Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Ellen Lederer-DeFrancesco, 54, is a Democrat running to address key concerns for residents of Assembly District 14 and to create a cleaner, more affordable future.
“Helping people has always been important in my life,” she said.
Lederer-DeFrancesco has lived in Oceanside for 14 years with her husband, and Air Force veteran, and they have two teenage daughters and two rescue dogs. Ellen has two master’s degrees and a doctoral degree in education, and taught young people for seven years.
Lederer-DeFrancesco has campaigned energetically: she maintains a weekly newsletter, and has gone door to door to speak with voters to better understand their beliefs, problems and priorities.
“I am running because my opponent has been in office for over 22 years and no longer goes to Albany,” she said. “We pay for him to stay at home and collect a paycheck — we have no representation.”
According to Lederer-DeFrancesco, some of the most important issues in Assembly District 14 are the high cost of living, air and water quality, and women’s reproductive rights.
“I am running because myself and my neighbors deserve better,” she said. “We all deserve better. We deserve to have somebody up there who is fighting for us.”
As a parent of two, Lederer-DeFrancesco knows that raising a family can be expensive. “In my first career, child care cost more than my paycheck,” she said.
Her parents fell ill, so she stepped in as a caregiver, which gave her experience in dealing with the challenges that seniors in South Shore communities face.
“Senior care is very important to me,” Lederer-DeFrancesco said. “I was a caregiver for both my parents.”
“We have seniors who just can’t afford to stay here, so we need affordable housing,” she said. “We need to not only keep our families here, but we need young people to stay here.”
In order to make life in Assembly District 14 more affordable, Lederer-DeFrancesco found an opportunity to reduce utility bills.
“There’s everyday things that we pay for that can come down,” she said. “And here’s two examples: our electric company and our water company are private — they are for-profit. They do not care about the ratepayers, they care about their shareholders.”
To improve the health of the environment, Lederer-DeFrancesco supports gradually including cleaner forms of energy to the economy and improving recycling programs.
She supports Proposal 1 in next month’s election, which would revise the First Amendment to the Constitution to protect the civil rights of people based on their pregnancy status, ethnicity, and age, in addition to other categories.
Regarding reproductive health, Lederer-DeFrancesco made her message clear in a conversation with reporters during a Herald Roundtable event.
“Women do not have to die,” she said. “Women do not have to bleed out.”
She advocates for women — historically, a disenfranchised voting group — to make their voices heard in this election.
“It’s recent history that we have been entitled to get the right to vote,” Lederer-DeFrancesco said. “We need to. Women have fought really hard and really long. Honor those women who fought for us by voting.
“To everybody else who thinks that they can sit it out because their vote doesn’t count: every single vote counts,” Lederer-DeFrancesco said. “Please honor the system and democracy and go vote. It’s everybody’s duty to get out and vote and to be part of the democratic process.”
Lederer-DeFrancesco aspires to work with local Republicans to achieve her policy goals. To voters and policy makers across the aisle, she has a message: “We are more alike than we are different,” she said.
