FILE PHOTO
Derby native JR Romano faces three challengers for leadership of the state Republican Party.
An intimate and intense political campaign comes to a close Tuesday night at a banquet hall in Farmington: Four candidates are competing to be Republican state chairman, a contest in which only 74 Republicans are eligible to vote, and the winner is guaranteed little in the way of prestige, power or resources.
J.R. Romano, 40, a political operative elected to the first of his two-year terms in 2015, faces three challengers who say Romano bears significant responsibility for the disastrous 2018 election cycle in which Democrats retained every statewide and congressional seat and tightened their control of the General Assembly.
