From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Friday, November 8th.

One of the unexpected results of the election was how well Donald Trump did in New Jersey. He came within five points of Kamala Harris.

In 2020, Trump lost to Joe Biden by 16 points. Turnout was also lower this year. In 2020,

four and a half million people in New Jersey voted for president, four and a half million people.

This year, right around four million,

a pretty astonishing, half a million fewer voters, or more than a 10% decline, despite all the

attention and all the passions around this election. Another way to look at it, Donald Trump

got basically the same number of votes in New Jersey as he did in 2020, around 1.8 million.

That whole 500,000 drop-off in voters came out of the Democrats column, at least in the presidential race.

Biden got around 2.6 million votes, Harris around 2.1 million, according to the various official statistics that I've

seen reported by the media. And New Jersey is pretty representative of what happened in many

places in this election, but in such a blue state, it led to this headline in Politico, New

Jersey, said, New Jersey might be a swing state now. We'll talk to the writer

of that article coming up and take your New Jersey calls. In contrast to Harris's five-point win

in the presidential race in New Jersey, though, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate,

Andy Kim, beat his Republican opponent by nine points. Kim got about the same number of votes

as Harris, but the Republican candidate, Curtis Bashaw, lagged Trump by 400,000 votes. With us now is

the brand new Democratic senator-elect from New Jersey, Andy Kim. He moves up from his seat in the

House and also becomes the

first ever Korean American member of the United States Senate. Senator Elect Kim,

thanks for making some time for us in this momentous week for you. Congratulations on your

election and welcome back to WNYC. Well, thanks for having me again. I really appreciate it.

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