Can Christie Succeed as ‘Trump Slayer’? New Jersey has thoughts.

Chris Christie left the New Jersey office with terrible popularity numbers. His presidential run in 2016 was a short-lived flop. He has a reputation as a bully and is perhaps best known for an infamous political retaliation scheme called Bridgegate.

But as Mr. Christie, a two-term governor and former federal prosecutor, prepares to wade into the 2024 Republican presidential primary on Tuesday, voters who know him best seem open to his underdog rematch with former President Donald J. Trump, if only for its potential as a grab-the-popcorn thriller.

A one-on-one debate between Mr. Trump and Mr. Christie “would have more viewers than the Super Bowl,” said Jon Bramnick, a Republican senator who makes a sideline as a stand-up comic.

“Trump may be able to give you a name,” he said. “But Christie will take that name, put a spin on it, and come back with three or four things that will leave Trump lying there waiting for the count.”

Any race that pits Mr. Christie against Mr. Trump is bound to be deeply personal. Mr. Trump seemed to take pleasure in belittling Mr. Christie of the White House; Mr. Christie blamed Mr. Trump for giving him a bout of Covid that left him seriously ill and hospitalized.

In interviews with voters in New Jersey, Mr. Christie’s assets and liabilities were repeatedly described as two sides of the same coin.

For moderates thirsting for a centrist voice, he’s not Mr. Trump.

And for Trump loyalists who might have preferred Mr. Christie to retire permanently to his Bay Head beach house, it was pretty much the same refrain: He’s not Mr. Trump.

“Anyone in the mix that isn’t Trump is good,” said 64-year-old David Philips on Friday during his lunch break in Trenton, the capital, where he has worked as a construction official for 20 years. He said he tended to vote for Democrats and was never a big fan of Mr. Christie.

“But compared to Trump, he’s a reasonable kid,” Mr. Philips said.

After giving up on the 2016 presidential contest, Mr. Christie became one of Mr. Trump’s biggest supporters. But he’s now positioning himself as the teller of hard Trump truths — a perhaps unlikely messenger with a message that will be hard to sell to a party full of Trump supporters.

Mr. Christie’s entry into the race comes less than six years after he left Trenton with an approval rating of just 15 percent, according to two polls taken during his last summer in office. At the time, it was the worst rating of any governor in any of the states surveyed Quinnipiac University over more than 20 years.

Last month, one Monmouth University poll of 655 Republican voters nationwide, Mr. Christie showed an unfavorable rating of 47 percent, higher than any other official or likely Republican presidential nominee.

Jeanette Hoffman, a New Jersey Republican strategist, predicted that Mr. Christie would cast herself as the candidate best positioned to be “the Trump slayer.”

“This whole tell-it-as-it strategy — he’s going to double that,” she said.

Still, she acknowledged that the odds against him were high.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Christie, 60, is known for being belligerent. And many of his most memorable clashes are well documented.

There was the time when he was filmed yelling down a heckler on a Jersey Shore boardwalk while holding an ice cream cone.

Memes linger from 2017, when he was photographed lounging with his family on a state-run beach that was closed to the general public over the 4th of July weekend because he and the legislature failed to approve a spending plan for the fiscal year.

And it was clear that his baseball days were behind him in 2015 when he took to the field Yankee Stadium for a charity game wearing a Mets uniform during his second term as governor. But he also earned high praise that night and an MVP award for having the guts to step into the batter’s box in the first place.

For those in New Jersey applauding his presidential run, that in-your-face chutzpah remains a major selling point.

Even detractors reluctantly express respect for the former governor’s willingness to flex his political and rhetorical muscles.

“He’s a bold man,” said Mark Sokolich, the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, NJ, where two of the three lanes of the George Washington Bridge were closed for four days in 2013 as part of a plot that endangered public safety. and became known as Brugpoort. “He’s a man who speaks his mind, and I think you need that in this day and age.”

Yet Mr. Sokolich said he would never vote for Mr. Christie.

“If he ever reached the office of president, I only hope that his talent for selecting people for high positions has improved,” Mr Sokolich said, referring to a Christie aide who wreaked havoc with an email on the roads of the municipality. : “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”

Mr Christie has never been charged with criminal misconduct and the convictions of two aides were overturned in 2020 by the US Supreme Court, which ruled that the plot, designed to punish a political opponent, was an abuse of power but not a federal crime.

David Wildstein, who admitted to being the architect of the traffic jam when he worked for the New York and New Jersey Port Authority, has known Mr. Christie since the two attended Livingston High School. He was the key witness at the trial, testifying that Mr. Christie was made aware of the bridge plan two days after the roadway closures began and he laughed approvingly. Mr. Christie has maintained that he had nothing to do with the closures.

Mr. Wildstein characterized his former ally as a cartoonish character in an interview.

“He’s the guy who stands on the sidelines at a Little League game and yells at the umpire,” said Mr. Wildstein, 61, whose guilty plea was vacated in 2020 following the Supreme Court ruling and who now runs the New Jersey Globe , a popular New Jersey political news site.

But, he added, “It would be crazy for someone to say definitively that someone can’t win.”