Congressman Andy Kim stood in front of a packed church hall in Ridgewood Thursday night and won another raucous standing ovation from a new army of Democrats who feel no allegiance to the power brokers trying to rig this Senate primary for First Lady Tammy Murphy.
About 200 people were crammed into rows of folding chairs, standing in the aisles, and crowding into the back. The church parking lot was full, so volunteers pointed drivers to a grassy field nearby.
They came to hear Kim tell his American Dream story. How his father was born with polio and had to beg for food on the streets of Korea. How grateful the family was to reach America and begin climbing the ladder. How honored he was to work in the White House, especially on the day President Obama invited his family to the Oval Office for a visit.
“Three generations of my family are in the Oval Office right now with the president of the United States” he recalled, shaking his head in disbelief. “I just remember thinking ‘This is America.’ This idea that we can work hard and be able to serve the country. I thought this is my dream come true.”
Folks, something big is happening in New Jersey politics. The bosses who run the county party machines are usually the kingmakers. But they’ve overreached this time.
My guess is that Kim is going to win the primary vote in June, no matter what the bosses say. Murphy seems to be worried about that as well: A few hours before Kim’s speech Thursday, she got rid of her campaign manager.
“There’s an ick factor,” says Susan Steinberg of Mahwah, a Kim volunteer. “Tammy is fine. But the ick factor is the nepotism. I have a lot of friends who want a woman, but it has to be the right woman.”
And how is Murphy the right woman for Democrats? She has never run for office, she has no voting record to scrutinize, she’s ineffective on the stump, and she was a registered Republican for most of her life. I heard each of those concerns from voters who at Kim’s event at the church.
Her Republican roots are going to hurt her, that seems certain. She sent big checks to dozens of GOP candidates over the years, including George W. Bush. She took the Republican side against Frank Lautenberg and John Kerry, and became a Democrat only when her husband started his campaign for governor in 2014, when she was 49 years old.
It didn’t help when pictures circulated on social media last week showing the Murphys posing with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner after a recent dinner, an inexplicable self-inflicted wound.
“It’s a big concern of mine,” says Niti Mistry of Ridgewood, a Kim volunteer. It grates on her in particular that Murphy remained a Republican after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, when the GOP blocked all attempts at gun reform. “If her husband didn’t run for governor, would she still be in the Republican Party?” Mistry asked.
But Murphy’s vulnerabilities are only half the problem for the bosses. Kim is also proving to be a captivating campaigner. I saw him speak twice in February, and both times he killed it, drawing standing ovations. He’s keeping pace with Murphy’s big donations by raising 10 times as many small ones.
When he decided to run for Congress in that 2018 campaign, he says the bosses told him it was hopeless, he says. The district was 85 percent white, and if he wanted to run, he should move north where more Asians live.
But he ignored them, stayed in the district where he grew up, and won a squeaker against a formidable Republican, Rep. Tom MacArthur. He won re-election twice, in a district that voted for Trump twice. In 2020, he outperformed Joe Biden in the district by 8 points.
In the church hall Thursday, he was at ease, holding a microphone and using no notes, with an “aw-shucks” style that captured the crowd.
His dad, despite that childhood in Korea, eventually earned a PhD in genetics in America. His mom got a nursing degree and worked in New Jersey hospitals all her life. He went to public schools, and eventually became a Rhodes Scholar. By this point, the crowd was ready hug him, grateful for a rare chance these days to feel great about America.
He drew laughs talking about his mom during that visit to the Oval Office. An educated professional woman, mind you, she was too awestruck to speak with Obama. “She didn’t say a single coherent word,” he said.
Granted, the next month or so is going to be tough for Kim. The empire will strike back. And in the next month or two, Murphy is favored to win a series of endorsements from the biggest machines, in Essex, Middlesex, Bergen and South Jersey. The party leaders in each case have personal financial interests before the governor, a brazen conflict of interest. So, pardon me if I’m not impressed.
When Passaic County endorsed Murphy, Kim says he was able to get only a five-minute Zoom interview to make his case. He still hasn’t gotten a chance to speak with delegates in Bergen, though Murphy spoke with them back in January.
“He’s a sitting Congressman and you don’t think it’s worth hearing what he has to say?” asks Micah Rasmussen, a political analyst at Rider University. “You must be pretty afraid of what he’s going to say.”
For good reason,. Kim is ahead by 12 points in the only independent poll of this race, and he beat Murphy in a landslide to win the Monmouth endorsement, in her home county, and scored another landslide yesterday in Burlington, his home county.
Remember, the party machines don’t win every time. And if they lose this one, it will be an epic humiliation they richly deserve, starting with the governor himself, who won’t deny Kim’s charge that he is making calls to delegates.
Maybe a humiliating loss is just what the machines need. Maybe then grassroots Democrats will force them to change the rules so that independent players without fat-cat support no longer face such tall odds.
More: Tom Moran columns
Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com or (973) 986-6951. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
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