ADDED: This is such a low-budget ad that the line "I lived here all my life, raising my 3 kids" overlaps with a visual of 3 gravestones, making me wonder if his 3 kids died. Only after researching the question of his children and rewatching the video did I figure out that the graveyard is shown because the next thing he talks about is covid deaths.Edward Durr rules. pic.twitter.com/3DZ27VbnwZ
— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) November 3, 2021
UPDATE: This just in from The Washington Post: "Edward Durr, who campaigned on $153 in NJ, defeats Sweeney." Some people in the comments (of this blog) are saying the number $153 isn't right, but the WaPo article says Durr spent "$153.31, according to Election Law Enforcement Commission documents."
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78 comments:
I spent more running for city council.
This was either the ultimate troll, or an incredible piece of political maneuvering. I can't wait to read the book about it.
I think I'm in love!
David Lynch would call this ad “divisive.”
wow! that's the way you do that
Too many Phil Murphys, not enough Ed Durrs.
But congrats to Mr. Durr.
I momentarily read that as "spent $153 million" and it didn't faze me.
Very inspiring. Don't let us down by not being able to help govern the state.
"End Single Party Rule"
Not if Pelosi(D) and Schumer(D) get their way nationalizing and Putin-izing our elections.
And yet Murphy "won" ..?
I doubt it.
Back in the day when I lived in the Chicago area, the mighty congressman Dan Rostenkowski was unseated by Mike Flanagan, an absolute unknown who had no money and campaigned door-to-door. Flanagan served one term and was defeated by Rod Blagojevich, who went on to fame as the governor of Illinois, elected twice but finishing out his second term in federal prison. Let us hope Mr. Durr does not also end up as a footnote to someone else's perfidy.
My friend has always held that the senate and house representation should be chosen randomly from the phone book.
I used to disagree.
I am now thinking it would be a much better system than the one we have.
One of the most gratifying victories in my lifetime. Hopefully we can finally end the Clinton/Obama meme about excess money in politics and buying elections.
...one caveat: I believe he was on Fox noting his campaign cost about 33 times more than the advertised $153..
HOLY CARP! THITRY THREE TIMES MORE!
WaPo: He drives a truck and rides a motorcycle so obviously he's a white supremacist.
Beautiful, simple, direct, and reasonable statements against an opponent and why it's time to rule them out. Made by the candidate directly to the camera.
It's like watching something out of an earlier era. An era that needs to come back.
I read that the '$153' was his cost for the primary. Cost for campaign was $8,000-$10,000. Still an astonishing upset.
I read somewhere that he campaigned by traveling around his district and talking to people. He noticed that the incumbent typically got 31,000 votes with token opposition in a district with over 100,000 voters. So, he just had to get 32,000 people who didn't usually vote to go to the polls. Obviously nobody saw this happening or the powers that be would have stopped it, somehow.
Thanks Leland: I was wondering what the "racist dog whistles" in the ad were. Truck AND motorcycle-- duh?!
I would say the write in guy defeating the Soros backed primary winner is a Democrat victory I can approve...
Fuck you lawless Soros destroyers! Hooray leftie political machine incumbent turned write-in candidate!
Why do campaigns feel obligated to waste money on those professionally produced scare ads that all look alike?
Some of the most memorable television ads are the low budget locals leaning in to their low budget-ness...
Shipoopi!
some people in the comments (of this blog) are saying the number $153 isn't right, but the WaPo article says...
...then HOLY SHIT ANN it must be true!!!!
During ran the ultimate shoe leather campagn. He went door to door and talked to people. A significant fraction of the $153 was for Dunkin Donuts.
Great Job! Glad he won. We need more of this
The teachers' union spent millions on the guy he beat.
This is the sort of reminder that we need to toss out the entrenched elites.
Well, obviously Russian oligarchs picked up the rest of his expenses.
North Jerseyan, here...
The surprising thing to me about this is that Steve Sweeney (probably the third most powerful pol in NJ) had been Murphy's biggest pain in the butt during his tour. South Jersey got hit really hard by the mandates, and I would not doubt it if that was the driving force behind Durr's (and Ciatarelli's near) win.
Alas, no one pays attention to New Jersey, not even New Jersey, so it may be impossible to know how Durr did this.
To Achilles—What’s a “phone book?”
Fox News is reporting it was not $150 you spent it was actually five thousand dollars...
Who ya gonna believe?
Also contemplate how the two numbers could both be true...
Achilles said...
My friend has always held that the senate and house representation should be chosen randomly from the phone book.
you're Drafted, you serve ONE term, during the term you Have To live on Base (provided housing), you are NOT allowed to spend ANY money during your term (expenses paid by government... After your ONE term, you are ineligible for ANY other government positions (ANY), but you receive a comfortable pension.
People will look at it, as a Horrible Burden... Which it WILL be
We'll call it: Winning the Lottery, and buying the farm
(your option to serving, is PRISON)
Can Of Cheese for Hunter said...
And yet Murphy "won" ..?
I doubt it.
11/4/21, 10:18 AM
They cheated again...Not surprised...Hoping Ciatterelli makes them do a recount...
Bergen County, NJ
100% Reporting
Midnight: 219,894 votes
Ciattarelli up 5%
7:30 AM: 261,528 votes
Murphy up 4%
Democrats “found” 41,634 votes.
Audit New Jersey?
Terrific and very entertaining. The sort of political ad almost everyone will watch to the end. And his win in NJ (granted, it's south Jersey, so more conservative but still) defeating a 20-year Dem power is the definition of a political wave.
Now watch the ad-men try to duplicate it. I’m looking at you, Lincoln Project.
.31 cents.
why - impeach! Putin's poodle! He's a Russian spy!
Ronna Romney McDaniel, chair of the RNC (and Mitt’s niece), has a lot to answer for in letting the New Jersey governorship get away. The people of that state must have been very fed up with Democrats for Jack Ciattarelli to get that close with so little support.
Only thing I didn't like about his ad was his wimpy assed Harley in the end.
Real leaders kick start their Harleys.
And have scars to prove it.
But in general, yeah. Laughing my ass off that the Senate president is out of a job. Durr may serve a single term. He may not be effective in the Senate.
But the Senate president is gone and ain't never coming back.
If he does run again in 4 years, and if he does get elected, he will still just be another senator.
reminds me of the time George Nethercutt defeated House Speaker Tom Foley in 94. In one of the few times I send money to pols, I sent him a couple hundos. He was nice enough to send me a letter, thanking me personally, and pointing out that he was one of the owners of the main cellphone company in PR at the time. That made me a double supporter.
He was OK, kind of liberal (as in libertarian) so I had no problem supporting him. But really the only reason I did was to put a thumb in Foley's eye. Metaphorically, of course.
John LGBTQBNY Henry
This article quotes Durr as saying he spent less than $10,000. But it's just badly written enough that it's possible they were referring to an earlier race he ran and lost.
Howard: "Great Job! Glad he won. We need more of this"
Careful. Whiplash can leave you with a pretty sore neck for quite some time.
Blogger rehajm said...
...one caveat: I believe he was on Fox noting his campaign cost about 33 times more than the advertised $153..
Thirty three. It's the magic number. Sort of the WD-40 of numbers.
I think Insty, or someone, mentioned today that he spent $153 on the primary but a couple thousand on the election.
His opponent spent several million last election but I've not seen how much he spent on this one.
John LGBTQBNY Henry
I read that Durr actually was pretty canny. He looked at the voting history and realized that the Democrat be beat had never gotten more than 32,000 out of 150,000 votes in his somewhat conservative district, and that all he needed was 33,000 out of that 118,000 votes that didn't go to the Democrat. In other words, Durr figured out on his own that the guy was a sitting duck.
Achilles: "My friend has always held that the senate and house representation should be chosen randomly from the phone book.
I used to disagree.
I am now thinking it would be a much better system than the one we have."
"“I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory, than by the Harvard University faculty.”
--William F. Buckley, 1961
Of course, these days, WF Buckley wouldn't recognize the squish fakecons at National Review who now receive the bulk of their funding from their Lefty billionaire paymasters.
National Review today is basically The Weekly Standard in 2015 (Note: The Weekly Standard was shuttered in 2018 once the actual conservative owner figured out completely what the grifters were up to).
It's a process....a never ending Robert Conquest identified process.
A lot of what has come back to bite the Democrats is the result of the havoc that Democrats caused by refusing to co-operate with Trump on COVID. Trump sends NYC a hospital ship, Cuomo doesn't use it and sends COVID patients to nursing homes. Murphy did the same thing.
It's amazing how people get mad when you kill their parents and grandparents.
What I found interesting is that in an interview on Fox, he said that commercial was recorded by a 20-something neighbor's son. My thought is, the Youtube/Tik Tok etc. experience is likely going to upset the costly pro commercial producers. People trust the less slick presentations more these days.
This is such a low-budget ad that the line "I lived here all my life, raising my 3 kids" overlaps with a visual of 3 gravestones, making me wonder if his 3 kids died.
A strange reaction. Is Althouse death-obsessed? I saw those headstones as evidence Edward Durr's New Jersey roots are deep enough to include ancestral graves, which was part of his message. (The style of those monuments looks too old for recent interments.)
As political messaging, Durr's ad is brilliant. The fact that the spot isn't the polished product of a billion-dollar agency like Ogilvy and Mather is one of its foundations. Even if Ed Durr had $153 million and hired the McCann Group, the ad could hardly be improved upon. A smart "mad man" would have identified the man's unadorned sincerity as his core appeal.
In eighty seconds the ad does everything it needed to do:
1) Introduce the candidate and the office he seeks.
2) Establish his identity as a working man with deep local ties and not a carpetbagging lawyer.
3) Establish the raison d'être. The opponent is a careerist politician who is complicit in the needless deaths of thousands sacrificed by the ruling Democratic Party on the alter of TDS. The opponent is also complicit in the increasingly bleak economic situation of New Jersey.
4) Remind the voters that they have the power to initiate positive change.
5) Restatement of all bullet points. The subtitles do that job quite well.
Mounting the cruiser bike is a nice touch, BTW, as it ends the ad on a coda.
PS
Thanks to J. Severs for this, "I read that the '$153' was his cost for the primary. Cost for campaign was $8,000-$10,000. Still an astonishing upset."
I was baffled by that $153 price tag. Even those little corrugated vinyl signs are more than a buck apiece in quantity. The rule of thumb is buy twice as many as the area to be covered requires. NJ counties are pretty big. Eight of the twenty-one cover more than 400 square miles. Durr must have bought a couple thousand at least.
Hugh writes, What's a phone book?"
Yes, very clever. You're owed a cookie.
But don't you think it's strange that implied ignorance of comparatively recent history and the turn of phrase that refers to an uninsightful catalog of names could be considered a positive attribute? Someone who claims he's too cool for school has done himself no favors.
Durr spent $153 in the primary. He spent $5k in the general election.
So this would be yet more evidence of why you should never trust any information you get from the WaPo.
It's not just that they'll lie / twist facts to advance a Democrat narrative, it's that even when there's no political advantage to them, they're still just too lazy to find out what the actual facts are
"Edward Durr spent $153 on a campaign that unseated the New Jersey state senate president"
Did "the campaign" unseat the Dem? Or did NJ Dem voters use "the campaign" to issue a protest?
Regarding the cost: aren't there filing fees and what not? You need money to even get on the ballot. I'm a bit dubious about that sum - it's probably a line item on the total cost.
Regardless: even if there are several thousand bucks for filing, etc. it begs the question - all those that spend 10s of millions - where does it actually go?
And yet Murphy "won" ..?
The margin of fraud was not exceeded. Ciattarelli certainly has grounds to petition for a recount. (In NJ only a district or superior court judge can order a recount. There's no statutory recount for statewide or local elections.) He ought to request an election-fraud investigation as well. Project Veritas has video evidence of state election officials caught in the act of criminal violation of NJ election laws.
@Althouse, it turns out that the Post is wrong. $153 is what Durr spent on the primary. For the general election he spent closer to $5000. I surmise that no one working for the Post actually bothered to call Durr to ask.
Still, it should be noted that $5000 will not buy much in the way of a used car in Biden’s economy. It’s not as though he bought his seat.
Hugh said...
To Achilles—What’s a “phone book?”
It is an old argument.
Durr is now confirming that he spent a total of $5,000 on the campaign. The teachers' union spent $2.5 million.
He reminds me a bit of Clay Higgins, that Louisiana sheriff who made those wildly popular videos and was elected to Congress. He's been oddly out of the news ever since, as far as I'm aware.
rehajm great clip! Funny can work on low budget. May The Fonk Be With You!
153 on the primary is correct. He then spent 7-8000 on the general election per the interview with him from today.
He spent $153 on the primary. He spent over $5000 on the general. Half of that was spent at Dunkin' Donuts.
$153 of his own money. He raised about $10,000. Still an amazingly cost-effective campaign.
"so it may be impossible to know how Durr did this."
He did it the old fashioned way. He went out and talked to the voters, every day, walking the neighborhoods of his potential voters. He evaluated the voting rolls for his district and found that there are 100K +- registered voters. The most votes Sweeny ever received was around 31K. He figured that all he had to do is get 32K to win and he did. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best solution.
They're milkshake ducking him on Twitter now.
Proxmire campaigned somewhat in this manner. He would stand outside County Stadium and other venues and shake hands. He also had that "Golden Fleece Award" thing going. The last democrat I ever voted for.
Personal contact, going to the constituent rather than making them come to you...that means something. People will be able to see if you're genuine or full of sh*t.
Johnson's infamous "Daisy" :60 was fundamentally one B&W, sync-sound shot of a girl picking daisy petals then stock footage of nukes. Pretty cheap.
It's surprising that the GOP establishment in his district couldn't find an alderman or somebody to run. Maybe they thought they had no chance to unseat Sweeney, so they didn't bother? (Maybe they really didn't want to unseat Sweeney...?)
One correction he is making now. He says he's "exasperated" by false reports that he spent only $153. That's how much he reported he spent for the primary. For the general election, he spent... $5,000. -- Ace of Spades HQ
Not so fast 12,000 ballets for Sweeney just showed up. Again, shocking, just shocking!!
When are the republicans going to start pushing back on this shit.
We shall have to enjoy Durr while we can. I'm sure he is about to be doxxed thirty ways from Sunday and will have to resign in disgrace over some pecadillo from 10 years ago.
I did read (at WSJ?) that Durr tracked down Sweeney at a Dem event and asked for a debate. Sweeney turned him down, laughing at him. Oops.
Not to worry, Sweeny just found some late ballots. Everything is gonna be alright.
100% of the votes in, Durr up comfortably, and suddenly Sweeny, the labor connected Democrat, claims to have "found" more votes.
How would you like to be Sweeney's wife and hear this outcome? Or his kids if they are in school. This should be part of his biography just as much as it will be for Durr. Great stuff but also very funny.
Not so fast. The Democrats have found some uncounted ballots. Stay tuned.
Michael K: "Durr is now confirming that he spent a total of $5,000 on the campaign. The teachers' union spent $2.5 million."
Durr has mentioned several times that he spent $153 or whatever it was during the primary and the $5,000 was for the general election against the guy who just keeps finding "new" ballots in the trunks of cars.
Maybe Al Franken, who won his MN Senate seat because the democraticals "found" extra ballots in a trunk of a car (hooray for chain of custody!), is advising the Sweeney campaign.
Not so fast. The Democrats have found some uncounted ballots. Stay tuned.
And by some miracle, at least 80% of them will be for the Democrats. As usual.
Americans love a David and Goliath story. If Sweeney survives this by "finding" votes, the National/State Republican Parties should for certain bankroll a challenge. And key Democrats in NJ should be made to go on record before the Court Challenge on whether or not they think the votes are not manufactured.
I don't see how Sweeney would have the Political Support from his own party if this happened. You could drag down the Teachers' Union as well in NJ doing this.
It'll be an interesting couple days.
"It's not over 'til we win!"
tim in vermont said...
Not to worry, Sweeny just found some late ballots. Everything is gonna be alright.
God I hope the democrats do this.
Please please please...
I am sure this is nothing. Nothing at all.
MadisonMan: "Americans love a David and Goliath story. If Sweeney survives this by "finding" votes, the National/State Republican Parties should for certain bankroll a challenge."
The National republicans pushing back on obvious democratical voter fraud?!
LOL
Now that's funny.
Makes me recall Hunter S. Thompson eloquently writing about the 60s:
"...no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world...that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
I think that maybe we will all look back on Nov 2 2021, and see that was the point where the wave of woke progressivism broke and began to roll back.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." ---Mark Twain
I'm hearing that in New Jersey - a bunch of votes didn't get counted.
what up?
Achilles link goes to a video of a woman who can't get the machine to take her vote for the Republican, but allows her to vote for the Democrat in New Jersey election, and one of the Twitter comments was that it's illegal to take video in a voting booth.
Necessity is always a defense, should New Jersey charge this lady; demand a jury trial. Not that they would, it would just draw attention to it. We really have to go back to paper ballots. Canada does it, and they have the winner the same day.
"Sweeny just found some late ballots. Everything is gonna be alright."
And there's your just-in-time supply chain, back to working the way it's supposed to. The ports appear to be unclogged.
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