As he’s campaigned around New Hampshire over the last several months, Chris Christie says plenty of voters would approach him after his events to tell him, “You’re in my top three.” In an interview earlier this week with THE WEEKLY STANDARD, the New Jersey governor shared a hopeful development on that front. “Now they’re coming up to me and saying, ‘We’re voting for you,'” Christie says.
All candidates tend to boast about their anecdotal support, but in Christie’s case in New Hampshire, there may be something to his rosy assessment. The latest poll of likely Republican primary voters from WBUR finds Christie sliding into second place in the Granite State, with 12 percent support just ahead of Marco Rubio’s 11 percent.
Both candidates trail Donald Trump, who clocks in at 27 percent, but it’s Christie who is seeing the biggest boost in support. The New Jersey Republican is up 6 points from WBUR’s November poll, and he’s 10 points better than where he was in that poll in September. And Christie’s been on the rise in New Hampshire over the past month, doubling his position in the Real Clear Politics average of polls in that time.
A lot has been going Christie’s way, even with the looming specter of Trump. The New Hampshire Union Leader, the largest newspaper in the state with an influential conservative editorial page, endorsed Christie late last month. He also snagged the endorsements of some important Republican leaders, like Jeb Bradley, the former congressman and current state senate majority leader, and Renee and Dan Plummer, a notable Republican activist couple.
“Chris is really doing it the New Hampshire way,” says Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator who now lives in New Hampshire, where he unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate last year. Brown’s home in Rye has become an important stop for the GOP presidential candidates, and it’s where he and his wife Gail host “No-B.S.” barbecues to allow voters to see candidates up close. Christie, Brown says, was among those who most impressed his barbecue regulars.
“I think he’s in the best position right now,” says Brown, who tells TWS he probably won’t endorse a candidate until around the third week of January. “He’s seeing people for the third of fourth time,” Brown adds.
Christie has been helped by voters’ increased focus on national security in the last month, as the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino have brought issues of terrorism to the fore. Voters, says Christie, are responding positively to his experience as a federal prosecutor and his commitment to taking the terror threat seriously. “They recognize after San Bernardino, anywhere could be a target,” Christie says. “They don’t understand why the president won’t talk about it.”
Brown agrees terrorism has become a major issue in New Hampshire, at least among Republican voters. “It’s really the only thing people are talking about,” he says. “That’s in Chris’s wheelhouse.”
What are Christie’s biggest challenges to winning in New Hampshire? In a name, says Brown, it’s Donald Trump. The WBUR poll showed a smaller but significant uptick in Trump’s support as well, and his longtime dominance in the state suggests voters will have to coalesce around one alternative to beat the Donald. That, Brown says, is the other of Christie’s challenges. “Our party is divided between some very qualified candidates,” he says.
With Marco Rubio and, to a lesser extent, Jeb Bush and John Kasich taking up a similar space, Christie will have a difficult time consolidating the center-right support that propelled Mitt Romney and John McCain to win the last two New Hampshire primaries. Add up the support for Christie, Rubio, Bush, and Kasich in the latest WBUR poll, for instance, gets to 38 percent—not far off from the 39 percent support Romney ended up winning in the 2012 primary.
Christie heads to New Hampshire again this weekend, his 27th trip to the state this year and 18th as an official candidate for president. With more than 100 New Hampshire events under his belt and growing list of endorsements, Christie is as good a bet as any to continue consolidating that support. The candidate himself is prosaic about what he needs to do to build on the momentum in the first primary state.
“You have to be patient while you’re working hard,” Christie says. “You cannot expect that things will happen overnight.”
