Some Republicans have a blunt message for Chris Christie: drop out
Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, has traveled the world in his quest to stop Donald J. Trump’s march to the Republican nomination. In the living rooms of New Hampshire and in the charred homes of Israeli families murdered by Hamas, he has criticized the former president as unfit to lead, as anti-democratic and as an ambitious dictator.
But now, six months after Christie’s primary, Republicans who share his goal of defeating Trump are proposing a very different approach for the long-term candidate.
Fuses.
Republican donors, strategists and pundits are publicly pressuring Christie to follow the example of Tim Scott and Mike Pence and formally end his campaign. Many would like to see him throw his support behind Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who has risen in the polls in early voting states in recent weeks.
The focus on Christie’s bid reflects the fear that has consumed anti-Trump Republicans as the race enters its final weeks before the Jan. 15 Iowa caucuses. Despite three debates, tens of millions of dollars and many months of campaigning, none of the six candidates still challenging Trump have significantly eroded his double-digit lead. And their time is quickly running out.
“The people who support Chris aren’t supporting him because they love Chris Christie — they want someone to run against Trump,” said Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator who dropped out of the presidential race in 2012 after failing to win. gain enough traction to take on Trump. win the nomination. “He has a very important decision to make: whether he will withdraw and let his votes go to someone else, or whether he will actually improve Trump’s chances by staying in.”
But this year’s momentum is reminding other Republicans of 2016, when Trump took advantage of the large field of candidates, allowing him to sow divisions among voters who favored other candidates. Mr. Christie stayed in that race until finishing sixth in the New Hampshire primary. He endorsed Mr. Trump 17 days later.
“Time is a flat circle, and everyone insists we are reliving the 2016 election one blow at a time,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who has spent years working to defeat Mr. Trump. “The most important thing Christie could do this time to make a difference is drop out.”
Mr. Christie sees that race differently, saying the candidates running against Trump — including himself — have not taken the threat to his candidacy seriously enough.
“We all thought, ‘Well, at some point he’s going to drop out or fade away at some point.’ And we all waited. Hope is not a strategy,” he said in an interview with Fox News on Monday. “If you want to beat someone, you have to tell people why he’s not right for the job and why you are.”
But in a race in which Mr. Trump has maintained a large lead, Mr. Christie’s small hold on the New Hampshire electorate may not make much of a difference.
Patrick Murray, a New Jersey pollster and director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, said his data suggests that only about half of Mr. Christie’s support in New Hampshire would go to Ms. Haley, with the rest among the others would be distributed. candidates. The five or six points Ms. Haley would earn would not be enough to come close to Mr. Trump, who leads New Hampshire by nearly 30 points.
“It would help her get closer to second place,” Mr Murray said. “It’s just not big enough to make a difference.”
Mr. Christie’s advisers argue that he plays an important role by being the only candidate willing to take direct and regular shots at Mr. Trump. Mike DuHaime, one of Christie’s top strategists, said a case could be made for all candidates other than Trump to drop out, given that no one has managed to break the 20 percent barrier in the polls.
“Whatever case people bring against you about Christie, the other two have no path either,” Mr. DuHaime said, referring to Ms. Haley and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. “Should everyone just drop out, or should we try to beat him?”
Mr. Christie has run a relatively low-budget campaign, powered by a small staff and frequent television appearances. He has largely ignored Iowa to ensconce himself in New Hampshire, a state where independent voters can cast their ballots in the primaries. Mr. Christie has put an aggressive push on those voters, who are more receptive to his anti-Trump message. This fall, organizations joined his campaign advertisements shown He urged Democrats in the state to become “black” voters and support his bid.
But now that the deadline for switching party registration has passed, Mr Christie is showing signs of weakness. In recent weeks he barely reached 10 percent in the polls in New Hampshire. It remains unclear whether he will be on the ballot in every state. Last week, officials said he had failed to collect enough signatures to qualify for the Maine ballot. Mr Christie plans to appeal the ruling. Whether he will meet the electoral threshold to qualify for the fourth Republican primary debate on Wednesday also remains in doubt.
While campaigning in New Hampshire, Mr. Christie said his path to the nomination would involve winning the state and then focusing on Michigan, which holds its primaries in late February. He pointed to McCain’s 2008 campaign in New Hampshire as a model for victory. “All he did was come to New Hampshire, end up in the suburbs and go from city to city to town hall meetings, and then he won,” he said.
As Mr. Christie joked and answered voters’ questions, he remained adamant that he was in the running to win the nomination. The other candidates, he said, were “fighting like animals to come in second place” — a line that elicited chuckles from the crowd gathered in a huddle. packed reception room at a small restaurant in Concord.
“You know what we call second place in New Jersey? The first loser,” Mr. Christie said, as voters shouted the answer in unison with him. “If you want to win, you have to beat the man in front of you.”
His call received support from some independent voters in New Hampshire and even from Trump Republicans. “He is, in my opinion, the only one who shows the strength and fortitude necessary to govern this country,” said Ralph Mecheau, 69, an independent voter who represented Mr. Christie met at a state union meeting. “If you can’t stand up to Trump, how are you going to stand up to others?”
Gary Morrison, a 27-year-old Trump voter who is a member of the state’s workers’ union, said he came out of the union’s town hall as a Christie supporter, and that he rejected Mr. Christie’s gun violence policies, which targeted was good at the enforcement of gun violence. laws already on the books and more support for mental health care instead of adding more gun control laws.
“The way I look at it is to make sure they can’t just take things away,” Mr Morrison said.
Mr. Christie said that if he failed to achieve a major victory in New Hampshire, he would reconsider his pledge to keep his campaign going. until the Republican convention in July.
That’s far too long for some strategists, who said they wanted Christie to consider a much shorter timetable.
“He probably has the toughest path to the nomination, and sooner or later you have to face that reality,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “Ideally, the country would have faced that reality yesterday or a month or two months ago.”