Clifton Councilwoman Rosie Pino will be the GOP nominee in the 9th congressional district, the New Jersey Globe projects, setting the stage for a potentially competitive general election matchup against Rep. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon).
As of 11:42 p.m. and with nearly all of the vote reporting, Pino has 51.4% of the vote while her lone opponent, attorney Tiffany Burress, has 48.6%, a margin of just 366 votes. That margin may grow even closer as a few remaining votes are counted, but not enough to put Burress in the lead.
The plurality-Hispanic 9th district voted for Donald Trump in 2024, and Pou – who was unopposed in her own primary after boxing out some would-be challengers – has been a GOP target since she took office last year. If Republicans are going to flip any New Jersey seat this year, it will likely be the 9th district.
But Pino has a lot of work ahead of her, both to unify local Republicans after an unusually fractious primary and to kick her fundraising into a higher gear in the country’s most expensive media market. There’s also been some recent evidence that Hispanic voters are shifting back towards Democrats, jeopardizing GOP chances of competing for districts like the 9th.
For decades, Paterson and its suburbs were represented by irrepressible Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-Paterson), who was a state legislator and mayor of Paterson before being elected to Congress in 1996. Pascrell insisted on running for re-election two years ago at the age of 87, but he died before he could reach the general election.
That set off a hurried scramble to replace him on the November ballot; after a week-long sprint of a campaign, local Democrats settled on Pou, a state senator who acted as a compromise candidate among several competing local factions.
Pou was expected to win the general election easily in what had until then been a solidly Democratic district, but instead found herself in a close race with unheralded Republican foe Billy Prempeh, ultimately winning by around five points. As one of thirteen Democrats who held a Trump-won district, Pou took office with a target on her back, and the GOP has excoriated every remotely liberal vote she’s taken in the year and a half since.
North Jersey Republicans, though, were unaccustomed to competing for the 9th district and did not have much of a bench in place. Prempeh quickly announced he would run again, but was met with a cool reception from party bosses who didn’t want him as their nominee for a fourth time; he withdrew from the race in December with a warning shot to GOP leaders who were looking to nominate “someone with strings.”
That left Republicans with Pino, who has held elected office in the district’s second-largest town for over a decade, and Burress, a political newcomer and the wife of ex-NFL star Plaxico Burress. Both argued that they represented Republicans’ best chance of winning the district in November.
But both also came under scrutiny for their ties to the district and their commitment to the party. A group Pino leads in Clifton endorsed Pou for Congress in 2024, an endorsement that became the subject of Burress’s mailers; Burress, meanwhile, lives a few miles outside the district (in a house that’s under threat of foreclosure).
Each earned some county party backing, with the Passaic and Hudson Republican organizations supporting Burress while Bergen Republicans went for Pino – even though Burress had announced an endorsement from the Bergen GOP chairman on the first day of her campaign. Burress also seemed to be many national Republicans’ preferred option, but they never got involved in the race to make that preference known.
Indeed, the race ended up becoming essentially a proxy battle between the Passaic and Bergen GOP organizations: Burress leads 62%-38% in Passaic and Pino leads 61%-39% in Bergen, which makes up a larger share of the electorate.
Pou, meanwhile, looked like she might face a challenge to her left – Paterson Mayor André Sayegh spent much of last summer criticizing her both on the issue of Israel and on a water crisis in his city – but nothing ended up materializing. That allowed her to build up a campaign operation in the district unimpeded, while Republicans had to spend months duking it out in their primary.
Financially, Pou’s edge has become a big one. At the end of the most recent fundraising period, Pou had $1.5 million in her campaign account, while neither Burress nor Pino had more than $40,000 (and both reported more campaign debt than cash on-hand).
The district also reverted back to its Democratic roots in last year’s gubernatorial election, voting for Gov. Mikie Sherrill by a 59%-40% margin – numbers that may not be replicable in a federal election but are nevertheless daunting for the GOP.