Rep. Andy Kim beats back GOP challenge in New Jersey

Rep. Andy Kim (D) on Wednesday was projected to win a second term in a battleground district in southern New Jersey, thwarting a key pick-up opportunity for the GOP.

The Associated Press called the race at 12:15 a.m. ET, projecting defeat for GOP businessman David Richter.

President Trump had carried New Jersey’s 3rd District by 6 percentage points in 2016, and Richter positioned himself as a staunch champion of the Republicans’ standard-bearer, touting his pro-business experience as the former CEO of a large construction company and bashing Kim, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, as too liberal for the district.

It wasn’t enough to bring down the first-term Democrat.

Kim had a heavy fundraising advantage. And the 38-year-old Rhodes Scholar, a national security official during the Obama administration, focused heavily on both the Republican effort to dismantle the 2010 Affordable Care Act — a central theme of races around the country — and Trump’s erratic response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Polls showed that both issues resonated with voters shifting away from Trump this year, particularly suburban women. And Richter, late in the cycle, was forced to defend an earlier prediction that the public health crisis in the Garden State was “pretty much behind us,” just as New Jersey has seen a recent surge in cases and hospitalizations.

Kim, who sits on the special House committee overseeing the administration’s coronavirus response, was well positioned to use the issue as a bludgeon, accusing Trump — and Richter, by extension — of ignoring public health experts at the expense of American lives.

“That inaction and incompetence has led our country down a path to failure,” he said Friday.