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The likely next senator from New Jersey said he would deliver a message about the importance of service and participation to safeguard democracy.
The first time most Americans were introduced to Representative Andy Kim was in the wee hours of Jan. 7, 2021, when a photographer captured a single image of the bespectacled congressman kneeling alone in the Capitol Rotunda, picking up trash left behind by rioters who had stormed the building just hours earlier.
The image, which quickly went viral online, was Mr. Kim’s first major foray onto the national political stage. He was a young, at the time relatively unknown Democratic congressman who had served on the National Security Council and advised President Barack Obama on Iraq before his election to represent a swing district in southern and central New Jersey.
Three years later, Mr. Kim, 42, will address the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Wednesday night as the odds-on favorite to become the next senator from New Jersey in November. If he wins, he will replace Robert Menendez, who resigned after being convicted in a vast international bribery scheme.
It is the culmination of a remarkable arc for Mr. Kim, who, by his own estimate, has never addressed an audience of more than 1,000 people. He arrived on Capitol Hill in 2019 after his victory over a Republican incumbent helped Democrats win back control of the House of Representatives. He held on to the seat in 2020 even as voters in his district overwhelmingly cast votes for Donald J. Trump.
In challenging Mr. Menendez, then a powerful three-term senator, he took on the Democratic political machine in New Jersey and won. In March, a federal court ruled that party chairs were barred from designing ballots that gave preferential treatment to their endorsed candidates. He is now heavily favored to win in the solidly Democratic state, a victory that would make him the third-youngest member of the Senate.
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When crafting his convention remarks, Mr. Kim decided to return to the moment he got down on his hands and knees in the Capitol Rotunda to clean up the debris left behind by the violent mob of Trump supporters that had ransacked the building — a simple gesture, he said, that at the time seemed like “really nothing special.”
“I want to just deliver a very personal plea to the American people that this chaos that we see right now in America — it doesn’t have to be this way,” he said in an interview on Tuesday night.
“I’m very much a believer that the biggest division in American politics isn’t Democrats or Republicans; it’s those who are engaged and those who are not,” Mr. Kim said. “So my message in this speech is about those that are not engaged. How can I show to you why I feel that your participation in this democracy is important — and how I cannot see how we heal this problem unless more people participate.”
