Three-quarters of registered voters in the Garden State do not have a favorable view of New Jersey’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie, according to a Rutgers-Eagleton poll released Monday. The numbers are the worst the former 2016 GOP presidential candidate has sustained in this particular poll during his six-year tenure at the helm of state politics.
Fewer than one-in-five people have a positive perception of the second-term governor who is not up for re-election again until 2018. The survey was conducted before two former staffers were found guilty in the Bridgegate trial.
Christie’s public opinion ratings have continually slipped since November 2013, two months after the incident, in which lanes on the George Washington Bridge were intentionally closed to delay commuters as part of a backlash scheme against a local Democratic mayor for not supporting Christie’s re-election campaign.
Christie was at its highest in the same poll shortly after the incident, hitting 65 percent approval before losing the support of many Garden State residents.
The poll shows Christie’s plunge coincides conservatives’ growing unhappiness with the governor. Forty-seven percent of Republicans see him favorably, down 10 points from September. Forty-three percent of registered voters see Christie unfavorably, up 15 points since the start of the trial. It’s the first time in Christie’s six years as governor that he has not received support from a majority of his party in this poll.
Six weeks ago, as the trial commenced, 23 percent saw him favorably and 67 percent did not. The trial’s conclusion, just before the 2016 presidential election, may have led the Donald Trump campaign to distance itself from the former Republican presidential candidate, who has become one of Trump’s top surrogates.
Christie had planned four appearances with Trump in New Hampshire over the weekend, but canceled them after a federal jury found his former allies guilty. The four-stop tour would have been Christie’s first foray back onto the campaign trail since Trump was caught making sexually explicit comments about women in a decade-old audio tape released last month.
The poll of 772 New Jersey adults, including 694 registered voters, was conducted via landline and cellphone between Oct. 28 and Nov. 3. The simple sampling error for registered was plus or minus 3.7 percentage points, at a 95 percent confidence interval; while the weighted design effect has a plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
