Chris Christie wants you to know: He’s telling the truth. But not just that. He also wants you to know he’s the only one telling the truth, indeed, the only one willing to tell the truth.
What truth? The truth about Donald Trump. The truth that Trump trails “drama and chaos” in his wake, that his “conduct is unacceptable” and makes him “unfit for office,” and that he already lost to Joe Biden once and will lose to him again if he’s a “convicted felon.”
None of his fellow Republicans, the former prosecutor charges, will admit any of this. That’s why, he says — and this is the last truth Christie wants to tell you, as it’s the most important truth he wants to tell you — he’s the only one of Trump’s rivals who can beat him. Because he’s the only one daring to take him on.
There’s just one problem: None of it is true. Christie’s entire conceit is a fiction, a figment, a mirage — that is, a lie. If Chris Christie is lying, that makes him a liar. Which, when it comes to Trump and his chances of beating him, is just what Chris Christie is.
There are plenty of truths, moreover, that Christie would rather he, you, and everyone else simply forget about. For example, that after belly-flopping in the 2016 New Hampshire primary, he dropped out and became the first major candidate to endorse Trump. Or that he voted for Trump again in 2020, having spent the previous four years as one of his staunchest advocates on TV. Christie claims he changed his mind after Jan. 6, and he has been a relentless critic of Trump ever since. But his words now can’t erase the reality that he was only convinced that Trump doesn’t belong in the Oval Office long after many of his fellow Republicans, who reached that conclusion at the first time of asking and not, like Christie, the second. Or that, when asked if he’d still pick Trump over Hillary Clinton, conceded that he would.
The super PAC supporting Christie named itself Tell It Like It Is PAC because, supposedly, that’s what he does. He’s the “only Republican with the courage to tell the truth,” it proclaimed in a recent ad, which may be so. He just hasn’t done anything of the sort since he jumped into the race.
Or even before that. Early in the spring, when speculation ramped up about whether Christie would seek the nomination, anti-Trump figures on the Right expressed a desire to see him run solely so he could “bludgeon Trump” in the GOP primary debates. Christie deprecated the prospect, declaring he wasn’t a “paid assassin.” Yet by the time he announced his candidacy in June, his rhetorical abilities had become “central to Mr. Christie’s pitch to disaffected Republicans,” as the New York Times's Shane Goldmacher wrote. Once the debates approached, Christie made confronting Trump onstage such a focus that it almost seemed to be his campaign’s entire raison d’être.
After Trump skipped the first debate in August, Christie swore he would “follow him around the country” so that Trump would be forced to talk to him “one way or another.” Christie’s strategy, to no one’s surprise, fell flat. Trump skipped every debate, avoiding any encounter with Christie in a formal setting. Nor did Christie’s cross-country manhunt materialize, preventing any informal run-ins. Christie, as the New York Times put it, “built his entire presidential candidacy toward a marquee confrontation with Mr. Trump.” He came away with nothing to show for it, which prompted the New York Times to wonder, “If Chris Christie Debates Without Donald Trump, Does He Make a Sound?” The answer has been a resounding “No!”
Not that GOP voters had any interest in hearing what he had to say in the first place. Republicans, to put it as bluntly as possible, despise Christie. They loathe, abominate, and revile him. Every piece of available data confirms this. In Fox News’s mid-December poll of the GOP primary race, his favorable rating with Republicans was an anemic 27%, while his unfavorable rating was 59%, a net score of minus 32%. Lousy as those numbers were, they’re positively glowing compared to the 12%, 65%, and minus 53%, respectively, he earned in Monmouth University’s survey from early December. According to FiveThirtyEight's average, Christie has by far the worst favorable rating with Republican voters of anyone running for the GOP nomination at minus 34%. Incredibly, that’s an improvement from minus 37% at the start of October. The Pew Research Center asked Republicans how satisfied they’d be if the various candidates were nominated. Sixty-eight percent said they’d be dissatisfied if Christie were the nominee compared to 18% who said they’d be satisfied.
The former New Jersey governor’s unpopularity with the base translates into predictably lousy marks in national polls of the primary race. In December, he registered an infinitesimal 1% in Yahoo News’s poll and a meager 2% in the Fox News and Monmouth surveys. He fared slightly better in the New York Times-Siena College poll, climbing all the way to 3%. Christie is under 3% in the RealClearPolitics average. And he doesn't have much room to grow as he struggles to break into double digits when voters are asked for their second choice.
Christie does post some big numbers. Alas, they’re all the kind where “large” means “bad.” CNN routinely asks respondents which candidates they’d never vote for. Christie is the runaway winner, soaring to 66% in its September national poll and an eye-watering 71% in its October poll of South Carolina. It may be possible to win the nomination with two-thirds or more of Republicans vowing never to vote for you, but the odds of it happening can’t be rated very high.
Zoom in on the states and things are just as bad. A recent Washington Post-Monmouth University poll found Christie garnering just 5% in Michigan, whose primary is Feb. 27. Christie has been ignoring Iowa, barely setting foot there. Hawkeye State caucusgoers have rewarded him with a sub-4% average in polls of the state. South Carolina Republicans aren’t into him either, with his numbers in the state also scraping the underside of 4%.
Iowa and South Carolina, important as they are to the primary race as a whole, are irrelevant to Christie. Just as he did in 2016, he’s putting all his chips on New Hampshire — a curious tack, given that his campaign ran aground there eight years ago. But arguably, it’s his only course. Of the early states, New Hampshire, with its electorate of centrist New England Republicans, independents, and Democrats, offers the centrist Northeastern Republican the most favorable conditions. For Christie, therefore, it’s New Hampshire or bust. “If I don’t do well in New Hampshire,” he promised in September, “I’ll leave.”
He should start packing his bags. Christie, it turns out, is just as toxic in the Granite State as he is in all the others. True, it’s the state where he does best in polls, the only one where he reaches double digits. But those same polls show that New Hampshire voters dislike him just as much as their counterparts everywhere else. A mid-November survey by CNN and the University of New Hampshire showed 47% of GOP primary voters would never punch their ballots for Christie. It's a terrible number but, remarkably, an improvement from September’s 60%.
The numbers are especially bad when Republicans are counted without GOP-leaning independents. Sixty-seven percent of Republicans rated him unfavorably according to CNN/UNH, while 76% did per St. Anselm College. And they wouldn't welcome the prospect of a Christie nomination. Sixty-nine percent of Granite State Republicans would be “angry or dissatisfied” if he were the nominee according to the former survey, while 70% of “strong” and 65% of “soft” Republicans would be “dissatisfied or upset” according to the Washington Post-Monmouth University poll.
Christie’s success in New Hampshire always depended on doing well with independents and Democrats. But doing well with independents and Democrats is not a path to victory in the Republican Party, not in New Hampshire, not anywhere. All of this was known, so why? What did Christie think he was doing, given that failure and humiliation were not only inevitable but foreordained? Even Christie himself has no answer to that question, his vision of vindicating himself, the party, and even the country as the teller of necessary but unpalatable truths about Trump being absurd on its face. To call his aspirations quixotic is an insult to the quixotic. Christie’s “window of opportunity closed long ago,” wrote FiveThirtyEight's Nathaniel Rakich when Christie got into the race. Reopening it was always going to prove a futile endeavor.
As Christie’s theory of the case has crumbled, pressure on him to drop out has grown. Republican donors, as well as conservative pundits and various figures in the GOP, have been clamoring for him to go for weeks now. Christie has been an immovable object, resisting all entreaties with characteristic obstinacy and swearing to remain in the race until New Hampshire. Whether he makes it to Jan. 23 is an open question. Gov. Chris Sununu’s (R-NH) endorsement of ex-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was a body blow to Christie’s campaign, threatening not only its viability but its very reason for being. If Christie’s continued presence is seen as stymieing Haley, who was just 15% behind Trump in the latest poll of New Hampshire, the pressure to drop out will only intensify, especially since, instead of exiting gracefully and surrendering the anti-Trump lane to Trump’s original United Nations ambassador, he’s started accusing her of “enabling” her former boss and being a “Trump sycophant.”
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Everything Christie said he would do or needed to happen to beat Trump, none of it came to pass. He said he wouldn’t run if he didn’t have a path to victory, then did anyway. He said he was the only electable candidate in the race, when in fact he was the least electable of all. He claimed only he could beat Trump, when he was the last guy who could. He pledged to pursue Trump relentlessly to force him to debate, then never tried to follow through. He asserted he wouldn’t run merely to be a “paid assassin” against Trump, then did nothing but lob verbal grenades at him. He declared he would do everything he could to defeat Trump, yet has since done all he can to help him win. Most of all, he promised he’d tell the truth because no one else would. In all these things, time, voters, the campaign, even the man himself, Christie has been made a liar.
The philosopher Diogenes famously went about ancient Greece, lantern in hand, looking for an honest man. Were he to return today to resume his quest and run into Christie along the way, he would keep walking, having still failed to find one.
Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on Twitter @varadmehta.