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 began circulating widely 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.
What a difference three years has made.
When he recalled the moment on Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Mr. Kim, 42, was speaking 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.
“I thought to myself, ‘How did it get this bad?’ ” Mr. Kim told attendees in the packed United Center in Chicago on Wednesday night. “So I did the only thing I could think of: I grabbed a trash bag and started cleaning up. What I learned on Jan. 6 is that all of us are caretakers for our great republic. We can heal this country, but only if we try.”
It was the culmination of a remarkable arc for Mr. Kim, who had never before attended a party convention and, by his own estimate, had never addressed an audience of more than 1,000 people. The theme of his brief speech, centered on public service, mirrored his own, unorthodox rise to power in Washington.
Mr. Kim has said that for years, he never entertained the idea of running for office. Instead, he climbed the ranks of the national security establishment, along the way crossing paths with many prominent figures, some of whom would later become his colleagues in Washington.
When he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the early 2000s, he contacted Barack Obama, then an up-and-coming state senator, to try to get approval to audit his constitutional law class. (Mr. Obama, his future boss, replied that he was not teaching the class that year because he was running for the U.S. Senate.)
A few years later, Mr. Kim, a Rhodes scholar, was strolling around Oxford University with his friend Pete Buttigieg, the future transportation secretary, when he met the woman who would become his wife. In Afghanistan, he worked for Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the commander of American forces in the country, as a civilian adviser.
Mr. Kim 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.
“I’m not someone who ever thought I’d run for office,” he said in an interview. “But after three elections, I actually think that’s why I’ve been successful in a district that Trump won. I’m not central casting of what a congressman from this district or a senator from New Jersey would look like.”
Last year when he decided to challenge Mr. Menendez, then a powerful three-term senator, Mr. Kim 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.
“The thing that scares me the most is this feeling like we have lost touch with this idea that we’re all part of something bigger than all of us,” Mr. Kim said in an interview on Tuesday night. “It’s this fracturing of America that I see that is most alarming to me.”
For that reason, he said, 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,” he said, “that this chaos that we see right now in America — it doesn’t have to be this way.”
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