In 2017, Jack Ciattarelli was running his first race for governor, losing in the GOP primary but laying the groundwork for a second campaign four years later; Jon Bramnick was winning an eighth full term in the State Assembly, where he was the leader of the Republican caucus; and Bill Spadea was continuing to grow his morning radio show, which he has used to make himself one of the state’s most prominent conservative voices.
What was Ed Durr doing? Waging a hopeless independent campaign for State Assembly that attracted zero attention and got 0.6% of the vote.
Now, all four men are running against one another for governor in 2025 – and the fact that Durr is even being mentioned in the same breath as the other three candidates shows just how strange and impressive a turn Durr’s career has taken in the last seven years.
A truck driver by profession, Durr spent most of his life (and his first three campaigns for political office) in complete obscurity, but the 2021 election for State Senate changed everything. Seen as a sacrificial lamb against all-powerful Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-West Deptford), Durr shockingly won, becoming an overnight hero for Republicans both in New Jersey and around the country.
The transition into elected office, however, wasn’t an easy one for Durr, who struggled to make headway in Trenton or grow his national profile into durable political power; he won in 2021 as an outsider, and never found a way to work well with the insiders. South Jersey Democrats, sensing weakness, made it their top mission to avenge Sweeney in 2023 and were successful, kicking Durr back out after only two years in office.
Rather than trying to win a seat in the state legislature yet again, Durr is now setting his sights higher, running for governor as an acolyte of Donald Trump and a manifestation of New Jersey’s forgotten working voters. Going up in the primary against two seasoned politicians in Ciattarelli and Bramnick and a right-wing in champion Bill Spadea, Durr starts out as an underdog.
That’s a label he’s used to.
This is the sixth in a series of in-depth histories of New Jersey gubernatorial candidates. Previous profiles: Steve Fulop, Steve Sweeney, Jon Bramnick, Ras Baraka, Jack Ciattarelli
In the wilderness
During the first fifty-odd years of his life, Ed Durr was a lot of things – father, grandfather, truck driver, conservative – but politician certainly wasn’t one of them.
Raised in Gloucester City, a small city directly to the south of Camden along the Delaware River, Durr dropped out of high school as a teenager to help his sick father, per a 2021 profile in the New York Times. (He later went on to get a G.E.D. through Gloucester City High School, but still does not have a college degree.) His parents were Kennedy Democrats, he told the Washington Examiner, but the family flipped to Republicans under Ronald Reagan.
Durr went on to have three kids of his own, and eventually six grandkids, while working at a variety of places: Dunkin Donuts, a farm supply store, a construction company, and eventually the furniture company Raymour and Flanigan, where he has worked as a truck driver since 2017. Along the way, he had some financial troubles, including a rough period in the 1990s when a bank began foreclosure proceedings on his family’s house and he filed for bankruptcy.
Throughout that time in his life, Durr may have had some ideological beliefs, but he wasn’t particularly political – setting him apart from many of the other candidates running for governor next year, who were actively plotting their political rises in their 20s or even their teens.
“I was never really a big political person,” Durr said in a 2021 interview. “I’m very blue-collar; my father was a carpenter, I did carpentry, and then I gravitated into truck driving.”
In 2017, with Donald Trump settling into the White House, that detachment from politics finally ended – though no one was paying much attention to Durr yet.
That year, Durr filed to run for the State Assembly in the 3rd legislative district, saying later that he was motivated to enter the political arena because of how difficult it was to obtain a concealed carry permit. But he didn’t run as a Republican; instead, he filed to run as a conservative independent, under the ballot slogan “One for All.”
At the top of the ticket, the 3rd district, a largely rural South Jersey seat, was hosting a closely watched race for the Senate between Senate President Steve Sweeney and Republican Fran Grenier. Grenier benefited from more than $5 million in spending from the New Jersey Education Association, a normally progressive union locked in a bitter feud with Sweeney, and the election became the most expensive legislative race in state history.
But Durr’s Assembly campaign, like most independent legislative campaigns in New Jersey, went absolutely nowhere. After neither reporting spending any money nor seemingly eliciting even a single mention in any news story, Durr ended up with just 589 votes, or 0.6%, while Assemblymen John Burzichelli (D-Paulsboro) and Adam Taliaferro (D-Woolwich) were comfortably re-elected against Republicans Philip Donohue and Linwood Donelson.
In fact, Durr’s campaign was so obscure that Salem County Clerk Gilda Gill forgot to even include his name on Salem County’s ballots – and no one noticed, including Durr himself. (A similar mistake happened in a State Senate race in Hudson County last year, nearly forcing a new election to be held, but the 2017 error went unremarked upon.)
That wasn’t the end of Durr’s hopes of winning a legislative seat, though. In 2019, he picked himself back up to run for the Assembly in the 3rd legislative district again, and he had a much more sound political strategy this time: run as a Republican.
Gloucester Republicans were, at that point, not a tremendously optimistic bunch, having failed to win almost any legislative seats in nearly two decades (outside of one 4th district Assembly seat in 2009). That meant that there weren’t a huge number of ambitious local politicians eager to run for legislative office, forcing Republicans to instead rely on political unknowns like Durr – and like Beth Sawyer, a realtor and former township committee candidate from Woolwich who became Durr’s running mate.
On paper, the Durr-Sawyer ticket wasn’t in a total no-hope situation. The 3rd district was fairly conservative-leaning, having voted for Donald Trump by a few percentage points in 2016, and with Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy in office, the environment for New Jersey Democrats in 2019 wasn’t great. If Republicans had chosen to direct money towards the race like they were in the neighboring 1st and 2nd districts, it wouldn’t have been a crazy investment.
But they didn’t, and Democrats weren’t going to get caught napping. Burzichelli and Taliaferro, with Sweeney and South Jersey Democratic power broker George Norcross looming behind them, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure that the seats stayed in Democratic hands, while Durr once again barely raised any money at all.
Burzichelli and Taliaferro won that year, though not nearly as comfortably as they had in 2017. The two Democratic assemblymen got 27.9% and 27.1% of the vote, respectively, while Sawyer came in third with 23.1% (3,475 votes behind Taliaferro) and Durr in last with 21.9%.
Not to be deterred, Durr filed for office yet again in 2020, this time for a council race in his hometown of Logan, a small Democratic-leaning town along the Delaware River. Facing off against Democratic Councilman Chris Morris, Durr lost 59%-41%.
Throughout his first three bids for public office, Durr flew almost completely under the radar, with both the media and the state Republican Party ignoring his campaigns and treating him like just another failed perennial candidate – which he was. The life story and political views of Ed Durr were, at that point, not things that people had much reason to be interested in.
In what seems to have been his lone media appearance prior to 2021, Durr appeared on a brief two-minute NJ Spotlight News segment in 2019, offering up his vision of a better New Jersey: lower taxes, a better business climate, and more freedom.
“What is the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result,” Durr said. “I believe the people of New Jersey deserve better. I believe in fiscal responsibility, in smaller government, in more freedoms… I believe the citizens of New Jersey need someone who will fight for their right of self-protection. I believe we need to fight for the unborn – for the innocent babies. I want to help make New Jersey be a state we can be proud of again.”
On social media, however, Durr was striking a much more aggressively right-wing tone, posting things that would come back to haunt him later. Islam, he said, is a “false religion” and a “cult of hate”; on the subject of abortion, he claimed that “a woman does have a choice! Keep her legs closed”; and the January 6 attack on the Capitol was nothing but “an unauthorized entry by undocumented federal employers.”
The 2019 race also brought Durr and Sawyer together, a relationship that would prove to be a combustible one. The factors that later led Sawyer to publicly break against Durr – his inexperience as a politician, his focus on controversial social issues, his willingness to use incendiary rhetoric – were all present in Durr’s early campaigns.
But none of that seemed important at the time, since no one really thought Durr had much of a political future. Republicans were happy to let Durr throw himself against the fortress of the South Jersey Democrats again and again, because at least he gave their base someone to vote for, and Democrats were happy to keep on beating him.
Slaying the giant
The start of Durr’s 2021 campaign for State Senate against Steve Sweeney, the second-most powerful man in state politics, went much like his prior campaign launches: unnoticed.
Sweeney had, at that point, held the 3rd district’s Senate seat for 20 years, and had turned his corner of South Jersey into a true fiefdom. In 2017, when Republicans and the NJEA had teamed up against him, he still won by 18 points, and no one figured the 3rd district would be in much danger of flipping until the day he retired.
Sweeney was unconcerned enough about his re-election that, although he raised some money to boost himself and his Assembly running mates, his main 2021 focus was expanding South Jersey’s Democratic Senate delegation elsewhere. Defending party-switching State Sen. Dawn Addiego (D-Evesham) in Burlington County and flipping the open 2nd district in Atlantic County took up far more of Sweeney’s attention and money than his home district.
That wasn’t just overconfidence on Sweeney’s part; local Republicans, too, didn’t see much reason to believe 2021 would be their year. The choice of Durr for the Senate nomination, rather than one of the district’s more established GOP politicians, was essentially an early abdication of defeat; on his ticket were Sawyer, who had to run a write-in primary campaign to replace disqualified candidate Nicholas Sereday, and Bethanne McCarthy Patrick, an EMT and former Mannington school board member.
Much like in 2019, Durr’s campaign lacked much of a media presence, and had very little money to spend. (A post-election assertion that Durr spent only $153 on his campaign, however, was inaccurate; he actually spent around six thousand dollars.) But he, Sawyer, and McCarthy Patrick proved to be dogged campaigners, with Durr claiming after the election that he had lost 55 pounds from doorknocking around the district.
More importantly, though it wasn’t clear yet at the time, Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli – now one of Durr’s opponents for the 2025 nomination – was gaining ground against Phil Murphy. And as Ciattarelli’s momentum quietly grew, so did his standing in marginal legislative districts like the 3rd.
Sweeney wasn’t completely asleep at the wheel, spending some money – certainly more than Durr or Republicans ever spent – on ads promoting his ticket and attacking Durr, Sawyer, and McCarthy Patrick as tax-dodging phonies. But Democratic internal polls still put Sweeney and his slate way up, and the ads were seen as more of a precautionary measure than a real effort to stave off a Republican wave.
“Politician Ed Durr doesn’t pay his taxes; Durr doesn’t pay his bills; Durr doesn’t pay his debts,” one attack ad intoned. “And Ed Durr doesn’t share our values. Durr wants to eliminate overtime pay, the minimum wage, and paid sick leave for the middle class. Durr would raise taxes on working people so millionaires can pay less. Ed Durr wants our vote – but he doesn’t care about people like us.”
On Election Day, Sweeney’s focus was still primarily on other South Jersey legislative districts, where Democrats maintained hope of gaining ground. Durr, meanwhile, decided to spend election night at home with his wife, watching the results come in on the TV.
What they saw was shocking.
Not only was Jack Ciattarelli slightly up over Phil Murphy statewide (a lead that would disappear as more ballots were counted); not only were Republicans clearly leading in nearly every closely contested legislative district; but Steve Sweeney, one of the most powerful state legislators in state history, was losing his seat to none other than Ed “The Trucker” Durr.
By the morning of November 3, the day after Election Day, it was fairly clear that Durr had won and Sweeney had lost; Sweeney went on to officially concede the race a week afterwards, trailing 52%-48%. Once untouchable, Sweeney found himself kicked to the curb by the voters he had served for nearly two decades.
Durr, meanwhile, was thrust into a level of attention and exposure unlike anything he had ever experienced before; he was the David who took down a Goliath, and everyone who had ignored him for years (including the New Jersey Globe, which had prematurely called the race on election night for Sweeney) wanted to know everything about him.
The New York Times called Durr “the truck driver who’s riding high in New Jersey” in a lengthy profile; the Star-Ledger said he had “shocked the political world” ; CNN declared his win “the single biggest upset of the 2021 election.” A search of Google news hits for “Ed Durr” in October 2021 returns zero results; the same search in November 2021 returns 298.
In Republican circles, Durr became an overnight celebrity. Not only had he unseated a hugely powerful Democrat, but his straight-talking, truck-driving ways were appealing to Republicans who saw him as an example of Real America taking down the ruling class. A few days after the election, former President Donald Trump himself called Durr, telling the senator-elect, “Anything I can do, you let me know.”
With that increased exposure came increased scrutiny, especially of Durr’s more unsavory social media posts. Two days after the election, journalists uncovered Durr’s Islamophobic posts saying, among other things, that “Mohammed was a pedophile,” prompting Durr to apologize and meet with members of the state’s Islamic community.
“I’m a passionate guy. And I say things in the heat of the moment,” Durr told WHYY News. “And if I said anything in the past that hurt anybody’s feelings, I sincerely apologize.”
But that controversy was a small blemish on what was otherwise a joyous few months for the new state senator. Durr, naturally, credited his victory to the people of his district, saying that they were sick of the liberal policies that he’d be going to Trenton to fight against.
“I’m absolutely nobody. I’m just a simple guy,” Durr said. “It was the people, it was a repudiation of the policies that have been forced down their throats.”
‘MAGA Cinderella’
Winning and governing, however, are very different things, as Durr quickly came to learn.
Despite their losses, Democrats easily held onto both houses of the State Legislature, meaning that the opportunities for a freshman Republican like Durr were slim. Even among the 2021 cohort of new senators, Durr was a total newbie, since his five fellow freshmen had all served at least one term in the State Assembly beforehand. Durr had never held any elected office before; he didn’t even own more than one suit before heading to Trenton.
Once he was sworn into the Senate in January 2022, Durr introduced a flurry of bills related to guns, vaccines, abortion, and more, in keeping with the hardcore conservative outsider image he’d fostered during the campaign. That, to him, was the best way of fighting for the voters who had elected him, and it also gave him plenty of opportunities to make more headlines.
But Democrats had no interest in taking up any legislation with Durr’s name on it, even when he tried to introduce the type of unflashy policy bills that the legislature passes all the time. During his lone term in the Senate, Durr was the prime sponsor on 132 bills, not a single one of which made it to the governor’s desk.
And on the political side, Durr – dubbed “MAGA Cinderella” in a memorable Politico headline – hadn’t managed to convert his newfound celebrity into a more robust campaign operation; his political relationships were still thin, and his campaign bank account still alarmingly empty. That provided an opening for his political enemies, both in the Democratic Party and in his own backyard.
Though she kept it quiet for a while, no one was a more committed Durr foe than Sawyer, his own running mate. Sawyer had become deeply disenchanted with Durr over the course of their two campaigns together, especially once they arrived in Trenton together and Durr spent his political capital on right-wing messaging bills without much to show for it. Sawyer, who wanted to gain Democrats’ trust as a moderate, competency-focused legislator, felt betrayed.
“You want to get things done? You’d better reach across the aisle,” Sawyer told Save Jersey’s Matt Rooney in 2023. “[Durr] is ineffective. He unfortunately went in there with the attitude of, he beat Steve Sweeney, he’s the dragon-slayer, bow down and kiss the ring.”
Sawyer, alongside fellow Durr skeptics in the Gloucester Republican organization, grew even more frustrated with Durr during the 2022 election, when South Jersey Democrats used Durr’s old social media posts on abortion in ads that sank the Gloucester Republican ticket for county-level office. Durr, unknown a year previously, had become notorious enough that Democrats could use him as a scapegoat.
Following the 2022 loss, a furious Sawyer began looking for a way to get Durr off the ticket in 2023, when all three 3rd district seats would go before voters again. In February 2023, the plan was unveiled: Salem County Commissioner Mickey Ostrum (R-Pilesgrove) would run for Senate against Durr, with Sawyer and former Harrison Township Committeeman Adam Wingate running for Assembly. (McCarthy Patrick, who kept a low profile in the legislature, remained loyal to Durr throughout.)
Sawyer’s scheme, however, fell apart almost as soon as it began. She had counted on the Ostrum ticket winning one or more county lines in Gloucester, Salem, and Cumberland Counties; instead, Durr won all three, including a 41-to-29-vote convention victory in Ostrum’s home county of Salem. Ostrum, recognizing that Durr was a more formidable foe than he’d anticipated, dropped out of the race soon afterwards.
But Sawyer, who had been replaced on Durr’s Assembly ticket by Hopewell Township Committeeman Tom Tedesco, was in too deep to back out. After two weeks of hemming and hawing, she decided that she would take on Durr in the GOP Senate primary, with Joseph Collins, the nephew of former Assembly Speaker Jack Collins, serving as her lone running mate.
Teaming up with a broader ticket of renegade Republicans in Gloucester County, Sawyer oriented her campaign around one core argument: Durr was an unnecessary liability and gave Democrats an opening to flip the 3rd district back.
“The results of last year’s election demonstrated that candidates do matter. Ed Durr has proven himself unsuitable for office and will not be re-elected,” Sawyer said the day she launched her campaign. “If we let him run in November, he will pull the entire Republican ticket down with him. I have too much invested in this community to allow that to happen.”
Durr, meanwhile, said he wouldn’t get down in the mud with Sawyer; he refused an offer to debate her and generally declined to criticize her at all, arguing that his record spoke for itself.
“I subscribe to the 11th commandment – thou shall never speak ill of fellow Republicans,” Durr told the New Jersey Monitor. “It would become an attack piece and I have a no-win situation… If I bash her, then I’m a guy beating up on a woman. If I don’t bash her, I’m a guy who’s weak.”
The senator knew that he could take that stance because he was in the driver’s seat of the campaign. He had every county party organization on his side and had high name recognition from defeating Sweeney, two advantages that Sawyer simply couldn’t match – even though she, too, had taken down a long-serving Democratic incumbent in 2021. (She just didn’t get the same news coverage for it.)
Durr ended up winning in a 65%-35% rout, carrying all but one town in the 3rd district. But the accusations that Sawyer had made throughout the campaign – that Durr was a showboat who had accomplished little for South Jersey – wouldn’t go away so easily, and Democrats were ready to pounce.
For a while, it wasn’t even certain that South Jersey Democrats were going to seriously contest the 3rd district, which was far more Republican-leaning than any other competitive district in the state. If Sweeney wanted back in, Norcross would surely spend whatever it took to make it happen, but the former Senate President opted to run for governor rather than try to regain a spot in a State Senate that had quickly moved on from him. (Union County’s Nick Scutari became Senate President after Sweeney left, a symbol of the legislature’s shift away from South Jersey.)
The ticket Democrats landed on in Sweeney’s absence, however, was still very capable of giving Durr a serious challenge. Burzichelli, the former assemblyman who lost in 2021, was tapped to run against Durr, with Gloucester County Commissioner Heather Simmons (D-Glassboro) and Salem County nonprofit executive Dave Bailey running alongside him for the Assembly.
During the primary election, Democrats were happy to watch from the sidelines as Gloucester Republicans tore themselves to pieces. But as soon as Durr emerged as the nominee, they unleashed the full force of the opposition book that they had barely bothered to touch in 2021.
Over the course of the 2023 election cycle, Burzichelli and Democratic-aligned groups spent a whopping $4.8 million in the 3rd district. Much of that was spent on ads eviscerating Durr for his conservative views and controversial social media posts, including one memorable spot narrated by former Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg (D-Teaneck) in which she recounted being sexually assaulted as a child and slammed Durr for his stance on abortion.
Burzichelli also made the kitchen-table argument that the largely rural, not-especially-wealthy 3rd district needed competent legislators delivering for their constituents, and Durr’s hostility towards legislative Democrats made that impossible.
“He seems to be a fish out of water in that legislative body,” Burzichelli said. “We can do better.”
Democrats went so nuclear, in fact, that they started attacking state legislative candidates in other districts over things Durr had said, prompting several GOP candidates to release a statement specifically disavowing Durr. Like in 2022, the GOP’s truck-driving hero had become an albatross.
In his counteroffensive, Durr tried to remind voters of the reasons that they had rejected South Jersey Democrats like Burzichelli in the first place, and aired an ad featuring decades-old attacks on Burzichelli’s involvement in the production of (alleged) X-rated films. But Republican spending only totaled $968,000 in the 3rd district, allowing the narrative to be almost entirely driven by Democrats.
What had gotten Durr elected back in 2021 was simple partisan math: the 3rd district voted for Jack Ciattarelli that year by a whopping 15 percentage points, and Sweeney got caught up in the wave despite dramatically outrunning Phil Murphy, allowing Durr to eke out his upset win. (In other words, Durr probably owed his seat to the man who is now his rival for the gubernatorial nomination.)
But without a competitive race at the top of the ticket in 2023, and with so much Democratic fire trained on him, Durr was on his own in his fight for re-election. In order to have a real shot at winning, Durr likely needed another 2021-style Republican wave to outweigh the onslaught of spending against him.
He didn’t get one. On what was overall a great night for Democrats, South Jersey Democrats in particular, Burzichelli beat Durr by more than seven percentage points, 53%-46%; further down the ballot, McCarthy Patrick and Tedesco fell to Simmons and Bailey by a smaller 51%-49% margin, and Gloucester Democrats comfortably held on to every county-level office up that year. Naturally, Democrats couldn’t resist the opportunity to gloat.
“It feels like a wrong has now been righted,” Sweeney told NJ Spotlight News.
The loss was a rough blow for Durr, who had only just begun to learn the political ropes when they were forcibly yanked away from him. The soon-to-be-former senator had, at that point, been running for office in South Jersey for essentially six years straight; he had no idea what would come next.
“I’m right now spending time with [my] family and weighing my options,” Durr said when asked on Facebook in December 2023 whether he would run again. “I still believe I have something to offer the people.”
Ed “The Governor” Durr?
Durr had a few options in front of him. One: run for Assembly in 2025, when Simmons and Bailey would be up again and potentially vulnerable to a Republican challenge. Two: bide his time for 2027, when Burzichelli’s first term ends. Three: retire from politics at the age of 60 having achieved something genuinely remarkable and leaving it at that.
Or, option four, run for governor.
For years, the 2025 Republican gubernatorial primary had been viewed as a looming showdown between heavyweights Jack Ciattarelli and Bill Spadea, with Jon Bramnick also muscling his way into serious contention. In the party-dominated world of New Jersey politics, that didn’t leave Durr much room to maneuver, and he was and remains a heavy underdog.
But Durr was convinced he had an obligation to serve the state, and that the governor’s office was the best path to doing so (though there is still time for him to switch back to running for lower office if he so chooses). From the pulpit of an Egg Harbor Township church in May of this year, Durr launched his gubernatorial campaign, putting forward his deeply conservative bona fides and saying that he just wanted to make New Jersey a better place to live.
“Our state needs somebody to fight for them,” Durr said. “You got so many people out there saying they want to run, but what I see is they’re running for themselves. I’m running for the people. I don’t care about the fame and the fortune, all that stuff that people worry about. I’m fine with how I am. I’m a plain, simple guy. But the state needs to be turned around, and I know that I would do that.”
Durr’s gubernatorial campaign is, in many ways, just as quixotic as his early runs for office back in Gloucester County. Then, as now, he’s going up against politicians far better-known and more powerful than himself, ones who have much clearer paths to victory; then, as now, he seems to have no intention of spending the kind of money most successful campaigns spend. He filed paperwork with the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission indicating that he plans to spend less than $5,800 on the GOP primary, which needless to say is not enough money to run a proper statewide campaign.
That, ultimately, is both the appeal and the potential fatal flaw of Ed “The Trucker” Durr (the moniker in the middle is so important to him that he plans on using that as his official name on the ballot in 2025). More than virtually any other top politician in New Jersey, Durr truly is just a normal guy – someone who happened to find his way into substantial political power but who never really allowed himself to become a true politician, for better or for worse.
Usually, when normal guys go up against the political establishment, they lose big time. But as Durr knows well, anything can happen.