Stephen Sweeney said he doesn’t want any speeches in honor as he prepares to end his tenure as president of the New Jersey Senate at noon Tuesday.

The reason? For Sweeney, the hulking, suspender-wearing, sometimes-polarizing South Jersey Democrat who has helped shape Garden State politics the last 12 years, this goodbye is not a final goodbye.

“I’m not done,” he insisted about his career multiple times during an interview with NJ Advance Media at the Statehouse in Trenton last week.

The 62-year-old lawmaker is leaving the Senate after losing his seat in one of the most shocking defeats in New Jersey history, having fallen to Republican Ed Durr, a little-known truck driver with no elected experience, in November. It was so stunning even comedy shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “Last Week Tonight” poked fun at the results.

“Being the brunt of national jokes is not the kind of way I wanted to go out,” Sweeney, D-Gloucester, admitted.

Still, he stressed this is not retirement. Sweeney said he hasn’t ruled out challenging Durr to regain his Senate seat when it’s up again in two years. And he is even considered a likely candidate for governor in 2025.

“I’m not ruling out anything,” Sweeney said.

In the short term, though, Monday is Sweeney’s last voting session at the helm of the Senate. Tuesday at noon will officially mark the end of his reign as the longest-serving Senate president in New Jersey history, when state Sen. Nicholas Scutari, D-Union, will be sworn in as the chamber’s new leader.

The job has made Sweeney the second most powerful elected state leader, after the governor, in New Jersey. Armed with a blunt sense of humor and sometimes equally blunt temperament, Sweeney has helped usher in a wide array of legislation, from raising the state’s minimum wage to installing paid family leave to revamping school funding.

A self-described “centrist” Democrat, Sweeney both sparred and cut deals with former Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican he considers a friend. And in recent years, he worked with current Gov. Phil Murphy, a fellow Democrat, to enact a series of Democratic priorities, though he often publicly feuded with the more progressive governor.

Christie said Sweeney has been “about as good a tactical manager of his caucus that I’ve ever seen” and expects people will see how rare that talent is once he’s gone.

“If you made a deal with Steve, you didn’t have to hold your breath, most of the time, to see if Steve could deliver his caucus,” Christie told NJ Advance Media. “To me, that was Steve’s biggest strength. … We didn’t negotiate small things. … And he was able to deliver every time he said he would.”

But one of Sweeney’s signature achievements — reforming public-worker pensions and benefits — made him an enemy of some union officials. And left-leaning advocates frequently criticized Sweeney and his childhood friend and ally George Norcross, a South Jersey Democratic powerbroker who oversees a large voting bloc in the state Legislature, for stalling progressive policies.

Some have even championed how both Sweeney and a handful of other South Jersey Democratic lawmakers lost to Republicans in November’s election

Sue Altman, executive director of advocacy group New Jersey Working Families, said “we’re not thrilled” a Republican is taking Sweeney’s seat in South Jersey’s 3rd legislative district, but “we’re absolutely thrilled” his loss has “dislodged one of the biggest obstacles to progressive progress” in New Jersey.

“We believe his departure will leave space for new leadership, for new voices,” Altman said. “South Jersey Democrats are conservative and old-fashioned in their thinking, and it’s well past time they’ve been shown the door.”

Some have even quipped Sweeney might as well be a Republican.

Sweeney doesn’t sweat it.

“They’re phonies,” he said of his critics. “They don’t stand for anything for real. They cheered Ed Durr beating me. What Democrat would cheer that?”

“They don’t realize in order to get things done, you have to compromise,” Sweeney added. “How did they endorse Phil Murphy and not endorse me? Every bill progressive governor Phil Murphy signed into law was passed through my house. A lot of it with me sponsoring it. So what are they against? That I won’t do what I’m told? That I’m willing to find a solution to get the job done?”

“If you’re gonna back down whenever everybody else yells or hollers, then you’re gonna have nothing but paralysis.”

FOR HIS DAUGHTER

Sweeney, a native of Pennsauken and resident of West Deptford, is an ironworker by trade and has long been the leader of an iron workers union.

He said Democrats and Republicans both asked him to run for Gloucester County freeholder a quarter-century ago.

“If I had run as a Republican, my father would have shot me,” Sweeney said. “My father was a Roosevelt Democrat. I’m a centrist Democrat. My father, he made FDR look like a conservative.”

Sweeney was elected to the freeholder board in 1997. It was the start of a political career he said was inspired and has been shaped by his daughter, Lauren, who was born 28 years ago with Down syndrome.

“I just didn’t like the way people treated people with disabilities,” he said. “I’d walk into a restaurant and someone would stare at her. And me being Mr. Polished, I’d say, ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh yeah.’ I’d say, ‘She has Down Syndrome, not dumb syndrome. Don’t stare.’ She motivated me.”

Sweeney was elected to the state Senate in 2001, defeating Republican incumbent Raymond Zane. He then became Senate majority leader in 2008, at the time Democrat Jon Corzine was governor — a man Sweeney calls a “true gentleman.” In 2010, he became Senate president, wresting the post away from longtime President Richard Codey, D-Essex, a former governor.

Along the way, Sweeney has been bolstered by his longtime friendship and alliance with Norcross, a wealthy insurance executive from Camden known as maybe the most powerful non-elected official in New Jersey because of how he bankrolls candidates and corrals votes.

CHRISTIE AND PENSIONS

Soon after he ascended to the top of the Senate, Sweeney faced his biggest battle: a controversial bipartisan push to reform New Jersey’s perpetually underfunded public-worker pension system. He teamed with Christie, then the new Republican governor, to enact the agreement in exchange for reforming public workers’ health care benefits. The deal was feverishly opposed by many union leaders.

Sweeney — who said his career as a union leader made him a natural fit for the fight — still insists the move rescued the pension system and saved taxpayers money.

“So the people that view me as their enemy, someday maybe they’ll wake up and realize that we saved their pension,” he said.

Christie and Sweeney didn’t always get along. They had a long-running, high-profile clash about the political makeup of the state Supreme Court. And in 2011, after Christie vetoed programs Sweeney cared about from the state budget, Sweeney famously called him “a rotten prick.”

But he isn’t shy to say they’re friends, even if some people on the left lament how closely he worked with Christie.

“Do we judge somebody because they have Republican friends and Democrat friends?” Sweeney asked. “Christie came to see me two days after he was elected. And he said to me, ‘Are we gonna get anything done? Or are we just gonna do the politics?’ I was like, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ He said, ‘I want to get some things done.’ I said, ‘If we can focus on areas of commonality, we can get some things done. And where there are things we can’t agree on, do your politics, just don’t make it personal.’”

MURPHY AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Then came Murphy, the proudly progressive Democrat who succeeded Christie in 2018. Murphy’s election cleared the way for Sweeney and the Legislature to enact many policies that got stonewalled under Christie — minimum wage, paid family leave, equal pay, restored Planned Parenthood funding.

But Murphy was often at odds with Sweeney and Norcross at the beginning of his term. They had especially bitter fights over tax increases and tax incentives.

Their most recent disagreement has come just days before Sweeney’s exit. The Legislature is set to allow many of Murphy’s remaining emergency COVID-19 powers and orders expire Tuesday — including the school mask mandate — despite the governor asking for an extension to help fight a new surge. Sweeney argued vaccinations are now readily available and the state has to “learn how to move forward” with the virus.

Asked what it’s been like to work with Murphy, Sweeney said it’s “a different style” from Christie.

“There’s nothing that was going on that Christie didn’t know about or didn’t know something about it,” Sweeney said. “And the Murphy administration is not in the weeds. It’s not a knock. It’s just a different style.”

For his part, Murphy said his administration has enjoyed “a really good working relationship” with Sweeney.

“The first year, we took a while to get used to each other and get into a rhythm,” the governor told NJ Advance Media. “But I think he’d also agree for the past two and a half, three years, we have been in that rhythm. That doesn’t mean we’re always gonna see something the same way.”

Looking back, Sweeney has a long list of other accomplishments he’s proud of: eliminating the estate tax, raising the threshold on retirees’ income taxes, increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit, reworking the state’s school funding formula, regionalizing schools, restructuring higher education, bail reform, ushering in the state takeover of Atlantic City, instituting legal sports betting, writing gay marriage into law, bringing offshore wind projects to South Jersey, increasing solar power.

He said he’s especially proud of the work he’s done to help the disabled, including expanding extraordinary special education aid, banning the word “retarded” in state government, and creating a state disability caucus.

And there’s another policy he said his daughter inspired: expanding paid family leave.

”She was 2 pounds” when she was born, Sweeney remembered. “We were 75 days in the neonatal unit. And you watch families come and go, and it was impossible. In the beginning, all your family’s around you, all your family’s supporting you. But eventually, your family goes back (home).”

Among his biggest disappointments? The fact he wasn’t able to gather enough votes to legalize marijuana legislatively. Voters eventually passed it in a 2020 referendum.

“It’s generational,” Sweeney said. “My members who were in their 70s, they were against it. And they’re the ones that grew up with it in the ‘60s. I thought they would be the easier ones to get.”

HIS FUTURE

Sweeney blames his loss to Durr on a “red wave,” a surge of Republican support that swept across the blue Garden State in November. Republicans flipped seven seats overall in the Democratic-controlled Legislature. And Murphy won re-election by a closer-than-expected margin of about 3 percentage points.

“There was just an anger,” Sweeney said. “People are angry. They’re flat-out angry. They’re angry at Democrats that they have complete control in Washington when they can’t get the simplest of things done.”

There has been talk of trying to win back Sweeney’s district by running progressive candidates in 2023. Sweeney hasn’t ruled out running for the seat himself.

For years, there has also been talk that Sweeney is a top candidate for the Democratic nomination to succeed Murphy as governor in 2025. (Murphy can’t run again because he’s limited to two consecutive terms.)

Sweeney’s loss hasn’t blunted those thoughts.

“It’s been talked about,” he said. “We’ll see where I’m at then.”

For now, Sweeney said he’s speaking with a few universities about starting a think tank. The goal, he said, is for it to be “as bipartisan and as diverse as possible,” focused on issues like the state’s affordability.

“What I do know is New Jersey is an amazing state, and it can be a lot more affordable,” he said. “This think tank is gonna give me the ability to really focus on things without worrying about partisan shit on either side and coming to the people of New Jersey with solutions. I think I’ve got enough of a profile and my word has been good and I’m pretty credible, that I can get people’s attention. And I plan to.”

Sweeney also said the state needs a new pension system, and he plans to hold Murphy to a vow the governor made that he would negotiate one.

But how he can do that without being Senate president anymore?

“I’ve got a lot of friends here still,” Sweeney said. “I don’t need a title to have a voice.”