How can politicians better serve the American people? Sen. Andy Kim has some ideas

Three term Democratic Representative Andy Kim is now New Jersey's newest Senator.

He’s been listening to Americans who supported both himself and President-elect Donald Trump.

Today, On Point: His lessons from those conversations.

Andy Kim, U.S. Democratic Senator of New Jersey. He was elected in November and sworn in on December 8th.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Last week, Democratic Congressman Andy Kim became New Jersey's newest senator.

KAMALA HARRIS: Please raise your hand. Do you each solemnly swear that you will support and defend the Constitution of the United States, against all enemies, foreign and domestic?

SENATORS: I do.

HARRIS: That you will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. That you take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion. And that you will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which you are about to enter, so help you God. 

SENATORS: I do.

HARRIS: Congratulations, Senators. (APPLAUSE)

CHAKRABARTI: The three-time congressman was sworn in nearly a month early by vice president Kamala Harris, after sitting Senator George Helmey resigned. Helmy was appointed by New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy when longtime Senator Bob Menendez left office after being convicted on federal corruption charges. Menendez was convicted on 16 counts of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from New Jersey businessmen, as well as the governments of Egypt and Qatar.

Now Senator Kim was first elected to the House in 2018, and he served New Jersey's 3rd congressional district. In 2020, as he ran for reelection, he won overwhelmingly. He beat his Republican opponent by a solid 8% of the vote. But Kim noticed that something had changed in New Jersey's 3rd.

While he won as a Democratic congressman, in the 2020 election, Republican Donald Trump also won the district in the presidential race, though by a fraction of a percent. That set Kim on a journey to understand his constituents much better, to learn why people voted both for him and for Trump. Now in the wake of the Democrats 2024 presidential defeat, what Senator Kim learned could be of use to a party seeking solutions to its electoral loss.

And he joins us now. Senator Andy Kim, welcome to On Point.

ANDY KIM: Thank you, Meghna, for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: I just want to give you a heads up. That I will be asking you about drones a little bit later. Okay, this is, it's an important issue to people and a big mystery. So I will not let the hour escape without talking about drones.

But let's go back to the 2020 race, because the reason why I was made aware of these listening sessions that you heard, was you actually, after the 2024 presidential election, you put out this long Twitter thread explaining what you had done. So take us back to 2020. What did you first notice that just made you decide you needed to listen to the people of your district much more carefully.

KIM: This is a congressional district that Trump won in 2016. He won it in 2020. And in 2020, that was my first time being on the ballot when he was on the ballot. And the fact that I was able to win, but outperformed Joe Biden by around eight points or more, it was something that intrigued me. I was one of only seven Democrats in the entire country that won a district that Trump won that year.

And why that number is important is because our house majority was only five votes. So that means if me and four others of these Democrats that won these Trump districts, if we fail to outperform partisanship, it means that we would not have had the bipartisan infrastructure law or the Inflation Reduction Act or the CHIPS and Science Act or any number of other things that we got done.

So it really showed me a lot about the fragility of that moment. I really wanted to hone in on it. We estimated, potentially over 20,000 people voted for Trump, voted for me, and I wanted to just ask why. Just really tried to understand what is it that they're hearing, what information are they getting?

And so we held a series of these listening sessions and focus groups with people who voted for Trump and voted for me. And just overwhelmingly, I'm happy to go into the details here, but just overwhelmingly what I found just remarkably important is that every conversation started off with them talking about just how much they felt like politics is broken, how distrusting they are.

And in fact, they would use this word disgust, how disgusted they were with politics. And the fact that's where the conversation started, I thought was such an important and poignant moment.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. The details are exactly what we're hoping to hear from you. Because the disgust with politics, the really just unhappiness with the general service of politicians.

That's some, those are things that we've heard quite a bit over, especially over the past couple of years. So tell me what specifically were your constituents telling you that they were disgusted with? Because I guess what I'm trying to get at is like people can emote, but beyond, but underneath that, did they have really concrete, specific reasons?

KIM: Look at least here in New Jersey, and this was in 2020, a lot of it revolved around corruption. This sense that, I guess the way I would frame it is this question of, who do your elected officials work for? Who are they fighting for? And perhaps one of the most important questions I think one can pull, this question of do you think your elected leader cares about you?

And that's what I found really fascinating, is you could share similar policy positions with your elected leader and believe in those, but if you don't trust them, if you don't feel like they're working for you, you can see how eroding that moment can be. That's what I really heard from people, this feeling that elected leaders, right now, there was a survey last year that said 84% of people in New Jersey believe that their elected leaders are corrupt.

We live in the time of the greatest amount of distrust in government in modern American history. And so I think it's important not to underestimate just how much people distrust politics and government right now. And so that sense of anti, that sense of corruption, that sense of special interest, this idea that politics is just some club that is self-serving.

Elected officials are out for themselves to benefit their own ego, ambition and personal fortune, and that they're working on behalf of their donors. They're working on behalf of big corporations, so it doesn't necessarily have to be direct corruption. It's just about, also are they working for special interest and big corporations, but not for you?

That's the sentiment that was just overwhelming.

CHAKRABARTI: So this is really critical to understand. Because this question, do you think your elected leaders care about you, really gets to the heart of things. Were you able to ask folks, because these were voters who voted for both you and Donald Trump, that if they feel like Donald Trump cared for them, why did they feel that way?

What was he doing that made them feel that way?

KIM: So I think where I would categorize that as just, again, a deep distrust for the status quo, our status quo politics. And what I found fascinating when the conversation moved on to Donald Trump, and again, this was four years ago.

But I think a lot of this feels very resonant to this moment. Is even if they had concerns about his personal behavior, how he speaks, what he says, there was a sense that at least he's not somebody defending and perpetuating the status quo, they saw him as a disruptor, they saw him as somebody that didn't come from politics.

He never was in office before. And the way in which he engages, way in which he speaks. Yes, it's different, but that's actually something that they found as a plus, say they liked that he wasn't cookie cutter. And what I found fascinating is when the conversation came to me, like there was this kind of recognition that I'm different as well.

I'm not somebody that's been trying to protect the status quo. I talk a lot about reforms, a lot about campaign finance, and I don't take corporate PAC money. I, probably the most popular piece of legislation I ever introduced is legislation that would ban members of Congress and senior government officials from owning and trading individual stocks.

I never ran for office prior to my time running for Congress. And look, I'm an Asian American, young Asian American man who represents a 85% white district that voted for Trump twice. I am not central casting of what you'd imagine, a congressman from my congressional district to look like. I'm not central casting, honestly, of what you'd imagine a Senator from New Jersey necessarily to look like, I'm the first Asian American ever in the U.S. Senate, from the entire East coast of America.

But I think all of that, actually, I thought that was going to be a weakness for me in terms of being able to build coalitions, but I think it's actually turned out to be a strength. But what I'm trying to show is that yes, voters want someone that's different. They want someone that will disrupt, but there's a different way to be different than Donald Trump.

It doesn't mean that you have to go down that path to differentiate yourself, that people are looking for people that will stand up against corruption. Take those actions, but they can do it in different ways.

CHAKRABARTI: So you put this Twitter thread out originally on November 7th of this year. And there's one point in the thread where you say, I learned never to underestimate the extent to which people distrust and despise politics, especially those people who do not engage regularly.

And then, as you just said, you said in the Twitter thread, the main point you wanted to convey is that the hinge was on what it means to be different. You don't just have to be different like Trump. Okay, in that case, you don't go so far in this Twitter thread as to say this.

But it does seem like a quite damning judgment on the Democratic Party that when President Biden stopped his campaign, the party then very quickly rallied around someone who represented the status quo, the vice president. Was that a mistake?

KIM: Look, I don't think there were very many options at that point with so little time left. When I look back on it, there's a lots of different things that could have gone differently over the last two years.

But it isn't just about the position that someone is in, someone in that position as vice president or a U.S. Senator or a congressperson, by virtue of how they're engaging and talking to people, what kind of things that they're focusing on. Those are differences there.

But you know what I will say is. yes, I think she ran what, like a three-month campaign, like it is hard to, in that amount of time, differentiate from the status quo. This is something that's a long time coming. I'm writing about this from four years ago. You can imagine how baked in a lot of these feelings are.

And I think it was going to be difficult for the Democratic Party, no matter who is at the top of the ticket, even if they're, Biden stepped aside much earlier and there was a primary. I think that the party has real challenges when it comes to its brand, its reputation, and that's something that I saw full force, when people, when I was doing this.

CHAKRABARTI: Senator, you have to forgive me for just a second. I just have 15 seconds before I have to take this first break. But I'll definitely let you pick up that thought when we come back. So we're speaking today with New Jersey's newest senator, Senator Andy Kim. More in a moment.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Senator, if I may, I'm going to push a little bit more here, because I think there's a lot of substance that you put out in those two Twitter threads. And I will be so bold as to say I'm hearing you be a little bit hesitant right now, when it comes to directly addressing the Democratic Party.

I understand, it's your party, but let me say this. When you say that whether the person is the vice president or a senator or a congressman or whatnot, there are different ways to be different. That is absolutely true, but we must do a postmortem on the Harris campaign, even though, yes, she only had 100 days.

However, the first part of those hundred days were very successful. There's so much evidence of that. Because she and Tim Walz were bringing something different. They were bringing something distinctly not the status quo in the emotion, momentum and thrust of what they wanted to do for the American people.

Then, however, I would say in the last month of the campaign, something shifted. She refused to separate herself from the policies of the Biden administration, even by a little bit. She started campaigning with Congressman Liz Cheney, who I actually believe is an American hero, in defending democracy. But, voters, especially those low information voters you talked about, what they saw were two establishment politicians standing side by side.

So I'm just wondering if you are willing to say those were missteps. And if the next presidential campaign, when it comes around, what would you advise be done differently to break this view that Democrats represent nothing more than this despised status quo?

KIM: Yeah, so I think the reason why I was responding the way that I did to your question is I'm still not certain that any Democrat could have came in under their circumstances and pulled off a win, so that's what I'm still trying to think through myself.

Just given where things were at and how distrusting things were, how people were so frustrated by the summer of 2024. I'm not sure that anyone [would have] been able to separate themselves and distinguish themselves and be able to deal with that. Just given just what we saw with the election results.

So that's something I'm still grappling.

CHAKRABARTI: But isn't that wild?

KIM: To your point --

CHAKRABARTI: Senator, isn't that wild? Because instead, a critical number of swing voters in a few states trusted the convicted felon instead. They trusted the guy who facilitated the ransacking of Congress on January 6th, 2021. I'm not sure the bar for trust can get any lower than that.

And yet somehow the Democrats couldn't clear that bar.

KIM: And again, to the point that I said earlier that you responded to, we cannot underestimate how much people distrust. And in fact, a number of people that I talked to, it was around the time when, you know, these judicial cases were coming up against Trump, where there was a sense of rallying around.

People felt like some of the cases were political attacks, were things that were done, because of the fact that he was running for president again. And those are the types of approaches that cause people to, again, really distrust that process. There's that element of it.

And I think, in particular, for instance, like there was a lot of effort by the Harris campaign and more broadly amongst Democrats to talk about how Donald Trump posed a threat to democracy. That just, we have to protect our democracy and a lot of that message. And what's interesting is as I've talked to people who voted for Trump, subsequent to the election, a number of them, when I talk about that line, a number of them felt like that was a signal that the Democrats wanted to protect the status quo.

And that's something that we have to be very careful about. I do think that it's important that we talk about protecting democracy, but we have to do it in a way that doesn't make it seem like we're okay with how things are now, and we're worried about how Donald Trump is trying to change it. But it comes across sometimes, as this approach of saying, Look, we don't want to see change.

We don't want to see things different. But right now, we live in the time of the greatest amount of inequality, economic inequality, in our nation's history. People see that delivered by the same old politics. That's something that we have to grapple with, is an overarching message.

CHAKRABARTI: That is a really interesting point. Communicating to people that believing in protecting democracy doesn't necessarily mean defending the status quo. Okay. So then, how would you recommend Democrats begin to do that?

KIM: Yeah look, first and foremost, I think it's really important to really approach this moment with a lot of humility.

I always try to say I practice a politics of humility, and that's opposed to what I call a politics of hubris. Too often, people, and you see this right after Election Day, people, coming right out and saying, this is exactly why we lost, or what the Democrats lost or why the results happened this way.

I'm certainly putting out some ideas, but I'm not saying I have all the answers. We need to go out and talk to people. We need to have these types of listening sessions. I'm going to be having more in my own state. I've really been pushing the Democratic Party to do this more systematically across the country. To listen to people and hear from them and not assume that we can deduce this all on our own because that's that sense of hubris.

Like what I find so clear right now is just the people feel judged in their politics. They feel like elected officials are being paternalistic and telling them what they need to do, and what's best for their lives, without listening to them. And what I find is that when you have that sense of hubris in you, when you talk to someone, they can tell that it's not really a conversation.

It's not a dialogue that goes both ways, that when you believe you have all the right answers, and you know what needs to be done to fix this country, then you're not actually listening to the other person. You're just engaging in an effort to try to convert that person to your position. And that's obviously a lot of what, sometimes people feel, when people knock on their doors on leading up to Election Day and other things. Right now, as we are as far from the next election as possible.

This is exactly the right moment to go out and try to engage people, try to talk to them in a way where they're not assuming that this is transactional, just about getting votes, and to be able to hear from them. Because I can tell you, when I've done that, I can really get a sense of not just what's on their minds.

But it is also a sense of respect, people right now feel so disrespected by politics and that leads to that distrust. The way I always say it is if you're only having comfortable conversations in politics, it means you're not talking to all the people you need to be talking to.

We're not going to learn about the problems by just talking amongst ourselves and pollsters and researchers, we got to go out and have what are undoubtedly going to be some uncomfortable conversations, but that's going to be how we start to find our path.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, so let me ask you just in terms of practical obstacles to this return. What I'm hearing you say is that you're calling for a return to the pure purpose of representational government, right? It's to know and understand what your constituents want, hope and dream for, and then taking those desires and translating them into policy, right?

In government. That's essentially what a democracy is all about. But let's lean on your experience as a congressman senator. I, for a long time, my understanding has been that because a House term is only two years, that as soon as you get elected, you're basically in the next election cycle right after that.

And a lot of practical time is spent doing exactly the things you say shouldn't be done, which is talking to pollsters, talking to, going to fundraisers, talking to potential donors, and trying to do legislation, as well. Where is the mechanism to have these face-to-face town halls, meetings, opportunities to listen to constituents better?

KIM: In six years that I've been in the House of Representatives, you're right, I had a lot of tough races. And had to make sure we're building up the resources to fund them. But I also, in that process, held over 80 town halls, and I would go out every single month. I made a promise to go out every month to be able to do a town hall.

Many of them, most of them in person. And I'll tell you just a quick story. There was one that I did in a town that I lost by like over 25 points. It was a brutal beat. A brutal loss in that town. I showed up to do a town hall and several hundred people were there. And I stood in front of them, and I said, whether you voted for me or not, you're my boss.

My job is to serve you to the best of my ability. I'm coming before you right now, not as a politician, but as your congressman. And I need to hear from you. And we had tough conversations. A lot. I got asked a lot of tough questions, but I listened to everybody. I never raised my voice. Afterwards, there was a line of people waiting to talk to me one on one. And there was a gentleman, an older gentleman in the back.

He waited 45 minutes to come up and talk to me. And he came up to me and he said, I just want you to know, I didn't vote for you. And then he said, and I was very hesitant to come to this town hall today. But then he stuck out his hand and said, but I'm glad I did, shook my hand and walked off. And I can tell you that was one of the most profound moments of my time in politics.

And I've spent a lot of time trying to understand what happened. He waited 45 minutes to tell me three sentences, didn't even have a question. And what I've come to deduce is I believe while I don't necessarily think I earned that man's vote just for showing up and taking some tough questions, I do think I earned his respect.

And when this question about trust, what I've come to believe is you cannot trust someone or something unless you respect that person or that thing. And so for us, if we're trying to figure out how do we earn the trust of the voters of the American people, you got to earn their respect. And you don't do that by lobbing TV ads, bombarding their TVs, digital ads that are bombarding their screens.

You got to go out there, and you got to engage. And not just eight weeks before Election Day with a ground game. I think the House, with 780,000 people, it's actually in some ways, yes, you're constantly running elections, but you're also ... closer to the people in that way.

I now represent a state of 9 million people. It's much harder for me to think about how to be able to have those types of personal engagements with something of this magnitude. And that therein lies the difficulty of running for president, right? How do you try to engage over 330 million people, right?

No, you cannot simply have enough town halls to be able to do that. So that's why I'm saying, not everything I'm saying can be perfectly scaled or replicated, but it does give us a sense of how to be engaged.

CHAKRABARTI:  sense of how to be engaged, which also, I think, more profoundly what you're talking about is a shift in the entire soul or purpose of politics in the Democratic Party. Because again, to recap some of the things you've said, you want, you think, you're advising, meet people where they're at.

That makes a lot of sense. Talk about service, not politics, the politics of humility, as you said, listening, being empathetic, withholding judgment and I think being okay with people saying no to you, I completely get that. These all make perfect sense to me. But do you think your fellow Democrats are willing to hear this?

And I ask you that, specifically because many people might be saying why should we be empathetic with voters, when there's still a very strong basis of belief that many voters simply voted because out of racism, right? Like the first response to this Twitter thread of yours I'm looking for, and I get it, Twitter's not real life, but the first response from someone says, let's talk about white bigotry, sir.

And it's the main reason that Trump won. That's what that person thinks. That's the first response to your thread. Is that feeling, you think, common amongst Democrats, and how would you overcome that?

KIM: Oh, there's definitely a lot of anger. And that feeling is common amongst all of politics, not just amongst Democrats.

I hear it from Independents and Republicans, too. And we are right now having deeper problems as a society, we are losing touch with this idea that we're part of something bigger than all of us. We have so much, we've become this nation that's addicted to anger, the amount of contempt.

And I use that word very specifically, the amount of contempt that I feel within our society right now, including our politics, is scary. When we hear language from Donald Trump about the enemy within and other things like that, like this is a dangerous moment for our country in that capacity, empathy for somebody doesn't mean that I agree with them.

It means that I am trying to understand them. I'm trying to see the world through their eyes, understand how they're coming to decisions. And I think that is important. And again, that doesn't mean that I agree with them, that I'm accepting that as a valid reason to be able to vote a certain way.

But I'm recognizing their citizenship, their equal participation in our society. And if I want to be able to engage, I woke up in a Congressional district every day where I recognize that the majority of voters in that district voted for Donald Trump.

That is a unique experience and something that I have to grapple with. But I also have to understand that what I've come to see in the district and in the state, it's different than the politics that we see down in D.C. And that's something that I think is key.

So often people in D.C., they get obsessed with this question. Do we have the right message? Obviously a very important question, but they don't ask two other questions. Which is, who is the right messenger? And the last one, which I think is almost the most important. Does the message you're trying to convey to people actually get to the people you're trying to talk to?

And the answer to that is so often, no. People in my congressional district were not following, the Hakeem Jeffries or speaker Pelosi, Chuck Schumer on Twitter so we have to understand how are they getting their information?

CHAKRABARTI: As Americans, we're living in individually hermetically sealed information bubbles.

I think you're hitting on something really important. That even if the Democratic Party adopted all of the recommendations that you're making, somehow the information barrier has to be overcome. And I don't know if anyone has the solution to that.

KIM: Yeah, but look, it helps when you go and talk to them, and you hear, what do you understand about these candidates? Tell us what you understand. And where were you getting your information from, doing that kind of research, doing that kind of analysis. And hearing from them, rather than just assuming that the same old, you were talking earlier about how it felt like there was new momentum when Kamala came into the race and energy on that front.

No doubt that there was energy, but clearly, we were misjudging how to be able to measure that sense of energy, right? People, they look at it, they use certain things like small dollar donations, size of the rallies and energy on social media. Clearly that was wrong, and our usual way of trying to understand momentum in politics was clearly wrong.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Today we are speaking with New Jersey Senator Andy Kim. And Senator Kim, if we may, I want to just shift gears a tiny bit. Because I'd love to hear a little bit more about your story, your American story, actually. Can you tell us a little bit about your first months and years as an American.

My parents immigrated to America 50 years ago, actually about 50 years ago to this year. So our family celebrating our 50th anniversary in this country, my parents were born at the end of the Korean war. They're the only part of our family that moved here from South Korea.

It was a tough, lonely journey for a lot of that time, settled in New Jersey, because they wanted to have me and my sister have access to good public schools, a safe environment. And, it's been a humbling experience representing in Congress, the community where I went to kindergarten and now the state where my kids went to kindergarten.

And that experience, it's something where my parents were never political. We never talked politics at the dining room table. We never really thought that it was a place for us. We never really thought that we had that kind of voice, and that kind of capacity. It's been an interesting journey for me to get involved.

I was a United States, worked in diplomacy and national security for the country in a career capacity. Never thought that I would get involved in politics. And, when I thought about getting involved, I had a lot of people tell me, like, you seem like a nice kid and all, but there's just no way that you can represent, you can win these types of districts.

I even had somebody tell me that I'm the wrong kind of minority to win statewide in New Jersey.

CHAKRABARTI: Meaning what?

KIM: So it's meaning just that an Asian American, with a population in New Jersey that's, just, I think 12%, that you just can't build a coalition.

And I just got ... I was so offended by that. Because it's the sense that I can, as if I can only appeal to people that look like me.

CHAKRABARTI: Was it a Democrat who told you that?

KIM: It was a Democrat that told me that. And it was someone who was considers themselves to be a political expert and I just, it's just one of those things that just, you can imagine how discouraging that is. And I've heard this throughout my life, when I was at the State Department, working for this country, I was banned from working on issues related to Korea, because I was Korean American. They questioned my loyalty to this country, so those are the types of things that --

CHAKRABARTI: Is that a common practice at state?

KIM: Not anymore, because I was able to help introduce legislation that bans that practice, but for a while, yes. It was something that was particularly targeting Asian Americans, as well as some other people with certain backgrounds. And I just found that to be so offensive. Basically, made me feel like they're telling me that I'm not 100% American, that this perpetual foreigner trope is something that they believe on a fundamental level.

CHAKRABARTI: It seems then ubiquitous across American politics. Because you just in the span of the one minute, you talked about a Democrat saying you couldn't win because you're Asian, to the State Department having a policy that wouldn't allow people of various ethnic origins to work on regions that they may have distant family ties to that.

That is very disheartening, Senator.

KIM: Yeah, but look, what I will say is, I stayed in the race. I said look, I'm not gonna let other people try to define what I am or am not capable of accomplishing simply because of the color of my skin and my last name. And I am proud that on the 50th anniversary of my family coming to America, that I was sworn in as a United States Senator, the first Korean American.

Ever in the U.S. Senate in the 120 years that Koreans have been in this country, it's not a barrier I set out to break. That was not the reason I ran. But as a father of a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old, two little boys that unfortunately have already experienced discrimination and racism in their young lives, being taunted and called Chinese boy over and over again at school.

I think it's hopefully going to move the needle. Like I'm excited that a generation of New Jerseyans are hopefully not going to blink an eye in seeing an Asian American representing them in the U.S. Senate.

CHAKRABARTI: But this too is part of the distaste that many people have with the status quo, right?

Just if I could share just for a second, like for example, I get invited to do talks or panels and the invitation says, because of your experience as a South Asian journalist, I'm like, stop, full stop right there. I was born in this country. I'm an American, first and foremost. Yes, my parents came from India, but why is what I have to say as a journalist uniquely filtered through some kind of South Asian lens, but it's utterly normalized in this country.

So let me ask, though, given that, when you talk about your legislative priorities, for example, first of all, what are they Senator? And second of all, how do you talk about them in a way, or how do you choose those priorities in a way that matches with this sort of recipe that you've given the Democratic Party on how to be more effective as political leaders.

KIM: I remember when I first ran for Congress, eight years ago, I had some consultants say, maybe don't talk about your Immigrant family, that they came from Korea and things like that.

And I was like, I'm pretty sure people are going to figure it out when they see me and hear from me. And then it was just one of those things where what I was trying to show, I still talked about. But what I tried to show is my story is not just a Korean American or an Asian American story, it's fundamentally an American story. And trying to talk about that sense of my family's pursuit of the American dream, of what it is that we tried to deal with when it comes to opportunities and engagement.

And now as a father hoping for that for my kids. But I'll be honest, when I see all the craziness happening in the chaos right now in this moment, I worry about what kind of America my kids are growing up in. It doesn't necessarily feel like I have the same kind of optimism that my parents had for me and my sister, in terms of our ability to be able to progress beyond their means.

And so I do focus on a lot of that, that sense of, just what do I want for my kids? People's kids and grandkids, this sense of just the nuts and bolts. I often call it like, we're not asking for the moon. I'm not trying to make a billion dollars and build rocket ships to outer space.

Like I want to just be able to have a simple life, just be able to focus in on the dignity and decency of family and hard work. So I focus a lot on trying to address high cost of living, trying to address just the stability, or lack thereof in people's lives, the anxiety that they feel, like people talk about it as if like they can't breathe.

It feels like it's just like death from a thousand cuts right now. So that's how I often try to engage on it and how I try to talk about it. And how I try to use my family story to try to show the challenges that we've experienced, and how I can empathize with people about what they're going through.

CHAKRABARTI: So let's push this a little bit more into the realm of governance. Because your eloquence is heard in terms of how to engage with people, and more effectively listen to them. But then, of course, you got elected and congressman, congresspeople and senators get elected to actually do legislation, right?

And so I wonder if, do the Democrats find themselves currently in something of a painful position and specifically regarding this, that as the Republicans have done under Democratic administrations, where they have basically publicly, they've said publicly, our goal now is to stop any Democratic legislative victory, right?

Mitch McConnell famously said that during the Obama administration. Do Democrats feel the same way? Because let's do a thought experiment here. Say, come January. When the Trump administration and Republicans, they're going to have to consider about the sunsetting of those 2017 tax cuts.

They're going to want to renew them. If there's minor modifications that say, maybe make life a tiny bit better for working Americans, would Democrats be willing to compromise and support those tax cuts or would they not? Because any victory for a Trump bill, could Democrats see that as a affirmation of Trumpism?

KIM: Look we're definitely here to govern. And as I said, I represent everybody, not just the people that voted for me. But it also means that luckily, if there are actions that are being done in the tax cut, if that's going to be overwhelmingly benefiting big corporations and the wealthiest Americans, we need to call that out.

And we need to stand up against that. I still think a lot of the fundamentals in terms of the policies and the efforts, these are things that can connect with people. They just haven't been, we haven't had that storytelling. That approach that I think is able to really hit this home and solidify it. And we're not getting that message out there. So that's part of it.

And yes, I do think that we find areas where we can hopefully find some agreement. I'm hoping we can find bipartisan agreement on addressing the mental health crisis in this country, on addressing some of the other problems that we're facing.

The work that we did on the CHIPS and Science Act. To be able to invest in advanced manufacturing in a bipartisan way. Like I'm hoping that coalition is open to a 2.0 version, in terms of what we can do, and I think that's something that we can work with, but we certainly need to be able to tell our narrative about, why it is that we think all their actions that they're going to take are dangerous.

And look, it's not just calling out on the Trump side. And this is something I wanted to really reflect here in the final minutes, is how I was able to win this Senate seat, for instance, like we haven't told the full story, but look, like there were very few people in Jersey politics that 14 months ago would have a match, or 12 months ago would have imagined that I would be sworn in as a U.S. Senator. There's a lot of problems with the machine politics in New Jersey and a lot of that pushed by my own party. And so I just think in general, what the Democratic Party needs to recognize, or what all people need to recognize, is we're entering a new era of politics here.

This is a realignment moment for to use a word that you know, others have used. I agree with that, this isn't just a tinker around the edge kind of moment, and in New Jersey, there's a question like, will the Democratic Party in New Jersey move away from and take the reforms needed to rehabilitate a reputation that's been deeply broken by corruption, by cronyism, when you have politicians making money off their jobs.

Meanwhile, public transit, NJ transit trains are broken and not running. People look at that and say, the Democrats are in charge here and things aren't working well.

And instead, we see handouts to companies run by donors and other things like that. Like we need more reforms in those ways and be able to show that we can govern.

CHAKRABARTI: Senator Kim, you are right. We only have four minutes left. I have two important questions for you. People might remember that on January 7th, 2021. Just a couple of hours after the Capitol was finally cleared of the insurrectionists, a photograph was taken of you that really became viral, because it's profoundly moving.

You're on your knees in the Capitol Rotunda on the floor, cleaning up trash that was left behind by the rioters. It was the embodiment of an act of service, for the love of the democracy that we're all privileged to live in. And I wanted to remind folks of that moment that you had, because now we're at a place where just a few days ago, the man who's going to return to the White House, Donald Trump, in a Meet the Press interview said, on his first day in office, on January 20th, 2025, he's going to pardon all the people who have been convicted in American courts of crimes associated with January 6th.

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP: I’m going to look at everything. We’re going to look at individual cases —

KRISTEN WELKER: Everyone?

TRUMP: Yeah.

WELKER: Okay.

TRUMP: But I’m going to be acting very quickly.

WELKER: Within your first 100 days, first day?

TRUMP: First day.

WELKER: First day?

TRUMP: Yeah. I’m looking first day.

WELKER: You’re going to issue these pardons?

TRUMP: These people have been there, how long is it? Three, four years.

WELKER: Okay.

TRUMP: You know, by the way, they’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.

CHAKRABARTI: Senator Kim. We only have two minutes left, I do want to ask you about drones in a second. But I just want to get your thoughts on that is also part of our political reality now.

KIM: Just yesterday when I entered the Capitol, I actually ran into the family of Officer Sicknick who was killed due to what happened on January 6th, and it was profoundly powerful.

They're from New Jersey. I've talked to them before, and like that's so often what's being pushed aside, like what actually happened on that day. And just the idea that with so much going on in our country right now, so many real challenges that people were thinking about, when they voted on November 5th, the idea that this is what's going to be prioritized on day one, rather than putting all of our energy into lowering costs for people and helping them with their daily lives.

It just shows you how challenged we are with this moment in politics.

CHAKRABARTI: So now, sorry to have to make this very sudden turn towards drones, but I did promise you that because there's still a lot of questions out there of what's going on with all these drones popping up at various places on the Eastern seaboard.

How is it possible that we don't know? I thought we had pretty good technology in this country that could identify aerial objects over critical places in U.S. airspace.

KIM: Yeah, clearly, we need more when it comes to detection capabilities, I think this is something where we're gonna see a lot more drone usage.

It's just becoming so much more popular. And I don't think we've been really, as a society, aware of this as so much, understanding how we can identify. I went out with local police. And they pointed out some things that they saw in the sky that were a concern. At least for my purposes, we were able to go back and look at flight data and be able to attribute almost everything to air manned aircraft that was out.

I don't discount people are seeing drones. Because again, there's a lot more usage, including at night, as the rules changed a couple of years ago that allow for night usage of drones. I think what's key is we want to make sure we're protecting our critical infrastructure, other issues.

The last thing I'll just say is it gets back to what we were saying earlier about distrust in government. And that's something that, you know, we continue to see unfortunately popping up in different manifestations.

CHAKRABARTI: In this case it could be easily solved if the FAA or Homeland Security just came out and said here's exactly what these things are, and we know.

KIM: There's still people that won't believe them.

CHAKRABARTI: Transparency is the first step.

KIM: It is.