Candidate, clearly bigoted on social media, got elected to New Jersey Senate after getting no news-media coverage

New Jersey state Sen.-elect Edward Durr
(Photo by Ellie Rushing, The Philadelphia Inquirer)

"Edward Durr was such a long-shot candidate in his New Jersey legislative race that no one seemed to notice something rather striking about him: He had a history of posting bigoted, misogynistic and derogatory comments on social media," reports Paul Farhi of The Washington Post. But he beat the state Senate president, probably because he was such a long shot that he got no news coverage in a largely rural district.

Durr, a Republican, called the prophet Mohammed a pedophile, blamed "illegal aliens: for spreading disease, "used the motto of the far-right QAnon conspiracy movement and compared vaccination mandates to the Holocaust," Farhi writes. "He also denigrated Vice President Harris on Facebook, writing that she had earned her position only as a result of her race and gender."

"According to a search of the Nexis database, which catalogues thousands of news sources, there were no published or broadcast reports about Durr’s posts in the six months leading up to Election Day," Farhi reports. "Durr’s comments made plenty of news after last week’s election, when reporters finally caught up to his social-media history. But by then he had already scored a stunning upset over Democrat Steve Sweeney, one of the state’s most powerful officials. Durr, 58, won the Senate seat by roughly 2,200 votes out of 65,000 cast."

Durr had a long record of "incendiary posts," but he also "got no media coverage when he ran unsuccessfully for a state assembly seat in 2017 nor when he ran and lost again two years later," Farhi writes. Brigid Harrison, a professor of political science and law at Montclair State University, told him, “No one even considered that [Durr] was a real threat, and that includes me.”

Legislative districts of southern New Jersey
(Each district has a senator and two House members)

Farhi writes, "Years of cutbacks and consolidation among news organizations have left many communities without vigorous local coverage. . . . The southern New Jersey region once had four daily newspapers. But in 2012, Advance Publications merged three that it owned — the Gloucester County Times, Today’s Sunbeam in Salem County and the News of Cumberland County — into a single paper, the South Jersey Times. Salem, Gloucester and Cumberland counties form the heart of the district won by Durr. The Times’s major competitors include the Courier Post in Cherry Hill and its sister paper, the Daily Journal in Vineland, both owned by Gannett Co., the nation’s largest newspaper owner and a vigorous cost cutter. The Philadelphia Inquirer is the region’s leading metropolitan paper."

"The reporting staffs of the surviving local newspapers “have been decimated” and “barely cover local news anymore," David Wildstein, who runs the New Jersey Globe, a digital news site focused on state issues and politics, told Farhi, who writes, "Collectively, the South Jersey Times, Courier Post and Daily Journal list a total of 13 news reporters on their mastheads, covering a four-county region that has a population of just over 1 million. Editors of the papers didn’t reply to multiple requests for comment."

UPDATE, Nov. 15: Eric Lach of The New Yorker interviewed defeated Senate President Steve Sweeney, who said “We used to have local papers. And people used to be able to read about all of these wonderful things that were going on.” He also noted, Lach writes, an "NJ Advance Media analysis of his district . . . showed that Republican registration went up some thirty per cent in the past four years, while Democratic registration rose only twelve per cent. Southwestern New Jersey is poorer, more rural, and whiter than other areas of the state—bad conditions lately for the Democratic Party. Sweeney had received about as many votes this year as he did when he won re-election in 2017, but thousands of additional voters had come out."