The former New Jersey governor could maintain a zombie candidacy right up until the convention. What does he have to lose?
Every viable political candidate needs a plausible path to victory. There’s never much been one for 2024 presidential aspirant Chris Christie. A two-term New Jersey governor who was emphatically unpopular in the Garden State when he left office in 2018, Christie also bombed as a presidential candidate in 2016, finishing ninth in Iowa and sixth in New Hampshire. He managed to stay in the national limelight for a while by first toadying to and then disrespecting Donald Trump. But he entered the 2024 race with a really bad reputation among Republicans, particularly the MAGA majority. One national survey taken right before Christie announced his candidacy showed that 70 percent of GOP voters wouldn’t even consider backing him.
He’s managed to stick around by becoming the best-known candidate who is willing to openly attack Trump, and by focusing his efforts on the one early state — New Hampshire — where there is a relatively sizable (if decidedly minority) group of anti-Trump Republicans. He’s running third there in the polls, undermining Nikki Haley’s long-shot bid for an upset that would disrupt Trump’s coronation. So by all rights Christie’s campaign should end after New Hampshire just as it did in 2016, with an ironic boost to the 45th president’s prospects. Instead, he’s pledging — or perhaps we should say threatening — to continue his candidacy no matter what, as CNN reports:
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he plans to stay in the Republican primary race through next summer’s nominating convention, dismissing a recent CNN poll that shows him trailing former President Donald Trump and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in New Hampshire — a state he’s invested heavily in winning.
In an interview Sunday with CNN’s Dana Bash, Christie also brushed off the possibility of working with Haley or dropping out early to consolidate support behind a candidate who can mount a serious challenge to Trump, the clear frontrunner in the race.
Perhaps this is just bluster and a counterpart to Christie’s ludicrous claims that he might actually win in New Hampshire. But he also told CNN he’s making plans to campaign in Michigan, whose primary is in late February. So it’s possible he intends to become a “bitter-end” candidate who refuses to drop his bid despite abject defeat in the real world of primaries and delegates.
There is recent precedent for that sort of perpetual protest candidacy. In 2016, Bernie Sanders didn’t concede defeat until the Democratic convention in late July, even though by every objective standard Hillary Clinton had clinched the nomination in early June. But it was a very close race that was still contested right up until the final primaries. So perhaps a better analogy for a prospective perma-campaign by Christie would be Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign, which fought for delegates — and threatened to disrupt party harmony — months after Mitt Romney had nailed down the nomination.
Paul, of course, represented a cultlike semi-libertarian faction of the Republican Party that dissented from GOP ideological orthodoxy on a broad range of issues. Christie is a conventional Republican conservative whose heresy is largely confined to his latter-day refusal to bend the knee to the 45th president. So any zombie Christie campaign (presumably a poorly funded low-key affair dependent for even a marginal existence on the absence of any anti-Trump competition) would be predicated on the possibility of some very late and nonetheless overwhelming buyer’s remorse about the putative nominee — or perhaps a health crisis afflicting the former president, who will turn 78 next June.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that after winning most or all of the GOP primaries, Trump does have a health crisis or experiences courtroom setbacks that somehow erode the belief of Republican voters that his myriad legal problems are the product of Democratic persecution. Would a Republican convention stuffed with MAGA activists turn to Chris Christie as party savior? Or would they instead find a new champion among the hundreds of Republican politicians who kept pledging allegiance to Trump after his first and second impeachments and his third and fourth criminal indictments? The answer is pretty obvious. To put it another way, Chris Christie’s path to the 2024 Republican presidential nomination will never be more viable than it was the day he announced his candidacy. So while there’s not much point in him continuing his candidacy today or tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, he really does have nothing to lose by sticking around and grabbing whatever media attention he can secure by refusing to make Trump’s nomination uncontested.
