Republicans in New Jersey’s 9th congressional district have a new candidate in town: Tiffany Burress, a Passaic County attorney and the wife of former National Football League wide receiver Plaxico Burress.
Burress, a first-time candidate who’s relatively new to the world of politics, will seek to take on Rep. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon), a longtime New Jersey politician seeking re-election to a second term in Congress. Pou’s Paterson-based 9th district voted for Donald Trump in 2024, putting it on Republican target lists, and Burress is already training her fire on the freshman congresswoman.
“I built my career outside of politics, in the private sector. That real-world experience is exactly what this district needs in Washington,” Burress said in her campaign announcement. “But for fifty years, Nellie Pou has made a career out of politics and party insiders. After decades in government, she’s become part of the political class that is increasingly disconnected from everyday life in North Jersey.”
Burress’s entrance comes with five months to go in a GOP primary that’s already been underway for months; her main competition, Clifton Councilwoman Rosie Pino, began running for the seat in July.
Pino, however, was not able to use her earlier campaign launch to build up much of a head start. She had raised around $150,000 as of last October – fundraising reports from the end of 2025 have not been filed yet – and local GOP leaders in the 9th district have mostly kept their distance from her campaign.
One other Republican, Billy Prempeh, had originally planned to run for the district once again after being the party’s unsuccessful nominee in 2020, 2022, and 2024. But Prempeh abruptly bowed out of the race in December, alleging that the Republican establishment “wants someone with strings” and attacking both Pino and Burress in the process.
A former college track star in her native Pennsylvania, Burress works as a workers’ compensation and personal injury attorney at a New Jersey law firm. “Every day in court, I fight for people who feel like the system is stacked against them, taking on insurance companies and big corporations that delay, deny, and deflect responsibility when people are hurt on the job or injured through no fault of their own,” Burress said in her campaign announcement.
She’s perhaps best known, though, via her husband Plaxico, who spent four seasons with the New York Giants and 14 seasons in the NFL overall; the pair once appeared together in a 2014 episode of Celebrity Wife Swap. (Plaxico has also dealt with some legal troubles stemming from a self-inflicted accidental shooting in 2008, for which he ultimately served 20 months in prison, and state tax charges in 2015.)
The Burresses have two children and live in Totowa, a Passaic County suburb a few miles outside the boundaries of the 9th district.
If elected, Burress – or Pino, for that matter – would make history as the first-ever person of color to represent New Jersey in Congress as a Republican. Both would also be the first Republican congresswoman from New Jersey since Marge Roukema left office in 2003.
Defeating Pou, though, may be a harder task than Republicans initially thought in the aftermath of the 2024 election.
That November, as the GOP made historic gains with Latino voters across New Jersey and the country, Trump narrowly carried the 9th district, previously thought to be a safely Democratic seat. Pou, then a state senator who was tapped to run for Congress at the last minute following the death of Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-Paterson), beat the underfunded and largely ignored Prempeh by a 51%-46% margin, and Republicans quickly began strategizing about how to take her down in 2026.
Many of Trump’s gains in places like the 9th district, however, may have been more ephemeral than Republicans had hoped. In last year’s gubernatorial election, Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill won the district by nearly 20 percentage points, reverting it to its Democratic roots.
Pou also spent 2025 building up a serious campaign operation – something she’d never had to do before – and raised more than a million dollars to defend her seat. By entering the race relatively late in the cycle, Burress will have a lot of work to do in a relatively short period of time, both to get past Pino in the GOP primary and to unseat Pou in the general election.
In her launch ad, Burress faults Pou for living a “charmed life” in government jobs, and argues that the 9th district is in need of a change.
“Doors didn’t just open for me – I busted through them, becoming a successful lawyer, a wife, and mother of two,” Burress says. “When my party is wrong, I’ll say it, and bust down doors to fix it. You won’t get that from Nellie and 50 years of partisan politics.”
