If New Jersey Republicans are to flip a congressional seat this year – and that’s a big if – it will almost certainly be the 9th district, where Rep. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon) is seeking a second term.
In theory, while the Paterson-based district remains a heavy lift for the GOP, the conditions are there for a competitive race. Long a Democratic stronghold, the 9th district shockingly voted for Donald Trump in 2024, and Pou is largely untested as a battleground congresswoman; Republicans who want to consolidate and expand on the party’s gains among Hispanic voters should look no further than CD-9.
But before Republicans can focus on beating Pou, they’ll have to sort out their own primary, a two-way contest that’s divided local party organizations and brought a fair bit of bad blood to the fore in Passaic and Bergen Counties.
On one side is Tiffany Burress, a workers compensation attorney and the wife of ex-NFL star Plaxico Burress, who earned endorsements from several top party leaders by pitching herself as the kind of loyal Republican voters are looking for. On the other is Rosie Pino, a councilwoman in the city of Clifton who’s run as more of a maverick, grassroots-oriented candidate.
Both Burress and Pino contend that they’re the most conservative candidate running, and both say they’d give Republicans their best shot at flipping the 9th district. Neither has raised a large amount of money, however, and six days out from Election Day, there isn’t a clear frontrunner.
Originally, the race was going to be a three-way contest with Billy Prempeh, the GOP nominee for the seat in 2020, 2022, and 2024 and something of a polarizing figure among local Republicans. Prempeh, though, exited the race in December, alleging that party leaders were conspiring to block him from the nomination.
Prempeh has since endorsed Burress for the seat, but he told the New Jersey Globe that he doesn’t think Burress or Pino is doing what it takes to win.
“I don’t think that either candidate is doing enough to get the word out there,” Prempeh said. “As it stands right now, I have no idea what they stand for or what they want to do… It’s bleak, in my opinion.”
Pino has been running for the district for nearly a year with a relatively simple message: she’s the only candidate who has the experience needed to both win the district and represent it well in Congress. A current councilwoman and former school board member in the district’s second-largest town, she began her 9th district campaign with a solid political base and has worked hard to expand it since then. (She also ran for Passaic County Clerk in 2023, losing countywide by around six points.)
Pino can point to her own life story – the daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants, a mother of 11 in a blended family, and a former Democrat who became a Republican four years ago – as proof that she understands the 9th district’s electorate. Voters like her made the district competitive in 2024, and they hold the keys to its future in 2026.
“This isn’t about who’s the nicest or who’s the prettiest,” she said. “People are entrusting you to represent them, and I am by far the most qualified because I’ve delivered, because I have a proven track record, and because I have that experience.”
But some of the more idiosyncratic parts of Pino’s political background have come back to haunt her. In 2024, an organization led by Pino, Latino Leaders of Clifton, endorsed a bipartisan slate of candidates running for office that year – among them Pou, the Democrat Pino would launch a campaign against less than a year later. For Pino’s critics, the endorsement is evidence that Pino is a political opportunist without a real commitment to the GOP cause.
“It’s not that Rosie Pino is a bad person,” said Jose Arango, the chairman of the Hudson County GOP and a strong Burress backer. “But the reality is that if you endorse Nellie Pou, how can you be running in the Republican primary?”
Pino said that Latino Leaders of Clifton makes endorsements as a collective, and that the Pou endorsement cannot be attributed to her alone. Asked whether she personally voted to support Pou during the organization’s endorsement process, Pino declined to say.
Burress has also more recently begun going after Pino for a vote she took on the Clifton City Council last fall to support the Immigrant Trust Act, a controversial state-level bill that limits local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration officials. Burress says the vote means Pino supports sanctuary cities; Pino says the bill did no such thing, and that she was assured by law enforcement officers in Clifton that it would not impede their duties.
“No one in this country – and I firmly believe this – regardless of their legal status should live in fear,” Pino said. “This is the country where we build dreams, not destroy them.”
For her part, Burress argues that GOP voters are looking for a candidate like her: a conservative from outside the world of politics who can reinvigorate the party.
“A lot of [voters] actually say thank you – thank you for stepping up and doing this,” Burress said. “They’re excited that I work in the private sector, they’re excited that I’m not a career machine politician. They feel like I represent them.”
A first-time candidate who once made appearances on reality TV, Burress does come with her own host of vulnerabilities. Her husband Plaxico has drawn some bad headlines over the years – most famous was his stint in prison after he accidentally shot himself in the leg in a nightclub in 2008 – and the Burresses are now at risk of losing their home to foreclosure.
What Pino has hit her hardest for, though, is the fact that she doesn’t live in the district; the Burress home is in Totowa, a Paterson suburb a few miles away from the 9th district’s boundaries. Burress countered that she’s devoted her career to the people of the 9th district, and that she’d plan on moving into the district itself if she wins the seat.
“This district is my home,” Burress said. “This district is where I have done all of my community service for the past 20-plus years. This district is where I’ve worked – where I’ve gone to court, where I’ve stood up for clients, where I’ve fought against big insurance companies.”
Relations between the two are bitter enough that Burress wouldn’t commit to supporting Pino if she’s the GOP nominee: “I would support Republicans – I don’t consider her to be a Republican,” Burress said. Pino said she’d support Burress in a general election, and said Burress’s hesitance to do the same “speaks to her lack of commitment to the party.”
For a short while after Burress entered the race, it looked like she was the heavy favorite for the nomination. All three county Republican chairs in the district endorsed her campaign a few hours after she launched – endorsements Pino had been vying for for months – and national Republicans sent out a few signals that they liked Burress, too, though they’ve remained officially neutral.
But Pino made a dogged effort to chip away at that support where she could, with quite a bit of success. The biggest upset of all came on March 9, when Bergen County Republicans met for their annual convention – and voted to endorse Pino in defiance of both their chairman and policy committee. It was the first time in recent memory that a candidate backed by Bergen GOP leadership had lost a convention, and it means that the county where a majority of the 9th district’s registered Republicans live is now at least nominally on Pino’s side.
“Tiffany doesn’t go out, she doesn’t make phone calls, she doesn’t knock doors. And Rosie’s out there every day,” said Frank Pallotta, a former candidate for the neighboring 5th district and a prominent critic of the Bergen GOP’s current leadership. “The other thing that I think is really starting to catch on is, when the voters smell backroom deals, they don’t like it.”
Burress has also proven to be far from a fundraising juggernaut, raising just $97,000 since launching her campaign in January. Pino, in the race for far longer, has raised a total of $367,000, but she’s already spent most of it on consultants and campaign infrastructure; both candidates ended the pre-primary period with more debt than cash on-hand.
That’s thrown up some alarm bells about whether either Republican will truly be able to compete with Pou, who has more than $1.5 million banked. Those are the kind of resources necessary for a competitive battle in the country’s most expensive media market, and if Pino and Burress can’t raise money at that level, there’s no guarantee national Republicans will bail them out.
Pou, an amiable ex-state legislator who was chosen to replace the late Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-Paterson) late in the 2024 cycle, has done a solid job shoring up her own base in the district, boxing out would-be primary challengers like Paterson Mayor André Sayegh. Republicans argue that Pou’s liberal voting record in Congress – she was the only Trump-district Democrat to vote against the Laken Riley Act, for example – is a huge liability, but it’s also helped to unite her own party behind her.
Republican pessimism about the 9th district grew deeper last November, when Democrat Mikie Sherrill carried the district by 20 points over Republican Jack Ciattarelli, essentially erasing Trump’s gains. Although Pou may have a tough time matching Sherrill’s numbers, the result was a sign that the district’s Hispanic voters aren’t a reliable part of the GOP coalition.
But despite their uphill climb – the Cook Political Report recently shifted the 9th district into the “Likely Democratic” column – New Jersey Republicans still correctly view Pino or Burress as their best chance of adding a new congresswoman this year.
“I think she’s got the best shot of anybody in New Jersey, as far as a Republican taking a seat from a Democrat,” Pallotta said of Pino. “But I still think it’s going to be a lift… That’s where you look to, who’s working this? And Rosie’s working it.”
“It’s really about getting the voters to come out,” Burress said. “They’re there, and when President Trump won, it was shown that they were there. I believe that they’re still there, and if they come out, it can be flipped.”
Prempeh, whose five-point loss to Pou in 2024 was the closest Republicans have come to winning the 9th district in a generation, was less sanguine. He said that in light of how the 9th district’s primary has shaken out, he has some regrets about ending his own campaign; perhaps, he said, this year will cast his own campaigns for the district in a better light.
“This is what the people wanted,” Prempeh said. “This is necessary for people to see that, maybe Billy wasn’t as bad as we thought.”