Those who are entrenched in power and have grown used to it rarely go down without a fight.
After news outlets reported a victory for his opponent this past week, long time President of the New Jersey Senate, Stephen Sweeney, says he is not quite ready to concede.
Commercial truck driver and Republican Ed Durr will defeat New Jersey’s Senate president, Democrat Steve Sweeney, CNN projects https://t.co/waxjNX9JDm
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) November 5, 2021
This coming after Sweeney claims that “over 12,000 ballots (were) recently found in one county.”
New Jersey Globe reporting:
Senate President Steve Sweeney still trails possible Republican giant slayer Edward R. Durr by 2,095, but the powerful Democratic leader says he’s going to wait until all votes are counted before he concedes defeat in New Jersey’ 3rd legislative district.
“The results from Tuesday’s election continue to come in, for instance there were 12,000 ballots recently found in one county,” Sweeney said in a statement on Monday. “While I am currently trailing in the race, we want to make sure every vote is counted. Our voters deserve that, and we will wait for the final results.”
Still, Sweeney has an extraordinarily narrow path to win a seventh term in the Senate.
So far, Durr is at 51.7% of the vote, 32,430 to 30,335. He leads Sweeney in Salem County by 2,581 votes, while Sweeney has narrower leads in Gloucester (419) and Cumberland (67).
I have to be honest, I can’t say I didn’t see this coming. Happens every time we almost expect it at this point.
Throw in the fact that Sweeney has been entrenched in his office for nearly two decades, he was probably going to ride it out to the bitter end.
Defying all the odds, Sweeney’s challenger was a Republican, freedom-loving truck driver, named Edward Durr.
Early on in the race, Durr ran a political ad straight from the electric factory–which launched his campaign into the stratosphere and put Sweeney on high alert.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVq56sCShTg
To rub it in the elite’s faces even further, Dunn ran an ENTIRE campaign to the tune of a whopping $153.
Four years ago, the New Jersey Education Association spent $5 Million alone trying to unseat Sweeney.
Durr never looked back and seemed to come away with a decisive victory.
Durr, a truck driver for the Raymour & Flanagan furniture store and a two-time unsuccessful Assembly candidate, spent just $153 on his campaign against Sweeney, the second-most powerful man in state government and the longest-serving legislative leader in New Jersey history.
Sweeney’s possible defeat from the $153-dollar-man comes four years after the New Jersey Education Association spent $5 million to unseat him in a race that hit the $20 million mark.
Ed is definitely not someone who is afraid to take a stand against the establishment. Many have gained that courage over the past few years and that’s because of one thing.
The pandemic showed us who was who.
As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports here, Durr echoed that his victory was just a repudiation of the failed policies of lockdown regime governors.
“I’m absolutely nobody. I’m just a simple guy. It was the people, it was a repudiation of the policies that have been forced down their throats,” Durr told reporters in Gloucester County on Thursday, shortly after the Associated Press projected he’d defeated Democratic State Sen. Steve Sweeney.
Durr is no fan of Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy’s pandemic policies.
“It’s people told they can’t have a job. They can’t go to church. They can’t go to school. You can’t go shopping. They can’t go and eat dinner,” said Durr, 58, offering his assessment of why voters rallied to him.
“You cannot continue to tell people they cannot do things when we live in the freest country in the world. And you think you’re just gonna sit on your hands and do nothing. Gov. Murphy kept telling you, ‘no, no, no.’ And Senator Sweeney sat there and all right, whatever.
“So the people said, ‘No, you’re not doing your job,’ ” he said. “ ‘Take a seat, we’ll find somebody else [to] do the job.’”
You can also tell Ed’s not a politician because he also dares to let it fly on Twitter!
Republican who shockingly ousted Democratic NJ Senate President called Mohammed a "pedophile" & Islam a "false religion" & a "cult of hate" in 2019 –> https://t.co/8SNHo4Yuit pic.twitter.com/D3lvBCSROz
— Matt Katz (@mattkatz00) November 4, 2021
It will be interesting to see where this story goes. A lot depends on where these 12,000 ballots came from.
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