The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
●NJ-03: There goes another one! On Wednesday afternoon, the AP called the race in New Jersey's 3rd Congressional District for Democrat Andy Kim, who leads Republican Rep. Tom MacArthur 49.9 to 48.8. Remarkably, Kim's victory means that Democrats will now hold an 11-to-1 advantage in the Garden State's congressional delegation, which is the biggest edge the party has enjoyed since 1912 and ties their all-time record share of the delegation.
Campaign ActionKim's win was the fourth red-to-blue flip in New Jersey this year, and the most difficult. Though Barack Obama had carried the 3rd 52-47, it moved to the right in 2016, giving Trump a 51-45 win. What's more, this gerrymandered district, located in South Jersey, has long had a very pronounced Republican lean further down the ballot: Democrat Jon Adler captured it as an open seat in 2008 but lost it just one term later, and it had remained comfortably in GOP hands ever since—until now.
A big part of the reason was MacArthur himself. Last year, he gained widespread notoriety—and the deep enmity of progressives everywhere—when he authored an amendment that would have allowed insurers to eviscerate coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, allowing the House's once-dead Obamacare repeal effort to pass (it later failed in the Senate). He also was the lone New Jersey Republican to vote in favor of the GOP's tax giveaway, which hurt many taxpayers in his district by limiting the amount of state and local taxes they could deduct on their federal returns.
Kim, a former national security adviser to Barack Obama, was able to capitalize on both, and he proved to be a very strong fundraiser, critical both because the wealthy MacArthur was able to self-fund seven figures, and because this district straddles two very expensive media markets, New York City and Philadelphia. Kim will now become the second Korean-American ever to serve in Congress, and the first to do so as a Democrat.