For Long-Shot New Jersey Senate Candidate, Passion and No Filter Steve Lonegan, left, the Republican nominee for the Senate from New Jersey, with Gov. Chris Christie last week. NEWARK - To start his "Expose Cory Booker" tour, Steve Lonegan stood in front of one of this troubled city's more rundown schools this month and attacked the mayor's record on education. "He can issue all the Cory Booker platitudes - Cory-tudes - that he wants," Mr. Lonegan said. Cory Booker has failed people. Then he showed up days later at the scene of a double homicide, and accused Mayor Booker of being "too busy hanging out with Oprah" and "tweeting about Winnie the Pooh" to address the city's problems. "Finally," Mr. Lonegan said, "Mayor Booker issued a tweet mourning someone's passing. But it wasn't the two men shot dead in Cory Booker's Newark on Friday night. It was Michael Ansara, the Klingon from Star Trek. Even if Mr. Lonegan were not running against a nationally known Democrat, his campaign to be the first Republican in 40 years elected to the United States Senate from New Jersey would be a long shot. But he has no intention of letting it be dull. The election to replace Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, who died in June, presents a stark contrast: Mr. Booker, the mayor of the state's largest city, invites comparisons to President Obama; Mr. Lonegan, a former mayor of suburban Bogota, N.J., intends to go to Washington and dismantle the Obama agenda. Though Mr. Lonegan has taken in just $325,000 to Mr. Booker's $8.6 million in campaign contributions, Mr. Lonegan's campaign argues that he can take advantage of the unusual conditions of the special election - it will be held on Oct. 16, a Wednesday - to turn out a high number of conservative voters who rally passionately to his message. But it is not clear how many of them there are. New Jersey's Republican voters tend to reward moderation. Mr. Lonegan tends more toward outrage: railing against federal aid to Hurricane Sandy victims, for example, by saying that the state should "suck it up and be responsible for taking care of ourselves." "I don't think I'm a flamethrower," he said, responding to a characterization used by Mr. Booker. I advocate for issues, I advocate for them passionately. That's just who I am. Mr. Lonegan, 57, was most recently the state director for Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy group backed by the Koch brothers. He was Tea Party before anyone knew to call it a movement. As his favorite reading he cites works by Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises, and other limited-or-no-government treatises of the libertarian canon. He argues that the Federal Reserve's attempts to stimulate the economy have devalued the nation's currency, that President Obama's health care law will destroy the economy, that military spending could be cut and entire federal agencies, including energy and education, eliminated to rein in spending. "I'm very deeply concerned for my kids - and I know it's cliché - that we're on a trajectory toward economic collapse," he said last week, sitting in a restaurant in Hunterdon County. He was there for the biggest coup of his campaign, an endorsement from Gov. Chris Christie, his opponent in the 2009 primary for governor. "People should be able to work hard and save and accumulate wealth and a better future, and not have it taken away by the government, whether it's through taxation, or regulation, or debasing the dollar," he said. His models in the Senate are all Tea Party freshmen: Ted Cruz of Texas ("brilliant," he called him), Mike Lee of Utah ("very principled") and Rand Paul of Kentucky ("sharp, aggressive"). He comes across as a younger, more New Jersey-esque version of Ron Paul: formal, serious, not so much flamethrower as simply annoyed - by the Affordable Care Act, by the Federal Reserve, by having to suffer fools. "I am one of the few people who has read Dodd-Frank," Mr. Lonegan said, by way of explaining his antipathy for the bank regulations passed after the economic meltdown of 2008. As to Mr. Booker's celebrity, he sounds mystified: "What does that do for the country? There's no substance here at all. It's all, like, glitz.