of entering the Senate. During his orientation in November, a historian estimated that around 500 million people have been called Americans since 1776, and only about 2000 of them have served as members of the Senate. “It’s humbling in that way. It’s exciting,” he adds. “I hope to be able to do some good in that kind of capacity.”
Kim won a seat in November that wasn’t expected to be open this election cycle. Since 2006 it had belonged to Bob Menendez, the now-former New Jersey Democrat who last year was convicted of corruption in a case that rocked the upper chamber, leading to his resignation in August. Many lawmakers spend years preparing to make the leap from the House to the Senate, as a failed campaign to do so could mean the end of a political career. Kim, who served three terms in the House, had no immediate plans to make the move when he announced his bid to replace Menendez the day after the senator was indicted. His decision to run was based largely on a gut feeling. His challengers were some of the biggest names in New Jersey politics.
Kim won, and everything else is details.
“It was a bit scary and a little reckless,” Kim told Rolling Stone on Jan. 6, the day Congress certified the Electoral College victory of President-elect Donald Trump. “If I would have lost, people would have called it reckless. Now that I won, people said it was brilliant. But it was nerve-wracking because I was confronting the fact that this could very well end my political career at the age of 41, when I was just getting started.”
The senator openly admits that he doesn’t really like politics, at least not in its current form. In 2021 he joked that if he hadn’t gone into public service, he would have liked to open a bagel shop. Kim’s two sons, ages seven and nine, remain the center of his world. They accompanied him and his wife Kammy to his second swearing in ceremony on Jan. 3, where they presented Vice President Kamala Harris with their own homemade business cards. If becoming an elected representative was disruptive, the transition to the Senate is an even bigger challenge. Longer sessions, more travel, and bigger questions to answer from two young children who he hopes will one day understand the reasons he didn’t just open a bagel shop and stay close to home. “Why am I doing this? Why am I doing something that takes me away from my kids so much?” Kim muses, seated on a couch in a small room he’s adopted as his personal office in the temporary space, leaving the larger area that was technically supposed to serve as his own workspace as the staff conference room.
“I don’t want my kids to grow up in a broken America,” he says. “I don’t want my kids to grow up in a world where people shrug their shoulders when a senator is indicted for corruption. What’s the next 50 years gonna look like? I think that’s what keeps me up at night, and why I do this. This is not something I aspire towards. So what I always try to make sure is that my actions in this job, I don’t want them occurring because of self preservation. I don’t want to make decisions in my life or vote based off what’s going to help my career.”
Kim sits in the Capitol subway en route to the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2025.
Maansi Srivastava for Rolling Stone
Just weeks into his Senate career, Kim is already applying those principles to high-profile votes. On Thursday, Kim was one of only nine senators who voted against advancing the Laken Riley Act, a cynically named piece of legislation that, if passed, would require the federal government to detain undocumented immigrants accused of theft without bond, regardless of whether they are convicted in a court of law. The law would also allow state attorney generals to sue the federal government over immigration enforcement failures, and petition courts to deny visas from certain countries.
“Mandating detention for those facing accusations before they go before our judicial system runs counter to our Constitution,” Kim wrote in a statement defending his decision to buck the majority of his party. “I do believe we have to urgently take bipartisan action to fix our broken immigration system, and I stand ready to work across the aisle to get the job done. Let’s start from a foundation grounded in our Constitution.”
Due process and duty to one’s constituents factored heavily into Kim’s decision to run to replace a member of his own party who was not only under indictment, but — at least at the time — refused to resign in the face of widespread public distrust.
Kim’s victory in November was no easy road. The top brass of New Jersey’s political machine didn’t throw their weight behind the upstart in his early 40s, but instead backed Tammy Murphy, the wife of current Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy. The state’s first lady had never held elected office, but quickly racked up endorsements from prominent party leaders and county officials, many of whom held a vested financial and political interest in keeping Governor Murphy happy. Accusations of nepotism abounded, and in January of last year The New York Times reported that Murphy’s campaign had made phone calls to The College Democrats of New Jersey leveling vague threats about the organization and its staffers future prospects should they choose to endorse Kim. They did anyway.
“We took on a clearly broken system that was in large part perpetuated by people within my own political party, and we just said even if it benefits our party, we cannot have that,” Kim says about the fight against Murphy, one in which he stuck to his guns, focused on coalition building, and even managed to reshape the mechanisms through which New Jersey conducts its elections.
New Jersey has long implemented a controversial “county line” ballot system in its primaries in which candidates endorsed by the county-level leadership appeared together in one ballot column, as opposed to in separate groupings according to the office they were running for. The system has been criticized as a sneaky workaround through which party leaders could essentially hand select primary winners by placing them in an advantageous position on the ballot. Kim sued 19 county clerks in a bid to end the system and, while a permanent ruling is still in the works, his lawsuit managed to secure a redesign of ballots for the 2024 primaries.
For Kim and millions of voters, the victory was a major step towards restoring confidence in New Jersey’s electoral system. It’s the kind of thing “people are looking for,” he says: “We show that we can be a disruptor, but in a different way than Donald Trump is a disrupter.”
Kim rides the elevator up from the basement level to the second inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2025, on his way towards the Senate Chamber for the beginning of the election certification process.
Maansi Srivastava for Rolling Stone
Months later, with the biggest electoral victory of his career under his belt, Kim remains committed to helping fix what’s broken — both within his own party and in American institutions at a national level. No moment in our recent history better exemplifies that broken trust than Jan. 6, 2021, a day that still weighs heavily on Kim four years after he took up a roll of trash bags in the Capitol Rotunda and set himself to cleaning up the aftermath of the attack. “It’s my favorite room in D.C.,” he tells Rolling Stone of the heart of the Capitol.
In the early morning of Jan. 6, 2025, Kim took some time to walk around the Capitol on his own and revisit the scenes of devastation he’d witnessed in 2021. “There are very few people here today, in part because of the snow, but it kind of reminded me a little bit of what it was like to walk through that night. It was so quiet to the Capitol that night,” Kim says of his experience in the early hours of Jan. 7, when lawmakers were finally allowed to return to Congress after the riot to certify the vote.
“When you think about what allowed for January 6 to occur, it shows the level of distrust that people have in government,” he says. “I’m dedicating my life to trying to answer that question of how we heal this country. A big part of that is about trust. I don’t think we can get to where we need to be until we are able to restore some sense of trust.”
Kim is remaining stoic in the face of Trump’s return to the White House. He, like many other Democrats, considers the certification a non-optional constitutional duty, a demonstration of respect for the will of voters regardless of his feelings about the victor. Now that Trump’s win is officially in the books, Kim is clear eyed about the challenges he’ll face as he begins his freshman Senate term as a member of the minority party.
Kim in in temporary office in the basement of the Dirksen Senate Building, where boxes and moving materials abound. Sen. Kim will be assigned a new office in the near future.
Maansi Srivastava for Rolling Stone
“It was more than just about the 2020 election, more than just about the 2024 election,” he says. ”We’re going to have a hard time for a long time to come. I think we can get past a lot of the problems that we’re facing. The problem is right now we’ve become so fractured as a nation, that we’re losing touch with this idea that we’re part of something bigger than all of us.”
In Kim’s view, Democrats need to step up and not only provide the vision, but the follow through. “I don’t think the problem is just a messaging problem,” he says of the party’s losses in November. “I do think that it was a realignment [and] we cannot just try to recreate the Obama coalition. There needs to be something different.”
“The status quo is clearly not working for people. We live in the time of the greatest amount of inequality in American history, worse than the robber baron age,” he adds. “A lot of people, including myself, talk about protecting democracy, protecting these institutions. But to some people that comes across as making it seem like we’re saying we want to protect things as they are.”
This isn’t the case, Kim says: “The same things that led to the apathy and discontent in New Jersey that we were able to tap into — I feel it bubbling up all over the country. People are tired of just how things are. They are hungry for a new generation of leadership, and they are yearning for a different kind of politics than what they’ve seen so far.”
Kim departs from the Senate Chamber for the House Chamber on Jan. 6, 2025. There, he will watch as the election results are certified.
Maansi Srivastava for Rolling Stone
At one point before certifying Trump’s win, Kim showed Rolling Stone a series of photographs he’d taken earlier that morning, recreating pictures he’d taken himself in the aftermath of the Capitol attack. The senator can point to small markers that reveal the damage inflicted on the Capitol during the riot — such as a doorframe still sporting small dents made by rubber bullets — but to him the absence of anything substantial memorializing the day is unsettling. “I wish there was some lasting symbol,” he says. “What unsettles me still is that we cannot as a country agree that what happened on that day shouldn’t happen.”
While no memorial to the day stands in the public spaces of the Capitol, on a bookshelf in his office, among the Bible he was sworn in on and an impressive collection of hourglasses, Kim displays a small, shattered, statuette of an eagle — one that may have sat atop of a flagpole. Kim found the two shards of plastic, cleaved roughly down one wing, as he worked on his hands and knees to clean up the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The bird with a shattered wing is a poignant reminder of what is broken in America, and what Kim hopes to help repair.
