Do Republicans really have any hope of winning next year’s gubernatorial election in New Jersey? They’ve done it before, and State Sen. Jon Bramnick (R-Westfield) is confident that they can do it again.
Bramnick launched his campaign for governor last month, becoming the first Republican officially in the race to succeed term-limited Gov. Phil Murphy. His announcement came almost exactly 40 years after his very first run for office, a quickly scuttled campaign for city council in Plainfield.
In the four decades since then, Bramnick has served as a city councilman, a GOP municipal chairman, an assemblyman – including ten years as Assembly Minority Leader – and now, for the last two years, as a state senator. Along the way, he’s been encouraged countless times to run for governor, U.S. Senate, or the House of Representatives, but this is his first time attempting the leap to higher office.
His gubernatorial campaign will be a test of whether an openly moderate, anti-Trump politician can survive in today’s Republican Party. And it will also test whether Bramnick’s immense popularity in the well-off suburbs he’s dutifully represented for 20 years can translate into a successful gubernatorial campaign.
Bramnick has been in the public eye for a long, long time, and he’s stayed largely the same man throughout. Now he’ll find out whether New Jersey voters like what they see.
This is the third in a series of in-depth histories of New Jersey gubernatorial candidates. Previous profiles: Steve Fulop, Steve Sweeney
Plainfield victories, Westfield losses
By now, after 20 years in state politics, Bramnick is thoroughly associated with the tony suburbs of Union County. He lives in Westfield, and has spent his time in the legislature representing similarly fashionable towns like Summit, Millburn, and Madison.
But it’s not where he’s originally from. The son of a Plainfield stationery store owner (and the nephew of Leonard Morvay, who was active in Millburn Republican politics), Bramnick was born and raised in Plainfield, graduating from Plainfield High School in the early 1970s. He went to New York for college and law school and worked for a time as an assistant corporation counsel for the New York City government, but eventually returned to Plainfield to begin practicing law.
During the era he was growing up there, Plainfield was a city going through a major transformation. In the 1800s and early 1900s, with New Jersey’s suburbs booming and Plainfield the beneficiary of a brand-new New Jersey Transit stop, the city became a top destination for Wall Street workers and other wealthy commuters. (The vestiges of that era are still visible in some of the city’s opulent architecture.)
But in the second half of the 20th century, as the Great Migration reshaped the country’s demographics and caused a major influx of Black citizens to New Jersey, Plainfield’s existing Black community began to grow substantially. As of the 1950 Census, Plainfield was 13% Black; in 1970, the city was 40% Black, and by 1980 it was 60% Black, with white residents in the minority for the first time.
The expanding Black community led Plainfield, once strongly Republican, to become a Democratic stronghold. In the 1984 presidential election, Ronald Reagan lost the city by more than 40 percentage points even as he was winning New Jersey in a landslide.
It was in that rapidly changing demographic and political environment that Bramnick first entered the political scene, running for an at-large seat on the Plainfield City Council in 1984 – the same year he began operating the law firm he continues to run to this day. His first campaign didn’t last long; local Republicans instead opted to put forward Bill Coleman, a former NYPD officer and talk radio host, and Bramnick decided not to take on Coleman in a GOP primary.
Even in that very early effort, Bramnick was already highlighting his willingness to poke fun at himself. “You may have heard of me,” he said when he initially announced his campaign. “On the Plainfield High School 1966-1971 basketball team, I averaged about a point a game.”
Another opportunity for Bramnick came almost immediately, when Councilman G. Richard Malgram was elected as a Union County Freeholder in November 1984. Bramnick was appointed to Malgram’s 2nd Ward seat, which included much of Plainfield’s remaining white, Republican-leaning population.
Once in office, Bramnick worked to become a “one man war against crime,” using his council salary to fund a program giving police radios to civilian patrols. He also took it upon himself to audit the rest of the town government, including going through the Democratic mayor’s own expense reports.
His brand became strong enough to power him to two easy re-elections; he beat local Democratic club president Ken Robertson by 733 votes in the race for an unexpired term in 1985, and defeated Democrat Rupert Crawford 1,137 votes to 672 in 1987 for his first full term in 1987. After the 1987 elections, he was one of just two white councilmembers left in Plainfield.
In 1989, Republicans entreated Bramnick to run for mayor, the first of many times he would be considered for higher office. But he declined, and when his council seat came up again in 1991, he decided halfway through the campaign season that he wouldn’t seek re-election.
Bramnick’s sights, as it turned out, were set elsewhere. Soon after he left the council, the Bramnick family packed up and moved to Westfield, which was everything that Plainfield no longer was by the 1990s: mostly wealthy, mostly white, and Republican-leaning.
Within a few years of moving, Bramnick took his first stab at continuing his political career, this time on the Westfield Town Council. When Republican Councilwoman Gail Vernick departed her 1st Ward seat to run for mayor in 1998, Bramnick became the Republican nominee to succeed her, and he had good odds in a town that had never elected a Democratic majority to the town council in its history.
But Vernick’s mayoral campaign didn’t go well – she lost to incumbent Democratic mayor Thomas Jardim, who became the first Westfield Democrat to ever win a second mayoral term – and her council running mates faltered with her. Bramnick ended up losing to Democrat Carl Salisbury by 39 votes, 1,305 to 1,266, the first (and so far still only) electoral loss of his career.
Salisbury, for his part, had nothing but kind things to say about his vanquished opponent, telling the Westfield Leader that Bramnick “ran a really terrific, civilized, honest campaign.” Those weren’t just empty words; in 2015, Salisbury joined the law firm of Bramnick, Rodriguez, Grabas, Arnold & Mangan.
Convention chaos
Bramnick’s 1998 loss was a setback, but it proved to be a temporary one. With his law firm steadily growing in stature across Central Jersey (and the title of “New Jersey’s Funniest Lawyer” added to his resume), Bramnick was elected as the Westfield GOP municipal chairman in 2001, positioning himself as a rising star in a part of the state that loved electing moderate Republicans just like him.
In 2003, he got his chance to move up. Assemblyman Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) of the 21st legislative district was chosen to succeed State Sen. Rich Bagger (R-Westfield), who resigned from the legislature to take a job at Pfizer; that triggered a special election convention among the 21st district’s four county GOP organizations to choose Kean’s replacement in the Assembly.
Bramnick wanted to take Kean’s seat, and he wasn’t the only one. Thirteen different Republicans, among them a former assemblyman, a former county freeholder, and the sitting mayor of Westfield, all expressed interest in running, setting the stage for a turbulent county convention that pitted the 21st district’s four counties against one another.
Typically, when a legislative seat that straddles multiple counties needs to be filled at a special convention, all relevant party delegates gather and hold one combined vote without regard for county boundaries. But Republicans in Union County, which made up around two-thirds of the 21st district at the time, were nervous about losing their iron grip over the district by splitting their votes and allowing a candidate from Somerset, Morris, or Essex County to slip through instead.
In order to avoid that outcome, Union Republicans got a bit crafty. Immediately before the actual convention – scheduled by the Union GOP chairman – the Union GOP held its own mini-convention among the Union candidates, which at that point had been whittled down to three: Bramnick, former Cranford Committeeman Phil Morin, and Summit Councilwoman Kelly Hatfield.
After two ballots and 90 minutes, Bramnick won 99-96 over Morin. (That three-vote margin proved to be the critical turning point for Bramnick; if just two people had switched their votes, he might never have gotten another chance to kickstart a career in state politics.)
With Bramnick selected as their “official” choice, Union Republicans then rejoined the main convention, where three other candidates – former Assemblyman James Barry (R-Harding), Millburn Mayor Thomas McDermott, and Warren Township Planning Board Chairman Dan Gallic – were waiting.
Each of Bramnick’s three challengers had support in their respective home counties, but none could reasonably assemble the kind of coalition needed to topple the convention’s Union County delegation. Gallic tried to organize his own mini-convention to choose a unified nominee from Morris, Somerset, and Essex Counties, but he was rebuffed; his effort to ban candidates from running if they shared a hometown with another sitting legislator (Kean and Bramnick were both from Westfield) was also rejected.
In the end, Bramnick won the convention easily, getting 137 votes to Barry’s 51, McDermott’s 25, and Gallic’s 19. The result caused some bitterness, with the Westfield Leader writing that the convention’s non-Union GOP contingent “felt railroaded by their more numerous Union County brethren” – but there was little they could do. Bramnick took office a week later.
Legislative rise
Even as a newly minted assemblyman, though, Bramnick wasn’t quite out of the woods yet. Three Republican challengers stepped up to take on Bramnick and his seatmate, Assemblyman Eric Muñoz (R-Summit), in the 2003 Republican primary just a few months after Bramnick’s convention win: Barry, the former assemblyman, and a new duo of Betty LaRosa and Helen Ryan.
Running without party support, LaRosa and Ryan tried to do what many off-the-line challengers have done before and paint their opponents as creatures of the machine. Bramnick “was not elected by the people, he was chosen by the party bosses,” LaRosa said in a newspaper advertisement; re-electing him would just be a continuation of New Jersey’s “boys’ club.”
But ultimately, their attacks didn’t stick against the district’s two well-liked assemblymen. Bramnick and Muñoz, who had been in office since 2001, were renominated with a combined 66% of the vote, while LaRosa and Ryan got a combined 25% and Barry – who had left the legislature more than two decades earlier – got just 8%.
“We had a very positive race,” Bramnick said after the results came in. “Everybody worked hard and the voters decided to keep us in office.”
In those days, a primary win was all a Republican needed to hold onto the 21st legislative district. Running with Kean at the top of the ticket, Muñoz and Bramnick coasted to a double-digit win against Democrats Ellen Steinberg and Norman Albert, winning every town in the district except Springfield.
Every town in the district except for Springfield supported the Republican slate – even towns like Millburn and Summit, which today will sometimes vote for Democrats by 30 points or more. The suburbs of the 21st district were beginning their steady shift towards Democrats in that era, but those trends had not yet reached downballot races for state legislature, and voters were perfectly happy to re-elect the moderate trio of Kean, Muñoz, and Bramnick.
Unfortunately for the three legislators, they were too late to be a part of the New Jersey GOP’s legislative heyday. Democrats gained full control of the State Senate in the 2003 elections and flipped several Assembly seats, pushing the 21st district’s legislators into a Republican minority that was able to do little against the state’s increasingly powerful Democratic governing trifecta.
Absent much real legislative power, Bramnick began instead building up his credentials within the Republican Assembly caucus. He was appointed as the caucus’s assistant minority whip, a low-ranking leadership position, in 2006; he rose to Republican whip in 2007 and became the Republican conference leader, the caucus’s second-highest position, in 2009.
For nearly Bramnick’s entire time in the legislature, the Republican caucus had been led by Assembly Minority Leader Alex DeCroce (R-Parsippany). DeCroce had pushed out Paul DiGaetano (R-Nutley) after a disappointing showing in the 2003 elections and made himself into a widely liked figure in Trenton, with some calling him the statehouse’s “elder statesman.”
Then, in the waning hours of the legislature’s lame duck session in January 2012, DeCroce collapsed in a statehouse bathroom and died. His death was a total shock to his fellow legislators, most of whom were still milling about the statehouse when it happened – and it unexpectedly left the Republican Assembly caucus without a leader.
As it turned out, the decision on who should succeed him was not a tough one. A week after DeCroce’s death, the Republican caucus elected Bramnick as their new Minority Leader unanimously and with little fanfare. With nine years in the Assembly under his belt, Bramnick was now the chamber’s most powerful Republican.
Biding time
Back at home, Bramnick consistently won re-election by solid margins, with state Democrats never bothering to target him or his running mates. In March 2009, Muñoz tragically died of a heart ailment; he was succeeded by his widow, Nancy Muñoz, who easily defeated two Long Hill politicians at a special election convention.
Those two challengers, Long Hill school board member Bruce Meringolo and Long Hill Mayor George Vitureira, both ran again in the 2009 Republican primary (separately from one another), but their support was limited almost exclusively to Long Hill, and Bramnick and Muñoz won easily. That race remains the last time Bramnick has had to face a fellow Republican in any election.
Another brief political headache arose in 2011, when redistricting put Bramnick and Muñoz in the same district as Assemblywoman Denise Coyle (R-Bernards), a two-term Somerset County legislator. A deal was struck to push Coyle out and allow Union County to keep both of the 21st district’s Assembly seats until the next open seat arose, thus avoiding a primary. (That deal was reneged on in 2021, when Bramnick left the Assembly but Union Republicans refused to concede the seat to Somerset.)
As his stature in state politics rose, Bramnick established a brand that both Democrats and Republicans found difficult to assail. He was conservative on many of the issues his suburban constituents cared most about: lowering property taxes, fighting crime, and pushing back on the affordable housing requirements established by the New Jersey Supreme Court. On hot-button issues like abortion and gun control, though, Bramnick was a committed moderate.
Those qualities put Bramnick at the top of a lot of lists for higher office. He was seriously and frequently mentioned as a possible contender for governor and for U.S. Senate; when Rep. Mike Ferguson (R-New Providence) said he would retire in 2007, Bramnick was cited by PolitickerNJ as the “leading candidate” for his seat before deciding not to run.
And in 2009, Bramnick was on a four-person shortlist to be Chris Christie’s lieutenant governor, and he may well have gotten it had Christie not decided that he’d rather run alongside a woman. (The spot ultimately went to then-Monmouth County Sheriff Kim Guadagno.)
It also helped that essentially everyone – from Democratic legislative leaders to conservative Republicans in his conference – basically liked the guy. Bramnick never felt that political disagreements needed to lead to personal animosity, and the result was that he had few enemies and many friends.
But there’s one guy Bramnick really doesn’t like: Donald Trump. And as it turned out, Trump nearly proved to be Bramnick’s electoral undoing.
Troubled waters
Bramnick wasn’t always the anti-Trump warrior he is now. He, like most New Jersey Republicans, was a supporter of Christie’s 2016 presidential campaign; when Christie dropped out and endorsed Trump in February 2016, Bramnick said he was inclined to follow suit.
“I intend to support the governor’s choice here, because Trump has the most nexus with New Jersey,” Bramnick told the New York Times. “He has golf courses here. He knows New Jersey pretty well. There’s no real connection between the other candidates and New Jersey.”
But he never actually endorsed Trump, and once Trump got into office and demonstrated that his insults and bluster weren’t just a campaign-season act, Bramnick started to distance himself further from the president. In doing so, he was following the lead of his legislative district, which supported Hillary Clinton over Trump by a 53%-43% margin.
“I am not a member of a cult,” Bramnick said in 2019 of his differences with Trump. “I am a member of a political party.”
Heading into the 2017 legislative elections, with Trump and Christie both broadly unpopular among New Jersey voters, few believed that the 21st district would be especially vulnerable. State Democrats, who had their hands full with a variety of other pickup opportunities around the state, didn’t think the 21st district’s voters would be willing to oust Bramnick, Kean, or Muñoz simply because they disapproved of Donald Trump.
The two Democrats running against Bramnick and Muñoz for the Assembly, Lacey Rzeszowski and Union County Freeholder Bruce Bergen (D-Springfield), thought differently. Rzeszowski in particular put together an unconventionally strong campaign, raising more than $200,000 and posing with a cardboard cutout of Christie to remind voters of their unpopular sitting governor.
It almost worked. With Trump and Christie dragging Republicans down all over the state, Rzeszowski got 24.5% of the vote, just 1,554 votes behind Muñoz; Bramnick was a little safer, but his 26.4% was still by far his worst election showing since arriving in the legislature. The narrow victory for Bramnick and Muñoz also came with a huge symbolic blow: for the first time ever, they lost Summit and Westfield, the two towns that had once formed the backbone of Union County’s GOP base.
And since New Jersey assemblymembers are only elected to two-year terms, winning one campaign meant immediately preparing for the next. From the beginning, it was clear that come 2019, Bramnick and Muñoz were in for a tougher fight than they had ever faced before.
Democrats, who chose New Providence Democratic municipal chair Stacey Gunderman and former congressional candidate Lisa Mandelblatt as their nominees, put the 21st district at the top of their target list – and they had several factors working in their favor.
For one, the legislature passed a voting reform in August 2019 that would automatically send vote-by-mail ballots to any voter who voted by mail in 2018 or 2017. The reform meant that more unlikely voters might be casting ballots in an off-off-year election than before, and since mail voters leaned Democratic, that spelled trouble for many Republican Assembly candidates.
For another, Bramnick and Muñoz had to deal with the presence of a pair of “independent conservative” candidates, former Scotch Plains Mayor Martin Marks and former Union County Democratic Chairman Harry Pappas, who said that the two incumbents were nothing but stooges for the liberal agenda in Trenton. Marks and Pappas were positioned to siphon conservative voters away from Bramnick and Muñoz; in fact, they privately admitted that was precisely their goal.
And in a heater of an October surprise, the New Jersey Globe reported that Bramnick’s law firm specifically advertised to those accused of sexual assault that they would “discredit your accuser.” In the midst of the #MeToo movement, the statement was widely excoriated by state politicians; Bramnick apologized and took that part of his firm’s website down.
All those setbacks were enough to make Bramnick the underdog for much of the race. But he responded with an aggressive campaign that targeted individual voters with mailers highlighting his work in their hometowns and worked to build up its own vote-by-mail system to respond to the new Democratic-sponsored reforms.
The race turned Bramnick into something he usually wasn’t: a cutthroat politician. Over the protests of some Republicans in other competitive districts, Bramnick funneled money towards the 21st district via Assembly Republican Victory, a leadership PAC he controlled. And he was even willing to knife Muñoz, with whom he had never been especially close, sending out mailers and airing TV ads that declined to mention her existence. (He eventually added her back in to some of his later ads.)
The end result was definitive: Bramnick and Muñoz won re-election, even doing slightly better than they had in 2017. They lost ground in Westfield but improved in most other towns, giving them a combined 51%-47% win over Gunderman and Mandelblatt; Marks and Pappas barely registered with 1% of the vote each. Moderate conservatism in the suburbs of Union County would live to see another day.
The leap upwards
Not too long after Bramnick’s hard-fought win, his longtime running mate Kean decided that, after 20 years, he was done with the New Jersey Statehouse. Kean had narrowly lost a 2020 congressional race to Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-Ringoes) and was gunning for a rematch in 2022, and he chose to step down from the Senate to focus exclusively on that race.
From the moment Kean first broached the idea of retiring, Bramnick was a shoo-in for his seat. While some more right-wing members of the party had grown increasingly frustrated with his moderate stances, party leaders had no qualms about elevating him to the Senate, and he won both GOP conventions and the eventual primary uncontested.
The 2021 general election was a bit of a tougher fight, but not by much. Democrats, lacking any real confidence that they could beat Bramnick and focusing instead on South Jersey races, put forward Roselle Park Mayor Joe Signorello III as their nominee and then promptly abandoned him. (Eddie Donnelly, the president of the New Jersey Firefighters Mutual Benevolent Association, might have gotten more party support, but he ended his campaign before the primary.)
After a sleepy election season, Bramnick beat Signorello 54%-46%, flipping Westfield back into the GOP column by all of eight votes. Bramnick, Muñoz, and newly elected Assemblywoman Michele Matsikoudis (R-New Providence) were the only three Republicans anywhere in the state to win a district carried by Gov. Phil Murphy.
Bramnick’s fortunes were boosted further when his seat was redrawn as part of the decennial redistricting process. Democrats and Republicans on the Legislative Apportionment Commission drew a compromise map that protected most incumbents, including Bramnick; the 21st district was reshaped to include more of Somerset County, turning it into a district that Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli would have narrowly won in 2021.
Upon arriving in the more stately Senate, Bramnick – freed from the confines of leading an increasingly conservative Assembly GOP caucus – started to let his moderate flag truly fly. In his 2023 re-election campaign, Bramnick ran TV ads bashing both left-wingers and right-wingers, and he’s been happy to poke Trump-aligned members of his party when he wants to.
“In order to win statewide or in swing districts, we must be trusted as a political party by unaffiliated and moderate Democrats,” Bramnick wrote in a New Jersey Globe op-ed attacking then-State Senate candidate Steve Lonegan. “We cannot be branded as the ‘Trump’ party or deny the existence of the Jan 6 riot at the Capitol. We cannot deny the results of elections where 60 federal courts made 60 independent decisions rejecting the cases that claimed widespread voter fraud.”
Democrats had even less hope of defeating Bramnick in 2023 than they had two years earlier, and their candidate, former Bernardsville Councilman Matt Marino, was a true sacrificial lamb. Bramnick ended up winning 53%-46% – a decent margin, though one modest enough that it should make Republicans worried about their ability to hold the 21st district in a bad year for the party.
Which brings things to today. Even before he won re-election, Bramnick was already signaling that he had bigger things on his mind. After decades of being proposed for higher office – in fact, more than 30 years after first being put forward as a potential Plainfield mayoral candidate – he was finally ready to make the leap.
At his gubernatorial campaign launch last month, Bramnick brought together an array of politicians who represented the long arc of his political life. There was former U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, who has come to symbolize anti-Trump sentiment in the Republican Party. There were Muñoz and Matsikoudis, Bramnick’s two stalwart legislative companions.
And there were John Campbell and Gwen Crews, who many decades ago served with Bramnick on the Plainfield City Council and who have gotten to witness Bramnick’s steady rise over the years.
“Jon cut his political teeth in Plainfield,” Campbell said. “He’s originally from Plainfield, and he never forgot his roots. Even though he can walk with kings, queens, presidents, and prime ministers, he never lost his common touch.”