Title: New Jersey's New Senator

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. One of the unexpected results of the election was how well Donald Trump did in New Jersey. He came within five points of Kamala Harris. In 2020, Trump lost to Joe Biden by 16 points. Turnout was also lower this year. In 2020, 4.5 million people in New Jersey voted for president. 4.5 million people. This year, right around 4 million.

A pretty astonishing half a million fewer voters or more than a 10% decline despite all the attention and all the passions around this election. Another way to look at it, Donald Trump got basically the same number of votes in New Jersey as he did in 2020, around 1.8 million. That whole 500,000 drop off in voters came out of the Democrats column at least in the presidential race. Biden got around 2.6 million votes. Harris around 2.1 million, according to the various official statistics that I've seen reported by the media.

New Jersey is pretty representative of what happened in many places in this election, but in such a blue state, it led to this headline in Politico New Jersey. It said, "New Jersey might be a swing state now." We'll talk to the writer of that article coming up and take your New Jersey calls. In contrast to Harris's five-point win in the presidential race in New Jersey, though, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate, Andy Kim, beat his Republican opponent by nine points.

Kim got about the same number of votes as Harris, but the Republican candidate, Curtis Bashaw, lagged Trump by 400,000 votes. With us now is the brand new Democratic senator-elect from New Jersey, Andy Kim. He moves up from his seat in the House and also becomes the first-ever Korean American member of the United States Senate. Senator-Elect Kim, thanks for making some time for us in this momentous week for you. Congratulations on your election and welcome back to WNYC.

Andy Kim: Thanks for having me again. I really appreciate it.

Brian Lehrer: How does it feel to be called Senator-Elect?

Andy Kim: I think you're the first person probably outside of my family and my friends and team to say that to me. It's humbling. I'm a son of immigrants, a public school kid. To have that chance to be able to serve in a job that only 2,000 Americans in the history of this country have ever done, I'm humbled by this and I hope I can make New Jersey proud.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to more of your bio for people just getting to know you and what you hope to do in the Senate, but to start with the election, you heard I gave the listeners a lot of numbers there, but hopefully, they were clear enough about how people voted in the state. Why do you think you had such an easier time of it than Vice President Harris?

Andy Kim: After being in-- This is my fourth election in six or seven years or so. I've been in a lot of tough ones. I've learned not to jump to conclusions. Look, what I'll say from what I've been understanding over the last couple of years, people are unbelievably frustrated right now with politics as a whole, deeply distrusting. We live at the time of the greatest amount of distrust in government in modern American history.

As I've gone around all 21 counties in New Jersey, people are particularly frustrated by the high costs, the deep inequality that people are facing and I think that that's certainly something that really contributed to it, this sense that we're not on the right trajectory. I think it's really incumbent upon us to show that there's a different way for our country to go, a different way for our politics to go. For me, look, I outperformed Senator Menendez by 10 points in '18, I outperformed Joe Biden by eight points in 2020.

I try to bring a different kind of politics to the work that I do and I think that that can give us hopefully some clues on where we go from here.

Brian Lehrer: Does that mean different from Kamala Harris, since she only had a few months to introduce herself as a top-of-the-ticket candidate? Does that mean different from the Biden administration?

Andy Kim: I've been thinking about this. I would say it's not just about the Democrats doing something different or being different than Trump or different from Biden. How I've tried to approach it is about just a different kind of politics writ large. People are frustrated, whether it was under Democrats or Republicans. People who are frustrated, they're not just frustrated in the last four years or eight years. They've been frustrated for a long time. They haven't felt like this politics is moving in the right way.

For me, that's why I push so hard on trying to address corruption issues. It's why I stood up and ran for the seat in the first place when Senator Menendez was indicted. It's why I sued the state of New Jersey to fix our unfair broken ballot system, which meant I had to stand up against leaders in my own party to do so. I think that's what people want, is they want to see people recognize that we have a system that just isn't working.

We have billionaires building rocket ships to outer space while we got so much poverty, so much challenge here at home for so many families. I think we need to show that we're going to realign the politics and fix so much of what is just stacking the decks against so many families.

Brian Lehrer: With reference to the Politico headline, is New Jersey a swing state now?

Andy Kim: Look, what I've learned is that it really varies election to election. It's about this moment. We saw what? The governor's race a couple of years ago. The governor of New Jersey won by I think, what? Three points? I heard the same things at that front but also after that, I won my second reelection in 2022, by-- I can't remember. I think it was 12, 14 points, in a toughness. It's about the moment. I think right now, what we see is it's not just about New Jersey, it's about this country right now.

The question was, "What comes next?" We saw what? In 2004, George W. Bush win a massive election for presidency for his reelection, and then we saw Obama come in four years later. We don't know what comes next. What I'll just say is, look, this election was a tough one, but I'm somebody that wants to look forward and figure out how we move on from here and how we show that we're listening to the people, actually going out there and hearing from the people that had real concerns about the Democrats, about the candidates, about the state of our country and figure out what we can do to earn back that trust or at least restore that sense of trust and move on from there.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we have time for a few phone calls, only a few, but a few phone calls for Senator-Elect Andy Kim. If you want to call him and congratulate him, you can just do that, or if you have a question for him, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. We have until about 10:15. For people who don't know your bio, I see you were a national security official in the Obama administration. You also have a PhD from Oxford and you were a Rhodes scholar. What did you do more specifically for President Obama?

Andy Kim: Look, I'll start by saying I'm a son of Korean immigrants, a public school kid so I'm proud that New Jersey gave me the opportunities that I had. I was a career government official. I started under the Bush administration, I worked under the Obama administration, but not as a political appointee, always as a career guy. In particular, I worked on counterterrorism issues. I worked out in Afghanistan at the height of the war as well as a civilian embedded with the military.

I worked for the four-star commander out there. I come at my work from a sense of national security and I think that guides a lot of the work that I do. Not just that I focus a lot on national security, foreign policy in Congress, but that I'm somebody that comes from a nonpartisan background in terms of thinking about this as public service. I serve a country, not a party. When I was out in Afghanistan, no one there asks you if you're a Democrat or Republican. You're just serving the country.

I was proud to do that work for the Obama administration, for working in national security, and I hope to continue that in the US senate.

Brian Lehrer: Do you expect to center national security in the Senate, like join the intelligence or foreign relations committees or anything like that?

Andy Kim: Oh, I hope I have a chance to be able to serve on one of the national security committees. Right now in the House, I'm on the Armed Services Committee, really trying to stand up for our military families and our veterans. I'm on the Foreign Affairs Committee and a select committee on US-China competition. Clearly it's something that's important. I'm the only career diplomat in Congress, in the House or the Senate.

I do think I can add an important voice at a time when we see such global turmoil right now. I'm really worried about what kind of world my seven-year-old and my nine-year-old little boys are growing up in with all the challenges that we face. Hopefully, I can play a role in trying to build out a strategy of what we want America's role to be globally over the next few decades.

Brian Lehrer: You're the first Korean American senator-elect. What does that mean to you or your family or to the country?

Andy Kim: You're right. I'm the first Korean American ever in the Senate. I would be the first Asian American in the US senate from the entire east coast of America. It was over 120 years ago that the first Koreans came to America. My family came 50 years ago to this year. I think it shows, hopefully, that my story is not just a Korean American story or an Asian American story, but it's fundamentally an American story.

Last year when I first started running for Senate, I had someone look me in the eye and tell me I'm the wrong kind of minority to win statewide in New Jersey. I just found that to be so offensive. I can represent people not just that look like me or have my last name, but I have every bit as much right to represent the state of New Jersey as anybody else. I don't want to let other people define what I am or am not capable of accomplishing simply because of the color of my skin and my last name.

I'm proud that New Jersey is going to have the only all-minority Senate delegation in the entire country, really reflecting our diversity and showing that it should be about the quality of the character and the skills and merits which they bring. I hope people see me as someone who can try to bring that about.

Brian Lehrer: Kit in Bayville, you're on WNYC with your new senator-elect Andy Kim. Hi, Kit.

Kit: Hi, how are you?

Andy Kim: Hi, how are you?

Kit: Good. Senator Kim, I wanted to congratulate you, and I also wanted to tell you thank you so much. You have my vote forever. During the pandemic, my oldest daughter was scheduled to go to England, and we didn't realize how long it would take to get a passport. We contacted your office, and not only did your office help get her a passport, but they tracked it, and they called me the day it got delivered to make sure she got it. That is amazing public service. Thank you so much for your service.

Andy Kim: Thank you for that. I really appreciate it. My office, we try to do what we call customer service governance. I know it doesn't sound like rocket science, but I really think we need to go back to first principles. My job is to help improve the lives and help support my constituents. I say to all of them, whether they vote for me or not, they're my boss and my job is to serve them. I think too often people think it's just about the legislation, but it's equally important to be able to deliver for people.

Help them navigate their Social Security checks, their Medicare, Medicaid, passports, other things like that. I'm excited to bring that customer service to 9 million people in New Jersey.

Brian Lehrer: Avie in Freehold, you're on WNYC with Senator-Elect Andy Kim. Hi, Avie.

Avie: Good morning. Big congratulations, Senator-Elect Kim. Where I live, there is a lot of illegal immigrants who are there in different parts of where I live, and they have driven up the prices of real estate by $100,00, $200,00, $300,000 a home. In New Jersey it's directly correlated to how much property tax we're going to pay. Are you going to do the kind, compassionate thing and send the illegal immigrants home? Even if you can't get some big comprehensive immigration reform, just do it for your constituents to bring down the house pricing, which is killing the people in New Jersey.

Brian Lehrer: Avie, thank you. Do you accept his numbers and do you accept a relationship between undocumented immigrants, he calls them illegal immigrants, and the price of housing in New Jersey?

Andy Kim: Look, what you hear right there, I understand where he's coming from. People are really struggling right now, and they're trying to figure out why is it that they keep hearing the news the economy is getting stronger and stronger, stock markets going up, but they're not feeling it in their bank accounts, in their support. I understand the concerns in that front. Look, what I'll say on a couple of things is we really need to make sure that we're building more housing units.

That's something that the next administration is going to work on. I'll engage with them on that because I think we need a decade of building. The biggest driver of the housing cost right now is just the lack of units, the lack of homes to buy, to rent. Also in New Jersey, we're really struggling when it comes to public transit. It's causing certain areas to get much more expensive. There are other challenges that we're facing writ large when it comes to the economy and other difficulties of that nature.

Look, on the immigration side, I absolutely want to make sure that we can keep our country safe, that we can engage and we should have an orderly process over our border, but we also want to make sure that we're staying true to our heritage as a nation of immigrants. We can take practical steps, like increasing the number of federal immigration judges and other steps like that that could help address this enormous backlog that we have that is causing a lot of strain on different communities.

That is something that I do want to engage on, but I want to make sure that we have the fuller picture right now of why it is that we have so much inequality in America. It's not something that can be pointed on just one issue, but I hope to be someone that can take a comprehensive approach to address it.

Brian Lehrer: Are you worried about what President-Elect Trump calls the coming mass deportation force? I want to play you a 10-second clip of Governor Murphy from after the election.

Governor Phil Murphy: If there is any attack on the Garden State or on any of its communities from Washington, I will fight back with every fiber of my being.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to echo that or say anything about the mass deportation potential?

Andy Kim: Yes. First of all, I think it's a terrible idea that would hurt our economy, would send so much fear and shockwave. I think there are ways that we can be able to address the concerns that people have about migrants in America, about border security. We can do that without having to do something that would really be devastating to our economy and so many other issues and just send shockwaves of fear throughout this country in ways that I think would just be so disruptive.

I don't know exactly what's to come, but it's certainly something that we want to make sure that we are standing up and doing our best to be able to make sure that we don't see something that's going to be really devastating.

Brian Lehrer: Last question, and I know you got to go. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he wants a very aggressive first 100-days agenda. What else are you anticipating? We just talked about one of the fears that a lot of Democrats have, a mass deportation program. What else are you anticipating that you might have to play defense on, and what do you think you might be able to work with the Republican majorities? Apparently it's going to be a majority in both houses in addition to having the White House in a bipartisan way that you might see as progress for the country.

Andy Kim: Look, I'm not sure if the House has fully been called yet, but look-,-

Brian Lehrer: Correct.

Andy Kim: -what we've already seen, though, is efforts that the Trump team has laid out to reverse what we did on the Inflation Reduction Act to try to tackle climate change. We've seen Mike Johnson himself say that they're considering repealing what we did on the CHIPS and Science Act, which is about investment in advanced manufacturing in this country. I think those would be really devastating and I think that those are the types of things that the vast majority of the American people understand are important.

The CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, it's helping our economy. It's strengthening our global competitiveness at a time when we're facing increased competition from around the world. Those are some real challenges that we have to get our heads around. We'll see where things go, but I'm worried about this. I'm worried about how Trump's going to continue to push forward on tax breaks for the billionaires and the biggest corporations while continuing to squeeze the middle class, as we've seen in New Jersey with the salt tax that he put forward against us back when he was president that has hurt so many families in New Jersey. We just cannot let that continue.

Brian Lehrer: Senator-elect from the state of New Jersey, Andy Kim. Congratulations one more time, and we look forward to you continuing to come on with us when you're in office. Thank you so much for today.

Andy Kim: Great. Thanks so much for having me.

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