Rep. Jeff Van Drew Monday commended President Donald Trump for his efforts to shape the new Republican Party and bring about change.
"It's like, they have that saying, 'ripping the Band-Aid off and seeing what's underneath,'" the New Jersey Republican, who was a Democrat until just this past year, told Fox News' "Fox & Friends." Trump "did that and he showed the seamy side, quite frankly, of politics."
Van Drew, who won his reelection bid in his state's 2nd Congressional District, said Trump's actions "showed how politics could be better, that you really could work and fight for the average person ... the people who vote, the average, everyday working people out there need to be listened to and not forgotten about and certainly not looked down upon and that was happening a great deal."
However, Van Drew said he's not happy with the current election system, and that during his upcoming term in Congress, he will push for change.
"I feel like I've gone back to the 1900s," he said. "We're able to decode DNA, we're going to put people on Mars and on the moon, but we can't have an election system that works accurately quickly and electronically? That's nonsense."
Van Drew also slammed polls that showed Trump would "lose terribly" and said the president outperformed polls for a second election.
"Basically, he got half the vote," Van Drew said of Trump, adding that the polls had shown Republicans would lose many more people in the House than they did.
The lawmaker said the polls had also projected him to lose because he changed parties, but instead, he won "by a great majority."
Van Drew is currently ahead of Democrat challenger Amy Kennedy by almost 15,400 votes, with 80% of the votes in his state being reported. He clinched the win already — with Fox News and The Associated Press calling the race — by scoring 51% of the vote to Kennedy's 46%.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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