U.S. Rep. Andy Kim won a seat in the U.S. Senate on Nov. 5 after beating local businessman Curtis Bashaw in his first attempt at elected office.
The results showed Kim with 53.1% of the vote to Bashaw’s 44.6%. The remaining 2.3% of the votes were divided among four other candidates.
Kim, 42, who for the remainder of the year will hold onto his 3rd Congressional District seat, will take over the Senate post once held by Democrat Robert Menendez, who resigned this year in the wake of bribery and corruption charges.
The seat is currently held by George Helmy, who was selected by Gov. Phil Murphy to serve out the remainder of Menendez’s term. Helmy was sworn in on Sept. 9.
Kim became the first Korean-American elected to the U.S. Senate. He congratulated his supporters and campaign team members in his victory comments, saying, “Look what we’ve accomplished.”
“By most standards of what is possible, this moment right now should not be occurring,” he told his supporters at the Double Tree Hotel in Cherry Hill Tuesday. “A year ago, six years ago, few believed we could.”
Kim said he chose the Double Tree Hotel for a particular reason.
“Thirty-seven years ago, when I was 5 years old, my family and I lived out of this hotel for several weeks when we first moved to New Jersey. My Dad had just accepted his very first job ever, in a lab in Camden to do cancer research, and we were looking for a home we could rent,” he said. “My first nights in New Jersey were spent right here.”
“I wanted to be here tonight, in this hotel, to pay tribute to my parents. To my family. To this state. For giving a kid like me a chance to dream; for giving me the tools through public education and a kind community.”
His opponent, Bashaw, has a history with hotels as well.
Bashaw is probably Cape May’s best known hotelier, being the managing partner of Cape Resorts, which operates the Congress Hall Hotel. He campaigned for the Senate based, in part, on his experience as a businessman and job provider.
He embraced certain Republican tenets in his campaign, including protecting small businesses and securing the U.S. border with Mexico. He said early in his campaign that he traveled to the border and watched at 2 a.m. as illegal migrants made their way into the United States.
However, he separated himself from statements made by President-elect Donald Trump, who accused Haitian immigrants of eating families’ pets in Springfield, Ohio. Bashaw was also a pro-choice candidate who is gay and a self-proclaimed Christian.
He was commended by CapeGOP Chairman Michael Donohue as being the hardest-working candidate he had ever seen. In the end, Bashaw received 1,707,115 votes statewide, which was 331,778 fewer votes than Kim, while garnering more than 60% of the vote in Cape May County.
He said that over 295 days, he put more than 80,000 miles on his car traveling to all 21 counties and stopping in hundreds of towns.
Bashaw, had he won, would have been the first Cape May County resident elected to the U.S. Senate.
In his concession speech, he thanked Kim for running “an honest campaign based on policy issues.” Referring to himself, he quoted from the Bible’s book of 2 Timothy, saying, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”
“That describes our campaign perfectly,” he said.
Bashaw said civilization cannot exist without civility, which was often lacking in this campaign season.
He said he was thankful to his own Cape Resorts/Congress Hall team, which enabled him to campaign across the state because they “live our values of hospitality and welcome every day.” He expressed gratitude to his family members, including his husband, Will, whom he called a constant source of strength.
Bashaw said he believed he was part of building what he considered a bigger, better Republican Party, a party, he said, “of people who believe in greater freedom and a vital economy to create more opportunities.”
He said he learned that “America is best governed from the middle, not the extremes.” He continued to cite the need for less regulation and more opportunity in New Jersey and the United States. Americans deserve lower taxes, more affordability, more jobs and the ability to feel safe and secure in their own homes, he said.
“I have faith that New Jersey can be a place where our kids and grandkids can not only find work and afford a home, but be a home where they can thrive,” he said.
Kim said he believes his campaign was built on grass roots matters and repeated calls for people to be involved in making America better.
“You’ve heard me say that line, that I believe the opposite of democracy is apathy. By extension that means that our campaign (was) the opposite of helplessness. I hope this moment is every bit as meaningful for you as it is for me,” he said.
Without naming Menendez and his troubles, Kim said people told him they didn’t trust their public servants; they simply didn’t believe that politics was working for them. He said he also understands people have anxiety over what comes next for this country, calling the divisions between Americans today “deep in the bone.” He said it is going to take time to heal these kinds of problems.
“And it isn’t just politics. We live in the time of the greatest amount of inequality in our nation’s history,” Kim said, using as an example a public housing complex in Salem, where he talked to a mother who showed him black mold growing in her home and how her pleas for help were unanswered.
He also talked about meeting a young man who felt pessimistic about his life, saying he didn’t think he would ever afford to buy a home due to the high costs and his huge student loan burden. He believed these trends were unsustainable in the United States. He promised to help build a new era of politics.
“The same old same old is done. We’ve shown New Jersey there’s a better way,” Kim said. “We’ve showed the nation there is a better way.”
He made a promise to those who supported him that he would “not lose myself along the way.”
“I will anchor myself in the deep sense of public service that has guided me all these years. I won’t let the job change me, instead I will work to change the job. To change the broken politics that is decaying our nation,” he said.
Contact the reporter, Christopher South, at csouth@cmcherald.com or 609-886-8600, ext. 128.
