“We did very well under very difficult circumstances,” the 54-year-old realtor said of the ticket of three GOP candidates that narrowly failed to defeat the Democratic Party.
Indeed Duggan got more than 161,000 votes, outpolling the party’s presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, in some North Bergen towns.
In an interesting twist, he had been the target of negative campaigning because of his previous political connections.
A light-hearted Democratic ad that featured Sarah Palin also referred to Duggan saying: “One of the Republican freeholder candidates was a Socialist Party member.”
In an Echo interview in July, Duggan had spoken of his membership of the Irish Labor Party in his 20s, and of his gradual conversion to libertarian values after his emigration in the 1980s.
During the campaign flap, he told local media that Irish politics weren’t as “polarized” as the American variety.
The Republican Chairman Bob Yudin called the socialist reference “code for a scurrilous attack on Paul’s Irish heritage.
“They’re talking about things that supposedly happened 20 or 30 years ago when Paul lived in Ireland. He came to this country to start a new life. It’s stooping to political lows, and the voters are going to reject this kind of campaign,” he said,
Duggan said of the socialist reference in an interview with the Echo yesterday: “All that’s fair game over here, but none of it resonated with voters.”
Obama’s candidacy was the decisive factor that saved the Bergen County Democrats this time, he believes.
Now with “the wheels beginning to come off the economy” in the U.S., Ireland and England, it’s time, he said, “to hunker down and weather all these economic storms.
“I’m going to take a bit of a break,” said Duggan, who ran for the same post last year.
The married father of one said he would like to concentrate on local politics in his hometown of Bogota over the next year or so.