Tracy DiFrancesco launches bid for Somerset GOP chair

New Jersey Globe

By David Wildstein

Watchung Republican leader will challenge Tim Howes in June

Watchung Republican Municipal Chairman Tracy DiFrancesco will run for Somerset County GOP Chairman when the party reorganizes in June, setting up a showdown with the incumbent, Timothy Howes.

“I am running to restore the trust, transparency, and leadership of the organization in order for us to win elections again,” said DiFrancesco, the county GOP vice chair. “We can and must do better.”

Last year, over 150 Republican county committee members signed a letter calling for Howes’ ouster, and municipal chairs in Hillsborough, Somerville, and Branchburg asked him to resign. He refused.

DiFrancesco points to four consecutive losses since Howes took over in 2020 – the GOP almost won a county commissioner seat in 2021 – and to late filings with the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission.

“Our candidate recruitment has been negatively impacted, and fundraising practically paralyzed, as potential candidates and donors are uneasy being associated with the organization under the current leadership,” she said. “Not surprisingly, as a result, the organization has lost every election under his leadership, the worst election record in county history. Bottom line is we cannot move forward if we re-elect the current chair. It is time for change.”

DiFrancesco, 52, has been around politics for most of her life. Her father, Donald DiFrancesco, served as governor of New Jersey from 2001 to 2002 after 26 years in the legislature, including a decade as Senate President.

She pledged to “get back to Republicans winning again.”

“Otherwise, we will continue to slide in the wrong direction, which will greatly impact our local I promise to restore faith in our organization with 100% transparency and strong leadership,” said DiFrancesco. “We must also prioritize fundraising so we can run strong campaigns and assist our local candidates.”

In her announcement, she invoked two legendary former Somerset County GOP chairs, Luke Gray and Jack Penn; like DiFrancesco, they both started as leaders of the Watchung Republican Party before leading the county organization at a time when Somerset was one of the state’s dominant GOP counties.

“These are not just promises. I have a record to prove it,” DiFrancesco stated.  “I turned a Democrat-controlled governing body into an all-Republican one. I did it the old-fashioned way — I raised ten times more money than my predecessors and built a grass-roots organization that turned the town red.”

Howes, 63, became county chairman in 2020 after Al Gaburro retired. He was re-elected to a second term in 2022 with 91% of the vote against Jeffrey Grant, a former Tea Party leader and State Senate candidate.

Somerset County has shifted dramatically toward Democrats over the last seven years. Steve Peter won a county clerk race in 2017 in a 407-vote upset victory over GOP incumbent Brett Radi. Democrats won two county commissioner seats in 2018, one in 2019 to take control, and two more in 2020. Democrats won the sheriff race in 2018 and the surrogate post in 2020.

The county has 26,366 more Democrats than Republicans; in 2009, the GOP registration edge was 879. The only two state legislators from Somerset County are Democrats, and Somerset has gone Democratic in the last four presidential elections.

In better times, Gray ran a formidable political machine out of his floral shop on Route 22 in Watchung for thirty years before he died in 1984. He only lost control once, in 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson had coattails.

In 1965, Gov. Dick Hughes carried Somerset, and a Democratic challenger came within 400 votes of beating a GOP state senator. But Republican Jack Ewing, the CEO of Abercombie & Fitch, beat Democratic Freeholder Grace Gurasic by more than 4,000 votes to end the Democratic majority on the Freeholder board after just one year.

After that, only two Democrats scored countywide victories until Peter’s upset victory in 2017.

In 1973, a 26-year-old North Plainfield Councilman, Frank Nero, won a freeholder seat in the Watergate-related Democratic landslide. Nero didn’t seek re-election in 1976 – he lost a race for Congress against Rep. Millicent Fenwick (R-Bernardsville) — but Democrat Michael Ceponis kept the seat in Democratic hands. Ceponis won again in 1979 but lost in 1982 when Christine Todd Whitman beat him.