Kim faces competitive primary challenge in Flushing

Assemblymember Ron Kim is in a tight race to retain his District 40 seat against challenger Yi Andy Chen, who has raised significant funds during his campaign. Photos via Ron Kim and Yi Andy Chen/X  

By Ryan Schwach

The race to represent Flushing-centered Assembly District 40 appears to be a tight one, with incumbent Assemblymember Ron Kim locked in a competitive primary to represent the heart of Queens’ Asian American community.

Observers say that the race for District 40, which represents the largest center of Asian American voters in the state, is a toss up a week before election day in the Democratic primary for the seat. Kim, a 10-year incumbent, faces two opponents in Dao Yin and Yi Andy Chen.

With a week until the election, and early voting already underway, Chen potentially poses the biggest threat to Kim after significantly outraising him throughout the race. In the final weeks of the campaign, Kim has pushed on the institutional and progressive Democratic support he’s garnered over the last decade he’s spent in office.

But in addition the campaign cash Chen has brought in, changing voting patterns in the district and a push to bring identity politics into the race may prove to bring Kim his biggest challenge for reelection yet.

Kim and Chen, who both spoke with the Eagle late last month, said they were feeling positive going into the final leg of the race.

“I feel better than a couple of other cycles ago, so we feel good,” said Kim, who faced Democratic primary challengers in both 2020 and 2022. “There's a lot of new voters that we're speaking to now that we weren't able to connect to in COVID. This is the bread and butter of being in politics, just talking to voters and connecting with them.”

Kim is coming off a tough election cycle, winning both the 2022 primary and general election by less than three percent of the vote.

He told the Eagle that the 2022 election cycle was particularly difficult – it came after both the incumbent’s parents had died.

“I think the last election I was very much disconnected from the process, wasn't that engaged in the campaign itself,” he said. “I had to deal with my own personal grief, overcome some of the losses in my life and find that personal balance first before I can find the work, campaign balance.”

But Kim said that now, facing a major challenge from Chen, he’s in a “much better headspace and feel[s] much more focused going into this cycle of campaigning than the previous ones.”

Over the weekend, Kim held a major get out the vote rally in Downtown Flushing and drew support not only from his fellow progressive Queens lawmakers, including Senators John Liu and Jessica Ramos, but also from a somewhat unlikely ally – Mayor Eric Adams.

Kim was elected to office in 2013, succeeding now-Congressmember Grace Meng in the state house. Previously, he spent his early career as a staffer to the likes of Liu, State Assemblymember Mark Weprin, then-City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and worked in both the Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson gubernatorial administrations.

As a long term incumbent, the progressive elected has garnered backing from both the institutional Democratic Party and the Working Families Party.

But despite Kim’s optimism and campaign push, he appears to be facing a legitimate threat from Chen.

Chen, the owner of a medical supply business, became a presence in Queens’ political scene in 2021, when he came in second in a City Council primary for a district primarily representing Jackson Heights that was ultimately won by now-City Councilmember Shekar Krishnan. Chen has since moved to run for the AD40 seat.

Chen has gained a lot of attention for his fundraising prowess, which has allowed the candidate to spend big on advertisements throughout the district.

According to the most recent filings, Chen has around $217,486 in campaign cash left on hand, while Kim has around $105,389.

In total, Kim has received $193,785 in donations this year, while Chen has raised around $338,160.

“They are asking for a change,” Chen said of his donors. “A lot of issues that are happening in this community are not being addressed by Ron Kim…they are frustrated.”

In general, the money raised in the race has drawn scrutiny. Yin, the race’s third candidate, brought in $162,000 in public matching funds after allegedly using fake donations to receive them, the New York Times reported last week.

Chen’s fundraising has also raised eyebrows, if only because of the size of his campaign account. Chen said he found the suspicion understandable.

“That's fair to say, a challenger raising a big amount of donations, especially a short amount of time, but also it tells that people are not happy,” he said.

Kim acknowledges that Chen was aggressive with funding early on, but doesn’t think money will over power a candidate’s message.

“We've been raising more aggressively, and in the end I think we’ll be raising the same amount of money,” Kim said. “And I don't think money for all three of us will be a barrier to get our message out.”

Trip Yang, a Democratic strategist, called the race a “toss up,” saying that while Chen has raised a lot of money and support for his cause, the power of an incumbent Democrat in Queens cannot be underestimated.

“[Kim] has many of the institutional and progressive endorsements that you would expect a progressive incumbent to have – that on paper makes them a formidable incumbent,” he said. “The kicker here is that Chen presents a very serious challenge.”

The Asian Heart

When speaking about the race in late May, Yang called District 40, which includes Flushing and some surrounding neighborhoods the “the Asian heart” of Queens.

“This is the spot,” he said.

The district is around 70 percent Asian American, and has been represented in the past by Meng and her father Jimmy Meng.

Both Kim and Chen are Asian American, and both immigrated to Queens with their families at young ages.

The majority of that 70 percent in District 40 is of a Chinese background, something Chen – who is Chinese American – has specifically worked to tap into over Kim, who’s family immigrated from South Korea.

Chen only moved into the confines of the current district three years ago, but says he has been working in the Chinese community there for over a decade.

His backers in this election include a host of Chinese American organizations and groups. According to Yang, Chen has focused much of his campaign efforts on advertising in Chinese language newspapers as well as WeChat, a social media application used frequently in the Chinese community.

Chen has aggressively looked to tap into the Chinese American electorate, something that, while not the end-all-be-all, could have a noticeable impact on the race.

“The Chinese community often donate to Chinese American candidates trying to capitalize on that,” Yang said.

Despite being the majority, Chen argues that the local Chinese community is often drowned out of the electoral process, or stay mostly uninvolved – a trend he is trying to reverse.

“We have a majority population over here but still don't speak [English], and we don't have [much] voter outreach going on,” Chen said. “We do not have enough voices out there, our voice is not being heard, and I realize that especially my parents' generation, they don't speak the language, they don't know they don't know which path or which channel to express their concerns.”

“They don't understand how powerful the vote is,” Chen added.

Chen says he is trying to make the campaign a way to help increase voter education and involvement among the Chinese community in the district, something Kim is also trying to do.

“We also recognize there's been a shift of changing demographics in Flushing, and there's more Chinese American immigrants that are moving in, so we spent quite a long time, even before the campaign started, rebuilding a structure to make sure that they felt their voices were being properly heard,” Kim said. “Chinese American voters and immigrants want to be part of the process.”

Both candidates however, don’t believe that their difference in nationality will serve as much of a factor in the race.

While Yang acknowledges that voters have cast ballots along ethnic lines in the past – a situation not unique to the Asian American community – both candidates in the D40 race will need to court the entire district as a whole in order to win.

“Kim and [Chen] are going to need to try to make inroads with all Asian groups,” he said.

The key issue

While both Kim and Chen are looking for support from the same voters, and both talk about increasing Asian voices and raising up the working class, there is one issue they differ on – and that one difference could decide the election, observers say.

“The main policy storyline here is about public safety,” Yang said. “We have seen a lot of both empirical data and polling that states that Asian American voters in New York care about public safety more than the average New Yorker, and the average New Yorker already cares about public safety a lot, so the intensity emotionally for Asian Americans about public safety is extremely high.”

Much of Chen’s campaign has revolved around public safety. In his conversation with the Eagle, Chen talked about slow police response times and worries about burglaries and retail theft, concerns echoed by other local politicians like City Councilmember Sandra Ung.

Chen has gained the backing of the large and influential Police Benevolent Association in the race.

As a progressive, Kim has endorsed the reallocation of NYPD funds to community groups and programs and hasn’t often made public safety a central theme of his campaigns.

That has changed as of late, with Kim pushing public safety issues to match his opponent, Yang said.

“This year you have seen him try to merge his message he's had over the years about reinvesting in communities with more specifically working with law enforcement, working with the police department, type of messages on his campaign,” he said. “It feels like a subtle shift. It feels like a strategic shift.”

Speaking with the Eagle, Kim said that he takes public safety concerns “seriously.”

“We want to keep the people in this district safe,” Kim said. “Whenever you're going shopping at night or taking the subway to go to the city, whatever it is, we people just want to feel safe.”

The shift towards public safety as a major issue in Flushing, one that influences campaign strategy, could be a result of the voting tendencies of the Asian American community, which has begun voting more conservative in recent years.

In 2016, New York Times election data showed that former President Donald Trump won portions of Flushing’s Main Street by up to 50 percent, and in 2020, Trump’s vote share only increased.

More locally, in the 6th Congressional District, which includes Flushing and is 45 percent Asian, Republican Lee Zeldin secured 46 percent of the vote in 2022.

A year prior, Republican Curtis Sliwa and Mayor Eric Adams were neck and neck in many D40 voting precincts, though Sliwa won some in the northern part of the district with a full 81 percent of the vote.

The shift may have the potential to aid Chen, whose tough on crime platform positions him to the right of Kim.

The conservative shift in the district will be measured again in November, when the winner of June’s Democratic primary faces off against Republican Phillip Wang, though the GOP candidate only has around $1,300 in his campaign coffer.

Early voting is currently open in the primary and runs through Sunday, June 23. Election day is Tuesday, June 25.

Editor’s note: The publisher of the Eagle, Michael Nussbaum, has contributed financially to Yi Andy Chen’s campaign.