Hampstead, N.H.
Chris Christie has four events scheduled for today, which is good. Less good is that all of them are in tiny venues, the type of awareness-building, candidate-shopping size places most campaigns hope to do back in early January. This morning, for instance, Christie is booked into a coffee shop in a strip center. Maybe 80 people—counting voters, employees, and media—pack inside, before police close the doors. Another 20 or so stand outside as the snow begins. They hang around because campaign staff promise the locals that as soon as Christie arrives, he’ll talk to them, take selfies with them, whatever they want.
But then a group of about a dozen protestors show up. They’re not your usual hippy-radical-weirdos—they’re middle-aged guys from New Jersey who are part of the Amalgamated Transit Union. And, like many union folks back home, they want to give Christie the business.
When Christie’s campaign bus rolls up in front of the coffee shop, the union guys start chanting and shouting. There’s an air horn. In a way, it’s refreshing to see protestors who obsessed with something real—they’re worked up about the Garden State’s transportation fund—not reparations or a nuclear freeze or “no blood for oil.” They stand outside in the snow, waiting for Christie to emerge from his bus—alongside the overflow voters—for a good 40 minutes.
And then, like magic, Christie appears inside the coffee shop. His campaign hustled him in through the back door.
When Christie takes the microphone, he spends almost the entirety of his brief recapitulating his debate victory from Saturday:
If this seems uncharitable, fair enough. But Christie is convinced he’s going to ride Marco Rubio’s stumble to . . . well, to somewhere.
The audience seemed less convinced. The first question was about how Christie could defeat Ted Cruz over the course of a long primary fight. His response: “I’m not going to worry about Sen. Cruz, because I intend to defeat Sen. Cruz.” The second question was why voters should prefer Christie to John Kasich, who’s also a successful governor. Christie’s response was that because Kasich has a Republican legislature, he “just sends his ideas down the hall, they rubberstamp them, they send them back, he signs them, they all have a party.” Kasich “just takes bows and gives press conferences.” Christie then moved on to Jeb Bush:
Which nicely encapsulates Christie’s problem. Given the right circumstances, a skilled candidate can attack his way past one opponent. But Christie is stuck in a muddle with three other candidates—Rubio, Kasich, and Bush.
Or more accurately, Christie is stuck behind the muddle of Rubio, Kasich, and Bush—he’s been persistently at 5 percent in the New Hampshire polls. He went on a kamikaze strike against Rubio in the debate, and suddenly seems willing to denigrate Kasich and Bush, too. Heads-up with any one of them, you could see how Christie’s full-bore assault might work. But in order to move up enough to stay viable, Christie would have to leapfrog all three of them. And this seems highly unlikely.
It’s not true that there are no silver medals in politics—candidates can finish second (or third, sometimes) in primaries and still have paths forward. But with a 10th place finish and 2 percent of the vote in Iowa, and South Carolina looming next, a New Jersey Republican would have to do quite well in New Hampshire to have any productive reason for moving on. Christie might well have prevented Marco Rubio from having a good night tomorrow. But it’s unclear how he helped himself.
