Of course Chris Christie is running for president.
No, he didn’t declare his candidacy or announce an exploratory committee. He isn’t living part-time in New Hampshire like he did when he was still governor of New Jersey. He hasn’t even told his old crew to be ready to hit the road again.
But make no mistake about it, at this moment in the late summer of 2021, Chris Christie’s eyes are fixed on another White House run — even as his name is barely a blip in the early horse race polls, the very mention of it angers his many detractors, and so much has to happen to his party’s political landscape to plow a path for him.
Christie’s run in 2016 was doomed by everything from Donald Trump and how poorly New Jersey’s economy performed during his governorship to his inability to cash in on favors he’d given fellow Republican governors and how so many GOP voters hated how he warmly greeted Barack Obama in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
Add to that his retirement from Jersey politics as the most unpopular governor in state history, Bridgegate and Beachgate (and that meme!), and his declaration that Trump lost the election and was to blame for the “reprehensible and un-American” failed insurrection on Jan. 6, and there’s a really big hill to climb for 2024.
But Christie and those in his corner truly believe he can emerge again. He’s on record in a series of interviews with friendly media dating back to 2019, saying, with proper caveats, that he’s interested running, and would do so even if Trump tries it again (He has not replied to weeks of my requests for comment).
And on Thursday, he gives a speech at the site where the Christie-for-President talk took on a life of its own for the very first time a decade ago: the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California — a prime stop for Republicans wishing to launch a White House run.
So what could be ahead, and how could Christie Presidential Campaign II be different in 2024? Here’s how it can all play out for this never-dull Jersey politician.
It all begins with a book
A book deal is a classic precursor to any nationwide run. Christie, who was pretty much the only candidate not to have a book prior to his first run isn’t being subtle in the title of his upcoming tome: “Republican Rescue: Saving the Party from Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden.”
His next one might as well be titled “Vote for Me.”
The Christie argument is to take the GOP away from all that conspiracy talk that alienates so many, and focus all its attention on “extreme” President Joe Biden. He’ll save the party from being irrelevant with a formula of uniting the right and those moderates who are abandoning the GOP and winning back independent voters. He’ll pitch pragmatism and competence.
The first big forum to lay out this case will be Thursday’s speech at the Reagan Library, where in 2011 a woman in the audience begged him, to no avail, to run the following year. The library’s series of speakers for its events is filled with a who’s who of potential Republican contenders, and expect Christie to take full advantage.
Then he’ll repeat it again and again as the book will be published in November and the publicity campaign is unleashed.
Of course, there’s a little problem with this:
Donald Trump
Christie was the first major Republican to endorse Donald Trump in 2016. Their relationship is complicated. The Associated Press
Christie’s relationship with the even-more-volatile-than-he-is former president is, well ... complicated. And it’s the elephant in the room when talking about any 2024 run. Let’s break it down in five parts.
1. I Shoulda Been The Contender!
But for Donald Trump, Chris Christie would have faced Hillary Clinton in 2016. That’s how Christie views it.
“I absolutely believe if Trump had not gotten into the race I think we would have won,” Christie told me during his last on-the-record interview as governor. He’s often repeated how his internal polling in New Hampshire showed nearly 40% of Trump supporters said Christie was their second pick. And how when his wife went door to door, people would tell her they love her husband, but that Trump was their guy.
Christie thought he was the one who would tap into voter anger. Remember the campaign slogan? “Telling it like it is.” Christie channeled his inner Howard Cosell and pitched himself to voters as the brash politician who would call balls and strikes.
Trump, he concedes, did it better.
“What won it for him was his toughness and his outsider nature,” Christie said in the January 2018 interview. “They wanted someone down there who was no-nonsense, wasn’t gonna take any crap and was going to whip Washington into shape.”
2. Didn’t Christie say Trump lost the election?
What do you do when you say Trump lost and a majority of your potential base believes he won? A May Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll showed 53% of Republicans believe Trump is the “true president” and Biden only occupies the White House because of illegal voting.
Every single Republican running for office in the mid-term elections and in the 2024 race will be asked the same question: Did Trump lose the election and did Biden win fairly?
Not only did Christie say in November 2020 that the election was over and that Biden won, he didn’t mince words when talking about Trump’s legal team that was challenging the results.
“Quite frankly, the conduct of the president’s legal team has been a national embarrassment,” he said at the time on “ABC News This Week.”
“They allege fraud outside the courtroom, but inside the courtroom, they don’t plead fraud and they don’t argue fraud.”
Current polls show the people Christie will need to attract don’t agree with him, so what now?
His response: Move on.
“We’ve got to stop looking in the rearview mirror. 2020 is over and look, I don’t know everything that happened in the election but I know this much, Joe Biden’s living in the White House, he’s signing executive orders and he’s speaking before joint sessions of Congress. He’s the president,” Christie said in May on the podcast “Ruthless.”
“2020 is over and we’ve got to stop worrying about what happened in 2020,” he said.
3. And didn’t he call the Jan. 6 failed insurrection ‘awful’?
Christie didn’t mince words the day pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol as Congress certified the election.
“The president caused this protest to occur. He’s the only one who can make it stop,” Christie said on ABC News as the siege was ongoing.
“The president has to come out and tell his supporters to leave the Capitol grounds and to allow the Congress to do their business peacefully,” he said. “And anything short of that is an abrogation of his responsibility.”
His attempts to get in touch with Trump during the mayhem were unsuccessful, he added. And even after Trump released a video later telling his supporters to “go home in peace,” Christie still said at the time it wasn’t enough.
“The office you hold is bigger than you,” Christie said. “The responsibilities in that office are bigger than you and your own personal interests and I think that what that video showed was that the president was still placing his personal interests than of the interest of the country.”
He still blames Trump, saying he “ginned (it) up over the course of months” going back to the summer of 2020 when “he was talking about the election being stolen.” And he refers to it as “an awful moment in our country’s history.”
Now Christie, who led the “lock her up” mock trial of Hillary Clinton at the Republican National Convention, says it’s time to quit living in the past.
“Losing parties look backwards. Winning parties look through the windshield,” Christie often says.
Will Trump loyalists forget?
4. But wait ... Christie keeps saying he’s a Trump guy
While he will say in interviews that Trump bears responsibility for the riot, Christie will just as quickly tell people how he’s Trump’s guy.
He was Trump’s first major endorsement. They’ve been friends for two decades. Christie helped lead Trump’s transition. Trump tapped Christie to head his commission on fighting opioid addiction. Christie did all that help with debate prep.
Those are all the things he lists off in recent interviews in a not-so-subtle attempt to shore up his pro-Trump bonafides (he leaves out the part where Trump dumped him from the transition after he won and how he caught the coronavirus that sent him to the intensive care unit shortly after he helped Trump in debate prep).
In late April, Christie appeared on Fox News and was asked by Sean Hannity how he would grade Trump’s presidency.
“Overall, I’d give the president an A,” Christie said without hesitation.
And that after he gave himself only a B-plus as governor.
5. When Trump talks, his followers listen
Good luck to any GOP presidential hopeful getting out from behind Trump’s shadow. And if Trump doesn’t run for president again, any Republican who caught Trump’s ire should watch out.
Herein lies a problem for Christie. He may want to move on from the riot at the Capitol and focus on policy and other stuff, but Trump isn’t the forgiving sort. The two hadn’t spoken for months after the insurrection, according to people with knowledge of their relationship.
“Chris has been very disloyal, but that’s okay,” Trump said in an interview with Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker for their book on Trump’s final year. “I helped Chris Christie a lot. He knows that more than anybody, but I helped him a lot. But he’s been disloyal.”
Ouch.
Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, argues Christie’s biggest advantage at the moment is that he’s keeping Trump at bay and out of his line of sight considering the former president’s unique ability to metaphorically “explode” any rising star’s lead in early polls “in an instant.”
“They all have the same problem with Trump,” Sabato said, referring to Trump’s intense base. “If Christie starts rising in the polls, Trump is gonna find 10 other reasons why he doesn’t like him.”
The non-Trump road bumps
The story of Christie’s 2016 presidential campaign isn’t a long one. Single-digit poll numbers kept him off the main stage of some early debates. Tenth place in Iowa, sixth in New Hampshire, and it was ballgame over. Back to Jersey, dream done.
But while Donald Trump, as he’s argued, certainly stole his thunder, Christie had other problems from the get-go, including a bad economy that hurt his record as governor, and the Bridgegate scandal, which lured other candidates into the race and robbed him of big-money donors.
Perhaps all that time out of office will sweep these into the distant past, but will other big problems from 2016 continue to have life in a 2024 campaign?
Such as this photo with Obama:
Christie was happy to greet President Obama when he came to survey the damage from Superstorm Sandy. Images like this haunted him in the GOP primary. Governor's office | Tim Larsen
Christie says a major reason he didn’t get a big boost in the Iowa caucuses four years ago was because then-Gov. Terry Branstad did not endorse him, even though Christie had courted him for years and sent big gobs of money to his re-election campaign as head of the Republican Governors Association.
But whenever I spoke to Iowa Republicans, they were clear in why they wouldn’t support the New Jersey governor.
“Birds who flock, fly together,” then 65-year-old John Ymker, who ran a pork plant, told a small group of reporters who gathered at the door of the Hole N’ the Wall Lodge in Akron, Iowa where former controversial U.S. Rep. Steve King held his annual pheasant hunt fundraiser.
What bothered Ymker about Christie? It wasn’t the Bridgegate scandal, which barely registered with GOP voters. It was his embrace of President Barack Obama in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, just before the November presidential election.
Countless Republicans across the state offered the same assessment.
Then in New Hampshire, his Republican foes plastered the New Hampshire airwaves with attack ads that featured photos of Christie with Obama.
In truth, there was never an “Obama hug,” though they did shoot some hoops at a Shore boardwalk amusement stand when the president returned to survey the rebuild the following year. And Christie made big waves when he slammed Republican congressional leaders for dragging their feet on providing Sandy aid.
At the time, Jersey voters who knew he was defending them loved it. But Christie soon learned how much Republican die-hards hated it. And the years since have brought even more political demonization. Even though Christie was sharply critical of Obama’s policies, his opponents used that picture against his thousands of words.
Christie has to hope this will be seen as ancient history.
And there’s this ...
This photo launched countless memes. Andrew Mills | NJ Advance Media
Of course, the attacks the second time around will be even worse, especially if Christie is seen as a true threat by his opponents.
Christie will have to contend with how Trump loyalists view him, the stuff his opponents whacked him on in 2016 (including whether or not he’s a “true conservative”) and the fact that he left office as one of the most unpopular governors in America.
And there’s that photo of him sitting on the beach he closed during a state shutdown that became the meme seen ‘round the world.
It keeps resurfacing, even this year, mashing up with memes of Bernie Sanders donning mittens at Biden’s inauguration — and with pretty much anything else that happens in the world.
Will voters on the fence distinguish the social media joke from the serious candidate?
We may find out. And of course he’s not the only potential candidate with a meme: there’s one of Ted Cruz dragging his luggage on a plane to Cancun as millions in Texas were without power.
Is he yesterday’s news?
Christie didn’t even register among New Hampshire Republicans in a recent poll of possible 2024 contenders.
Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Kristi Noem, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo and “other.” No Chris Christie.
And his name didn’t come up when the Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC, did its own straw poll.
“This idea that you made an impression on voters’ minds is, I think, kidding yourself,” said Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center that conducted the poll.
“Unless you come in the close second, you’re yesterday’s news,” he said. “People forget who you are that quickly.”
But Wayne Lesperance, provost and professor of political science at New England College, says uphill climb in 2024 notwithstanding, it’s not crazy to think he could have some sort of shot in New Hampshire.
He said there’s “very clearly” the Trump-supporting Republican contingent in New Hampshire but also an emergence of most centrist, independent Republican.
“As governor and as a candidate two cycles ago, the way he positioned himself the more pragmatic, middle of the lane Republican. It seems to me there’s a lane there,” he said. “He has much of a chance of a lot of others that I’ve seen.”
HOW CAN 2024 BE DIFFERENT?
Christie never got traction in 2016 and there are lots of odds stacked against a 2024 run.
So what will it take for a 2024 candidacy to click, and what does he bring to the table?
He’s a gifted politician
Christie had a viral moment in New Hampshire when he told a story at a town hall about how a former classmate of his succumbed to drug addiction and later died, and how the country needed to change how it thinks of addiction. It’s exhibit A in his ability to connect with people and was a story I’ve heard him tell countless times. More than 6 million people viewed it within a month.
It was common at the events for his audience to be howling with laughter at a funny story minutes before some could be spotted grabbing tissues to wipe their eyes when he would tell the story of talking to his mother on her deathbed.
It’s a talent that can’t be taught.
And when he got on a debate stage that wasn’t too crowded, he destroyed Marco Rubio. It came too late — right before the New Hampshire primary — and in the end only benefited Trump. But other candidates know that you don’t want to tangle with this guy in a war of words.
Christie, seen here kicking off his presidential run at his old high school in Irvington, was a non-stop campaigner before his White House bid ended with the New Hampshire primary. Aristide Economopoulos | NJ Advance Media
No Biden hug
While running for president as a governor gives you a big platform, there’s also a tightrope to walk in being a Republican governor in a Democratic-heavy state, where even accepting expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act was seen as heresy in the Republican primaries.
But Christie has no such burdens now, which lets him take a battering ram to Biden as often as he can book a TV or radio appearance.
He’s already called Biden a “socialist” and a “far-left” president just about as many times as he’s fought with people during his sometimes raucous New Jersey town halls. Not to mention, in Christie’s words, the president’s a “liar” and “feckless.” The recent pull-out in Afghanistan gave Christie new fodder.
Many of these full-throated attacks are made as a GOP analyst paid by ABC News.
The website for Fox News took immediate notice by posting this headline: “Chris Christie turns into Biden attack dog in early days of administration.”
And he’s building his case against Biden in front of millions.
Next year is key
Christie’s long-time confidant, Bill Palatucci, says the former gov is a leader in the Republican Party who gets people’s attention and is unafraid to tell it like it is — even when it comes to Trump.
“I was not surprised by the number of (Republican National Committee) members from around the country who came up to me and said ‘Hey, I don’t always agree with Chris Christie, but what he has said about the president and what he said about the criticism of the Georgia law (restricting voter rights) are right on.’” Palatucci, an RNC committee member, recalled from an April meeting in Dallas.
“And they were applauding him for his speaking up and as always him being clear and direct,” he added. “I heard that from fellow RNC members from all over the country.”
Palatucci says while more people are coming around, he admits he’s “a bit in the minority” when he attends RNC meetings and argues the party needs to run on a message and “stop complaining about having the election stolen from us in November because A. That is not true and B. Most of America does not accept that so we need to be more policy-driven.”
But Christie’s biggest booster completely dismisses the idea he is actually running for president and insists “the smart people aren’t looking beyond 2022.”
That’s because 2022 could determine whether the Christie who is now running without declaring will become the Christie who actually jumps into the race in a few years. If other Republicans heed his message and make gains in Biden’s midterm, there’s momentum. If they stick to parroting Trump and the GOP is in shatters, his point — do this or we won’t win the general election in 2024 — grows stronger.
But if the more stridently Trump candidates are the ones making the gains, the path isn’t as clear.
“If he can run, he will,” said Sabato, who doesn’t believe Christie is a candidate if Trump runs again. “He’s had some private life and he’s cashed in on some things. But it doesn’t satisfy him. But the conditions have to be right. He doesn’t want to go out a loser and maybe a disastrous loser.”
He really wants it
When Republicans — including that woman in the Reagan Library audience — implored him to run in 2012, Christie declined after much soul-searching, saying he wasn’t ready to wake up on cold Iowa or New Hampshire mornings day after day.
In 2016, even though a lot of his political luster had faded, he went after it full on. I saw it first-hand. Campaigning is relentless and Christie doesn’t have an off switch.
When he wasn’t pressing the flesh at public events he was building relationships behind the scenes. Picture non-stop phone calls and texts to people to forge relationships and build trust. It could mean courting somebody for their endorsement or wishing somebody well as they’re sitting in a hospital bed after a brief procedure.
Today, Christie is still getting around. A lot.
Whether it’s for dinner with Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner in the U.S. House of Representatives in Old San Juan in April or attending a big donor cattle call put on by Karl Rove in Texas (which included seven other potential 2024 candidates), Christie is crisscrossing the country to help raise money for GOP candidates and rub shoulders with fellow Republicans. And this is before the book tour.
Does he still want it? You bet.
In that last interview I had with him as governor, Christie told of taking his kids to see Hamilton.
“When Aaron Burr did the scene in ‘The Room Where it Happens,’ you know, bemoaning the fact that it was Jefferson and Madison, and Hamilton in the room where it happens,” he said. “Sarah (his daughter) said to me after the show was over, ‘You’re gonna miss that, right?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m definitely gonna miss that.’”
Years later, it could be all be summed up in a single tweet by a New York Times media reporter who took a photo of Christie in June at Citi Field, where he sits on the board of his beloved New York Mets. And of course, there’s a mention of You-Know-Who.
“You should be president, man,” yells a guy who says he was “like Trump in Jersey.”
“I agree with you,” Christie says.
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Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com.
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