Credit: (Erin Scott/Pool via AP, File)Editor’s Note: With all 12 of New Jersey’s congressional districts topping the ballot in the closely watched midterm elections, NJ Spotlight News is previewing each of those races with a focus on the major party candidates. Today it’s the 3rd District. For more details on the district and for all the election coverage from NJ Spotlight News, visit our NJ Decides 2022 page.
This story has been updated to delete a reference to Democrat Andy Kim’s response to requests for an interview. NJ Spotlight News incorrectly said that Kim’s campaign did not respond to interview requests. Kim’s campaign replied through email several times. NJ Spotlight News did not receive those emails.
Democrat Andy Kim is seeking a third term in what has been a politically split district that has switched between parties in recent congressional elections. Redistricting has made the district somewhat less Republican. Unaffiliated voters slightly outnumber registered Democrats, 37% versus 36%, while Republicans make up about 26% of registrants.
Kim, who lives in Marlton, is challenged by Republican candidate Bob Healey of Moorestown. Three independents are also running: Gregory Sobocinski, Christopher Russomanno and Lawrence Hatez.
Andy Kim (incumbent)
Democrat
Andy Kim is running for his third term representing the 3rd District. He flipped this formerly Republican district in the 2018 “blue wave” in New Jersey. In the 2020 election, he received 53.2% of the vote against Republican David Richter. He is the son of Korean immigrants and is New Jersey’s first Asian American congressman.
Kim’s campaign and House websites are silent about his education. According to Wikipedia, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He went on to study international relations at Magdalen College, Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship and a Harry S. Truman Scholarship and then got a master’s and doctorate in philosophy there.
Prior to Congress, Kim was a foreign affairs officer with the U.S. Department of State from 2009 to 2013 and served in Afghanistan as a civilian adviser to two generals. Kim went on to work as a national security adviser under President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2015.
In the House, Kim serves on the Armed Services Committee, Small Business Committee and Foreign Affairs Committee. He has sponsored bills that would help offer microloans to small businesses and co-sponsored bills that would better support veterans seeking college education and conserve endangered wildlife. He is a co-sponsor of laws meant to address the baby formula shortage earlier this year (HR-7791), address mental health concerns of health care providers (HR-1667) and make lynching a federal hate crime (HR-55).
Kim lives in Marlton with his wife and two children.
On his campaign website, Kim focuses on five issues: strengthening health care, supporting small businesses and creating jobs, protecting the environment, investing in families and serving veterans, military service members and their families.
Information about his stands on issues comes from his website, statements from his congressional office and public comments he has made.
Here’s where he stands on key issues:
Inflation and the economy
Kim voted for a bill (HR-7606) meant to increase competition in the meat and poultry industry, improve food supply chain issues and provide grants for biofuels as part of the Lower Food and Fuel Costs Act package. Kim also supports making permanent the $300 monthly child tax credit created under the American Rescue Plan, the 2021 COVID-19 relief bill. He also voted for the America COMPETES Act (HR-4521), which would provide funds to support semiconductor manufacturing and supply chain security in the United States and for wireless supply chain innovation, as well as impose sanctions on China for cybersecurity and human rights violations.
In an earlier NJ Spotlight News interview, Kim said he supports “trying to bring down some of the tariffs,” including ones imposed on China, to help reduce out-of-pocket costs for consumers. He also touted his support for the Inflation Reduction Act (HR-5376), saying it will bring down the price of prescription drugs for senior citizens and reducing the deficit.
Addressing a question about the Inflation Reduction Act’s increased funding for Internal Revenue Service staff, which Republicans have said will mean more middle-class families will be audited, Kim told an August town hall that “corporations and the wealthiest Americans have been avoiding paying their taxes using different loopholes,” resulting in “hundreds of billions of dollars” in taxes not paid and the new law is going to try to bring “accountability and fairness” to the process, as well as help lower the deficit.
Kim, in that earlier interview, said that his trip to Taiwan with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in early August was in part about “building the capacity for semiconductor production … that really caused some of the shortages that have led to these huge spikes in costs for cars and for other types of products.”
Voting and elections
Kim voted for HR-1, the For the People Act, which would expand automatic and same-day voter registration as well as vote-by-mail and early voting nationwide and limit the removal of people from voter rolls. He also voted for the Voting Rights Advancement Act (HR-4), which sets standards that states must meet — involving racial or language minority groups — before they are allowed to make changes in the methods of voting, voting locations, voter registration lists and redistricting if they have had past voting rights violations. Both bills are being filibustered by Republicans in the Senate.
Climate change
Kim has said climate change is real and is causing an increase in extreme weather events. He has focused on helping improve resiliency against stronger storms. He voted for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (HR-3684), signed into law in November 2021, which provides $550 billion in federal funds — about $6.9 billion for New Jersey — for roads, bridges and other projects, including coastal resiliency, ecosystem repairs and weatherization. He also supports reforming the National Flood Insurance program to protect against excessive rate increases. Kim also said he supports repealing tax breaks for oil and gas companies, investing in electric vehicle charging stations, modernizing the electrical grid and aggressively reducing carbon emissions by at least half by 2030.
Abortion rights
Kim supports abortion rights. He voted for three recent bills passed by the House meant to protect women’s right to abortion and contraception. The Right to Contraception Act (HR-8373) guarantees the right to get and use birth control, including emergency contraception and is currently being blocked by Republicans in the Senate. The Women’s Health Protection Act (HR-3755) would create a statutory right for health care professionals to provide abortion care and a right for patients to receive that care without medically unnecessary restrictions and is also being blocked by Senate Republicans. The Ensuring Access to Abortion Act of 2022 (HR-8927) would prohibit retaliation against anyone who provides an abortion to an out-of-state resident or assists in that effort, a person who travels to another state to get an abortion or the interstate movement of drugs that terminate pregnancies.
Gun rights
Kim supports some gun control measures. He voted for a nationwide assault weapons ban (HR-1808), which allows for the continued possession, sale or transfer of an existing semiautomatic weapon. He also backed a number of other bills, including ones that would raise the age for purchasing a semiautomatic weapon from 18 to 21, allow federal courts to issue orders preventing someone at risk of hurting himself or others from buying or possessing firearms and strengthen background checks on those seeking to buy a firearm.
Social justice
Kim voted for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act (HR-1280), which would prohibit racial and religious profiling by all levels of law enforcement, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants at the federal level and set conditions for their use at the state and local levels, require federal uniformed officers to wear body cameras and states and local governments to use federal funds for cameras, make it easier to prosecute police misconduct and improve police training. Following the murder of Floyd in 2020 by a Minneapolis police officer, Kim held a number of town halls and roundtable discussions about issues impacting the Black community in New Jersey and issued a report highlighting a number of problems.
For more information on Kim, visit his campaign website.
Bob Healey
Republican
Credit: (Stephanie Barone)Bob Healey, 38, is a former punk rock singer and now chairman of the Viking Group, which includes the Viking Yacht Company based in New Gretna. His father and uncle built the company from a small boat-building company they bought in 1964 and today it employs more than 1,600. Healey, who lives in Moorestown with his wife and 14-month old daughter, said he has worked for the company for more than 15 years and has run it with his cousin for the last decade.
Healey earned a bachelor’s degree in finance from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. He is the co-founder and president of the Healey International Relief Foundation, which works to provide health care, education, clean water, and economic opportunity for people in developing countries. With his wife, he developed the Gleneayre Equestrian Program, which gives people experiencing physical and mental health difficulties the option to work with horses.
According to his campaign website, Healey’s primary issues are reforming immigration, supporting law enforcement, becoming energy independent, conserving the environment and supporting Second Amendment gun rights. In an interview with NJ Spotlight News, he called improving the economy and curbing inflation his top goal.
Here’s where he stands on key issues:
Inflation and the economy
Healey said inflation is the top issue among people he talks to in the district, with high gas prices and the shortages of some items also part of larger problems with the nation’s economy.
“We’ve got inflation that we haven’t seen in four years; we’ve got gas higher than it’s ever been in this country’s history; we have groceries that are as high as they’ve ever been,” he said. “And you know, if you are looking for baby formula right now, I mean, my wife just went to look for some yesterday and went to three separate grocery stores before she found some.”
Healey said Kim has not done anything to reduce inflation and said Kim’s vote for the Inflation Reduction Act won’t stop rising prices, citing a Congressional Budget Office analysis. (That analysis found that the law will have a “negligible” impact on inflation over the next two years but likely will lower inflation in the future.) He also contended the act’s funds for an estimated 87,000 new IRS employees, including auditors, “is going to affect middle-class families” because, statistically, most audits are conducted on those in middle-income brackets. A number of analyses of audit data have found that, in the past, those in the lowest income brackets — with less than $25,000 a year in income — were audited at five times the rate of all other filers. The Treasury Department has said it will not be targeting low- and middle-income filers or small businesses for auditing.
Healey said that he would bring his experience running his business, including keeping its budget in balance, and “just some fiscal common sense back to DC.” He would push for Congress to pass a budget every year, rather than rely on continuing resolutions to keep funding the government. And since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eased COVID-19 restrictions and ended any recommended quarantine time, Congress should reconsider whether to use $750 billion in unspent COVID-19 relief aid.
“We need to stop spending money,” he said. “We’ve still got $750 billion in COVID aid sitting out there and I think there should be a conversation about that and maybe repurposing some of that … We’re not talking about money that’s already allocated to be spent.”
Voting and elections
Healey’s views on voting and election reform are mixed. He said he believes President Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. He also said, “I think we should be making it as easy as possible as we can for people to vote.” On the other hand, he said he thinks requiring voters to show identification when voting “is a very reasonable thing to look to institute across the U.S.” Voting rights advocates say voter ID laws disenfranchise some low-income people and minorities who do not have a driver’s license or other government identification.
He said his views are influenced, in part, on time he spent doing relief work in Sierra Leone, which he said instituted voter ID after a civil war and that one reason for that war was that after “the same party kept winning elections time over time … people started to lose faith in the electoral system.” There is a lesson there for America, Healey said.
“We need to do everything we can to make sure that that doesn’t happen here in our country,” he added.
Climate change
Healey said he believes that “as humans, we have an impact on our environment” and that the nation’s energy policy should include a mix of natural gas, solar, wind and hydroelectricity. But he questioned the efficacy of the environmental priorities in the Inflation Reduction Act for which Kim voted. He said the law has “a lot of money going into, for instance, electric cars that a lot of families in this country really can’t afford” and that it spends significant amounts on “green projects” that will take a long time to get Environmental Protection Agency approval.
According to his campaign website, Healey would work to see that the EPA uses “the best science” in making regulatory decisions. He also would “bring government and business together” to devise research and development “incentives for reducing our carbon footprint.”
Abortion rights
Healey’s views are nuanced.
“I was raised a Catholic, I’m a new father, I am pro-life personally,” he said. “I do recognize, though, that there is a need to maintain the right for abortion for women who have been victims of rape or incest or if the pregnancy coming to term would threaten the life of the mother.”
Further, he said he does not support laws that at least eight states so far have enacted that ban abortion entirely and said that “compromise can and should be achieved” regarding first-trimester abortions.
On the other hand, he said he supports requiring girls under the age of 15 to get parental consent before getting an abortion and he opposes third-trimester abortions. Fewer than 1% of all abortions, or less than 6,000, occur at or after 21 weeks, according to the CDC, and the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that most of these occur because the life of the mother is endangered or there are fetal abnormalities.
“My opponent is for those things,” Healey said of Kim. “I tend to think that I’m the reasonable one in this district on that topic.”
He also supports a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that lets each state determine its abortion laws.
Gun rights
Healey’s website says he “supports the constitutional right of all law-abiding citizens to legally possess firearms, whether it be for sport or collecting, or to defend themselves, their loved ones, and their property.” He would “strongly” oppose efforts to infringe on those rights and to “scapegoat legal gun owners for the violent and lawless actions of others.”
In an interview with NJ Spotlight News, he termed a “good compromise” the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (S-2938) that President Biden signed last June. Fifteen Republicans in the Senate voted for the measure, which takes small steps to control firearms, including by requiring for the next decade enhanced background checks for gun buyers between the ages of 18 and 21, prohibiting someone accused of domestic abuse in a dating relationship from buying a gun and providing federal funds to states that allow the temporary confiscation of firearms from those deemed dangerous by a judge.
“I do think that we need to do everything we can to keep guns out of the hands of those people that have a history of mental illness,” Healey said.
Social justice
Healey said he doesn’t think that “America is a fundamentally racist country” but discrimination does happen and that whenever it occurs, it should be “stamped out.” Still, there is a lot of opportunity in America for those who work hard. He said the nation needs to safeguard the southern border because of the drug trade, but he said he is “open to a conversation” about creating a path to citizenship for those who are refugees and the so-called dreamers who are undocumented and were brought to the U.S. as children. America should welcome those who come here legally, he said.
“People who want to come to this country legally, I think we should be making it as reasonable as possible for them to become a citizen if they’re doing all the right things, if they’re paying taxes, if they’re building a life, building a family here,” he said.
For more information about Healey, visit his campaign website.
