Paul DeGroot may have initially seemed like an outlier in the race for the Republican nomination in CD-11.

Unlike candidate Larry Casha, a state committeeman, DeGroot hasn’t been active in the party for 30 years. And unlike candidate Tayfun Selen, a Morris County commissioner, DeGroot is not an elected official.

But just a week or so ago, he won the first skirmish in the nomination battle, securing the endorsement of Passaic County Republicans. There are some caveats here.

DeGroot now lives in Montville, Morris County, but he grew up in Passaic County (Clifton), and spent about 25 years working for the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office.

So he certainly has ties to the county.

But a win is still a win, even if redistricting has shrunk Passaic’s CD-11 territory to Little Falls, Totowa, Woodland Park and part of Wayne. Essex and Morris, which is the key Republican stronghold, make up the rest of the district.

DeGroot also is seeking the middle ground if you will, stressing that Republicans must recognize reality.

“The district has not gotten more red, it’s gotten more blue,” he said Tuesday morning over breakfast at a Route 46 diner. Knowing Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the district in 2018 and 2020 after years of GOP dominance, DeGroot says, “We are losing people,” or actually, voters.

He said he wants to do a better job reaching the voters Republicans are losing, namely women and minorities. On that score, he talks of reaching out to the district’s growing Indian and Latino communities.

A lot of party politics these days tends to push to the extreme.

Go to a Democratic gathering and the talk often swings around to fighting white supremacy, the Trump cult and possible insurrections to come.

At a Republican candidates’ night last week in Madison, there was rhetoric about radical socialists and Marxists. Both camps can be amusing, but such rantings often are far removed from what normal people actually think.

DeGroot says flatly that the 2020 race is over and that Joe Biden is the president. That’s a very obvious statement, but it’s also one that is not accepted by all Republicans. Or at least those still enthralled with Donald Trump.

Still, many of DeGroot’s views are in line with traditional conservative thinking.

For instance, he wants voter-ID laws and thinks Biden has been “weak” on Ukraine and that the administration was “asleep at the switch” in regard to rising inflation and supply side problems. He doesn’t totally oppose the recently-signed federal infrastructure bill, but says it probably could have been trimmed back.

Yet, with an eye toward trying to recapture some of the voters Republicans have lost, DeGroot said he’s open to expanding Medicare to include dental and vision coverage and to consider doing anything practical to reduce drug prices. On some of the social issues that have tripped up Republicans in the past, DeGroot says that no one honestly looking at his background will ever accuse him of being anti-women or anti-gay rights.

How DeGroot does in the upcoming Morris County convention remains to be seen. But he already is primed to take on Sherrill.

In the four years she’s been on the political scene, Sherrill’s nearly 10 years serving in the Navy has, understandably, gotten no criticism.

DeGroot looks at the shorter amount of time she worked for the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The congresswoman’s bio says that “as an outreach and re-entry coordinator, Congresswoman Sherrill developed programs to help prevent crime in the community.”

That doesn’t impress DeGroot.

He says those joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office normally “dream of taking down terrorists” and overseeing wiretaps to take down the mob. In his career in Passaic County, DeGroot says he’s prosecuted drug dealers, murderers and other miscreants.

DeGroot says that Sherrill never did that, adding that she was a “fake prosecutor.”

A fake prosecutor? If DeGroot gets that far, this could be a real election.