Anti-Trump Republicans are privately pleading with Chris Christie to drop out of the race ahead of the Granite State’s January 23 primary to make room for the surging Nikki Haley. Those phone calls aren’t going over well.
“He flat out said: ‘I’m not dropping out,’” says New Hampshire restaurateur Tom Boucher, a former member of Christie’s steering committee who called the former New Jersey governor Sunday morning urging him to bow out of the race and endorse Haley, lest he sabotage his own stated goal of preventing Donald Trump from returning to the White House.
Instead of heeding this advice, Boucher says, the former New Jersey governor questioned his former backer’s integrity for switching camps and endorsing Haley so late in the game.
“I just said, ‘I don’t understand it,’” Boucher recalls telling Christie. “You have an opportunity here to get behind Nikki Haley, you have an opportunity to get all of the people that are supporting you to get behind Haley so that she will accomplish what you’ve been trying to do since Day One, which is to make sure Donald Trump is not the nominee.’”
Renewed calls for Christie to drop out come at a crucial point in the primary. Polls suggest Haley and Florida governor Ron DeSantis continue to lag far behind Trump in Iowa just days before the January 15 caucuses. But the contest appears much, much closer in New Hampshire: Haley is within seven percentage points of Trump in the Granite State, according to a new CNN/University of New Hampshire poll. That same poll pins Christie’s support at just 12 percent — enough to potentially vault Haley to a surprise (though still unlikely) upset.
With pressure on Christie mounting by the hour, the former New Jersey governor still hasn’t offered any public indication that he’ll drop out. He called New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu — who has endorsed Haley — a “liar” for suggesting in a recent CNN interview that the low-polling Christie’s campaign is on its last legs.
“Chris Christie is not the type of guy to listen to Chris Sununu say ‘Get out’ and then just cower to him and say: ‘Okay, I’ll quit,’” says Mike Dennehy, a New Hampshire–based GOP consultant.
The campaign to drive Christie out has escalated to the point that some New Hampshire Republicans are wondering whether he’ll use a Wednesday night event in Windham, N.H., to announce his departure — an unlikely scenario his campaign flatly rejects.
“We have a public town-hall event in Windham so have invited our supporters. Hardly some sort of ‘huddle,’” says Christie campaign spokesman Karl Rickett.
Christie’s available to attend the town hall after failing to qualify for Wednesday night’s CNN debate, which will feature a one-on-one matchup between DeSantis and Haley. Trump, for his part, refused to attend the debate and is instead participating in a town hall in Iowa.
But the road is getting tough for Christie, who now regularly fields questions about whether he’ll drop out during his own town halls. His go-to response is to remind New Hampshire voters that Haley will not say whether she’d accept an offer from Trump to run as his vice president should he win the nomination.
“Let’s say I dropped out of the race right now and I supported Nikki Haley,” Christie told supporters Tuesday evening during a town hall in Rochester, N.H. “And then three months from now, four months from now, when you’re ready to go to the convention, she comes out as his vice president. What will I look like? What will all the people who supported her at my behest look like?”
“I’m not going to make the same mistake again,” Christie said.
It’s a painful reminder of his sixth-place finish in New Hampshire in 2016, when he dropped out of the primary and became the first high-profile Republican presidential candidate to endorse Trump. He’s still haunted by that decision, releasing an ad earlier this month admitting he “made a mistake” in endorsing Trump eight years ago. But throughout the race, Trump notably declined to participate in any of the Republican National Committee–sponsored debates, depriving Christie of the confrontation that served as the motivating rationale for his campaign.
This race is very personal to Christie, says Saint Anselm College politics professor Christopher Galdieri. “If you truly view Trump as an existential threat to democracy and the Republican Party, not necessarily in that order, it would make sense to try to coalesce behind the strongest possible candidate to oppose him,” he tells NR. “But I think for Christie, it’s not enough. I don’t think it’s just that Christie’s running against Trump. It’s that Christie is running against Trump and he wants to be the one to do it.”
Down to the wire in New Hampshire, the pro-Haley SFA Fund Inc. released a statement on Tuesday calling on Christie to drop out, saying his campaign is “helping Trump, whom he proudly endorsed in 2016 and supposedly opposes in 2024.” A growing number of conservative radio hosts — including Erick Erickson and Hugh Hewitt — are nudging him too.
“I can hear it in his voice that he is feeling pressure,” Boucher says of Christie. “Whether he takes the advice or not, that’s obviously his choice, but he’s got a very short window here to make the right decision for the party.”
Several loyal Christie backers defended his decision to remain in the race in interviews with NR, many of them rejecting the characterization that Christie is in any way fazed by the pressure.
“I’m disappointed that some of the other Republican candidates have not been, in my opinion, aggressive enough against former President Trump and the damage that he may do to the party,” says Norm Olsen, a Christie steering committee member from Portsmouth.
“People should let the election play out,” adds Clara Monier, another Christie steering committee member and former director of the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority. “Everyone who has the ideas that Christie has should be heard.” She maintains that Christie has strong policy chops and has outlined a much more substantive policy plan than Haley, who in her view has only offered “more fluffy stuff.”
Meanwhile, Trump-world continues to ramp up its attacks on Haley in the final weeks. A Trump-aligned PAC has latched onto the Christie–Haley dynamic and reportedly sent a mailer to independent New Hampshire voters who have voted in democratic primaries labeling Haley as a “BIG supporter of Trump’s MAGA Agenda,” while Christie is an “anti-Trump Republican,” seeking to convince independent voters to defect from Haley to Christie.
With the clock ticking until January 23, many New Hampshire observers say they’d be surprised to see Christie cave to the pressure.
“This is not his first rodeo. He knew what he was doing when he got into this race and took this path,” adds Fergus Cullen, a city councilor in Dover and former state GOP chair. “The idea that suddenly he’s feeling pressure, and is cracking under it, to me is pretty preposterous to anyone who’s observed the guy over the last 15 years.”
Around NR
• Dan McLaughlin offers an explanation for why Trump recently suggested the Civil War “was something I think could have been negotiated”:
The Occam’s razor answer is that Trump thinks the causes of the Civil War were negotiable because he thinks everything is always negotiable. It’s why he still claims he could get Vladimir Putin in a room and settle the war in Ukraine in an afternoon. He spent his whole adult life negotiating deals and made it his personal ethos. Everything he says is animated by his effort to strengthen his bargaining position (or at least, he thinks it is). Trump’s disinterest in truth and falsity, his demands for loyalty as a one-way street, his disdain for rules, laws, and institutional norms, his instinct for people’s weaknesses and pressure points — these are all symptoms of his tendency to look at everything through the lens of bargaining. Even history itself.
• Rich Lowry says it “wasn’t smart” of Nikki Haley to joke about New Hampshire correcting Iowa just ten days before the Iowa caucuses:
She’s been nipping at the heels of DeSantis and has a burst of new resources, which would suggest she has some serious chance of finishing second in Iowa. That would perhaps be a nice boost going into New Hampshire, where she is beginning to look potentially competitive with Trump. It’d be mighty foolish to take a step back in Iowa over a line she could just as easily have used in a week or so after losing (but perhaps over-performing) in the state.
• The pro-DeSantis super PAC Fight Right has latched onto Haley’s aforementioned joke, placing a $1.4 million ad buy in Iowa highlighting the comments, Audrey Fahlberg reports:
DeSantis’s orbit is bullish on Haley’s comments, pushing them in recent days in interviews and on social media to portray the former South Carolina governor as unfairly elevating New Hampshire over the first-in-the-nation caucus state. The DeSantis campaign launched a separate TV ad in Iowa earlier this week hitting “Wall Street-funded” Haley on similar grounds, arguing that she “disparages the caucuses and insults you.”
• Noah Rothman says there is no market for policy and no interest in candidates’ serious policy proposals among today’s voters. That would explain why DeSantis’s recent tax-policy comments made news despite his having made the same comments month ago (though they had flown under the radar at the time):
It is a cliché to observe that this is a “post-policy moment.” It’s equally trite to note that Donald Trump’s persona blots out the sun, and voters only seem to evaluate candidates for the presidency — Republican and Democrat alike — relative to their views on Trump. But that nonchalance betrays a disquieting unseriousness among primary voters. It stands in stark contrast to the challenges the next president will have to navigate.
• If you want to understand “virtually every issue in the multiple prosecutions of Trump” and you want to know why the parties are doing what they are doing, think: political calendar. Andrew C. McCarthy explains:
Trump’s strategy is delay, delay, delay. It’s simple: If he can get trials in these cases postponed until after Election Day and win, a new Trump Justice Department will dismiss the indictments. The cases will be closed, Smith will be fired, and the new president will be out from under criminal jeopardy.
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