New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has faced a political squall of late, with rising doubts about his national fundraising muscle and low approval ratings at home, but his allies insist he is not changing direction and remains in a strong position to run for president.
After a rocky trip to London and a few unflattering news cycles, Christie is getting back to his roots this week. On Tuesday, he will lay out his state spending priorities during his annual budget address, followed Wednesday by his first town hall meeting of the year in Moorestown, N.J. On Thursday, he will deliver a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington, D.C.
Although Christie’s CPAC speech will likely receive outsized national attention, the budget address might have the highest stakes. Christie has faced low approval ratings in light of multiple credit downgrades for New Jersey, Atlantic City’s decline, and imperiled infrastructure.
But, if there have been suggestions that a humbled Christie is toning down his rhetoric, as with a Washington Post headline this week that announced “a quieter Christie,” Christie and his circle are sending the opposite message.
At the Concord and Merrimack County GOP Lincoln-Reagan Dinner in New Hampshire this week, one Republican worriedly approached Christie about the supposed shift.
“I had one of your leaders say to me today, ‘We don’t want some kinder, gentler Chris Christie – we want the real Chris Christie,’” Christie said during his remarks. “Well, there’s only one Chris Christie, everybody. This is it. And there should be some comfort for you in that, I hope.”
Whether the one and only, real Christie can still viably compete for the Republican nomination is perhaps the more relevant question, one which Republican donors and power brokers have been posing with some increasing alarm.
As former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has crisscrossed the country raking in millions of dollars, in pursuit of an eye-popping first-quarter fundraising total, concerns about Christie’s fundraising have become particularly resonant. New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, a major Republican donor who supported Mitt Romney in 2012, announced this week that he will put his money behind Bush.
“Some guys move from Christie to Bush? That’s politics,” Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone, a prominent Christie donor, told The New York Times.
Those in Christie’s political circle are likewise maintaining an optimistic outlook, at least in public, while suggesting that Christie can win the nomination without initially raising money at Bush’s shock-and-awe clip.
“There’s no finite pool of donors or supporters. He’s going to have all the resources he needs to be competitive,” said one Christie ally. “That said, Gov. Christie has always run his campaigns as an insurgent.”
The source pointed to Christie’s 2009 victory over Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine, during which Corzine spent more than $23 million, including some of his own fortune, compared to Christie’s campaign tab of less than $9 million.
“(Christie) was outspent 3-to-1, and he did it the same way: he went out there, met voters one by one, and spoke the truth,” the ally added.
Those aligned with Christie are also eager to invoke the results in 2012 in Iowa and South Carolina, where Republicans Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, respectively, logged upsets against Romney during the primary. The conventional wisdom failed prognosticators then, they reason, and could again in Christie’s case.
With a Republican field in this election cycle that is more competitive than in many years, however, the race is already on not only to lock up donors, but also to win over the best political operatives, for which there was arguably less competition in 2012.
One of the biggest blows to Christie’s nascent campaign came last month when Rick Wiley, a former Republican National Committee political director who was thought to be a top pick to run Christie’s campaign, signed on with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker instead. Wiley works at the same firm, Mercury, as Christie’s political strategist Mike DuHaime.
Still, Christie has drawn some top-flight talent to work for his political committee, Leadership Matters For America. Christie hired Phil Valenziano, a former Romney campaign aide, to run his Iowa operations, along with former New Hampshire Republican Party Executive Director Matt Mowers, also a Christie alum. Phil Cox, who was executive director of the Republican Governors Association when Christie was its chairman, is now a senior adviser, and former RNC finance chairman Ray Washburne is steering Christie’s fundraising.
Just as many potential recruits have been discouraged from joining the campaign by Bush’s strong start in the same political space and by Christie’s pre-existing staff, whom one senior Republican operative described as “insular” and overly self-assured.
“Plus, the candidate’s rumored to be a micromanager with a prickly personality who knows better than everyone else,” the operative said. “Oh, and you have to move to Jersey to be on the campaign. Not a huge recipe for success in landing coveted staff talent.”
