Andy Kim couldn’t rest one evening last September.

“I didn’t get a single minute of sleep that night,” he recalled in an interview with NPR, “I really felt like I had to do something and really show people that, you know, when there’s these problems in our politics, that there are people who want to step up and try to fix it.”

The problem was his fellow New Jersey Democrat, Sen. Bob Menendez. Last fall, Menendez was indicted for the second time on corruption charges. The news might not have rocked most voters in New Jersey — where as many as 80% of its residents said they viewed the state’s politicians as at least “a little” corrupt, according to a May 2023 Fairleigh Dickinson University poll.