A former Trump adviser — backed by a Bucks County venture capitalist — says he’s running for Pennsylvania’s GOP chair

Pennsylvania GOP chair Lawrence Tabas has a challenger for state party leader.

Ted Christian, who lives in Bucks County and worked as state director for the Trump campaign in 2016, announced his intention to run for the position Friday during the annual political swank-fest in Manhattan known as Pennsylvania Society.

Minutes later, Paul Martino, a Bucks County venture capitalist who funded a slate of mostly conservative suburban school board members in 2021, said at the same Young Republicans event that he will back Christian, 56, with a $100,000 investment in his campaign.

Campaigning for state party chair is somewhat rare, but Martino said supporting Christian is his reason for reentering the political scene. Christian’s interest in the position became known among Republican committee members in recent months.

“There’s a generational shift that needs to happen in the party,” Martino said. “As old as Trump is, he’s made inroads, and I feel like our current leadership, with the ‘wait your turn’ philosophy, is never gonna get us there.”

Tabas, 71, the longtime Philadelphia-based general counsel to the Republican Party, has held his post as party chair since 2019 and has not said whether he will seek reelection. He did not immediately return a request for comment Friday.

Tabas was the only candidate nominated in 2019, and won the chairmanship unanimously as the party reeled from scandal. He replaced former chairman Val DiGiorgio, of Chester County, who resigned following allegations of sexual harassment.

Despite bruising losses, his party did not try to oust him after the 2022 midterms. The chair is elected by about 350 state committee people. More people could jump in, especially if Tabas opts not to run.

“Most of the state committee members will wait to see what Lawrence Tabas wants to do,” state committeeman and longtime GOP strategist Charlie Gerow said. “And if he determines that he doesn’t want to seek reelection, I believe there will be other significant candidates.”

For all the hand-wringing over the future of the Democratic Party following losses this November, it’s the Republican Party that looks poised for a leadership referendum. That’s partly due to the election cycle.

While Tabas is up this year, Democratic chair state Sen. Sharif Street is not up for reelection until 2026, and Democrats have made no indication of an imminent leadership shake-up.

The Republican Party won big at the top of the ticket in Pennsylvania this year, flipping the state for Trump, sending Republican Dave McCormick to the Senate, and adding two GOP members of Congress to the House ranks.

But at the local statehouse level, Democrats largely hung on. And Christian would bring a more direct tie to Trump as he prepares for a second presidency.

“How in the world does Trump win by three points, and you win all the rowhouses, and you don’t get back a single seat in the statehouse?” Martino said. “That’s a failure of leadership.”

Christian, a former director of New Jersey’s Republican state committee, also served on Trump’s first transition team and worked on his 2020 campaign as a senior adviser.

Martino, a father in the Central Bucks School District, became a known political player in 2021 when he spent half a million dollars backing a slate of largely Republican school board members, an effort he framed in opposition to COVID school closures.

He poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaigns for Republican candidates in the Bucks County school board race in 2023 when Democrats flipped control of the board.