Last year, when most of the state’s political establishment was all-in for Tammy Murphy for U.S. Senate, a lonely dissent came from former Rep. Tom Malinowski, who instead supported then-Rep. Andy Kim and his anti-machine campaign.
Kim ended up winning that race against the odds, and now he’s in a position to return the favor: the senator is supporting Malinowski’s comeback bid in the special election to succeed Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill.
“Tom Malinowski knows the House of Representatives, he knows Congress, he knows New Jersey, he knows how to be able to stand up against Donald Trump,” Kim said in his endorsement video. “That’s what I need right now: someone there as a partner with me in the Capitol. And I see that in Tom Malinowski.”
Kim said that he and Malinowski first met 12 years ago, when Kim was working in the White House under President Barack Obama and Malinowski was a top official at the State Department. In 2018, both moved back home to New Jersey to try and unseat Republican House members – and both won, part of a nationwide wave that flipped control of the House from red to blue.
Throughout their shared four years in the House, Kim and Malinowski were perhaps the two New Jersey Democrats with the weakest ties to the state’s powerful political machines. That ended up coming back to haunt Malinowski in 2022, when he lost re-election in a district that had been redrawn by his own party to be significantly redder; Kim, on the other hand, was given a much bluer district.
After Senator Bob Menendez was indicted in 2023, Malinowski publicly considered running for his seat, but Kim’s Senate campaign took off too quickly for any other anti-machine candidate to catch on. Instead, Malinowski chose to endorse Kim while criticizing much of the state’s political establishment for lining up behind Murphy; he was one of just a handful of prominent Democrats to align with Kim before Murphy ended her campaign.
Now, Malinowski has a competitive primary of his own to deal with. The former congressman represented the 7th district during his time in the House, but his comeback campaign is taking place in the neighboring 11th district, where a huge number of ambitious politicians already live. (Kim, for his part, represented the 3rd district during his time in the House, far to the south of both the 7th and 11th districts.)
One of Malinowski’s 11th district opponents, Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill (D-Montclair), had a huge number of local Democrats behind his campaign on day one; others, most prominent among them Lieutenant Gov. Tahesha Way, have been well-known political figures for years. (Still another, Cammie Croft, is an alum of the Obama White House like Kim, though it’s not clear whether the two would have ever overlapped or interacted in their largely unrelated roles.)
Kim, though, said that when 11th district voters elect their next member of Congress – the special primary election is likely arriving in late January or early February, but has not been scheduled yet – they should consider who will be best prepared to hit the ground running in Washington.
“Tom is someone that I can trust, someone who I know has a heart of service, and someone who I know can step up in this incredibly dangerous and tumultuous time in America,” Kim said. “We need to make sure that we have people who know what they’re getting themselves into, who know how to be able to handle this.”
Malinowski isn’t the only 2024 Kim supporter to now be getting an endorsement in return. Last week, Kim endorsed Councilman James Solomon in the runoff for mayor of Jersey City; Solomon hosted events for Kim’s Senate campaign in early 2024 and joined his lawsuit against the county organizational line.
