MANCHESTER, N.H. — Chris Christie took a brickbat to Marco Rubio early in Saturday’s presidential debate, besting the Florida senator during an early exchange and putting what has been a swift Granite State rise in jeopardy.
Rubio would eventually recover, and finish the evening in typically strong form. New Hampshire Republicans and independents might yet decide to discount his altercation with New Jersey’s governor by the time they head to the polls on Tuesday to vote in the crucial New Hampshire primary. But even if the episode costs Rubio, there’s no guarantee that Christie, who was lagging significantly in the polls here, will be the beneficiary.
Rubio voters aren’t necessarily available for Christie to poach. His real competition might be former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, showing real potential to finish in the top tier here.
But Christie might have had a different reason for targeting Rubio: Stopping the rush of GOP power brokers, moneymen and voters to the senator’s campaign following success in Iowa. Christie, by undercutting Rubio in New Hampshire, could be counting on the volatility of the nomination fight to continue, such that he will be able to proceed in the campaign no matter how he performs on Tuesday. Here’s how senior Christie adviser Mike DuHaime put it:
“The rush to coronate Rubio is going to be off,” he said in an email to the Washington Examiner. “This will reshape the race regardless of what happens in New Hampshire.” To be clear, DuHaime added that he does believe Christie’s sparring with Rubio will breathe new life into the governor’s campaign.
Since the first of the eight Republican presidential debates occurred in August, Rubio has been near flawless in each faceoff.
Roughed up occasionally, the articulate, knowledgeable senator was skillful at returning fire from his opponents and had always managed to dig his way out of holes before they got too deep. But on Saturday at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, Christie boxed Rubio in, and doing so created a television clip that could haunt the senator at least for the remainder of the final three days of the Granite State campaign.
Asked by the ABC News debate moderator to refute accusations that, as a 44-year-old first-term senator, he lacks the experience to be president, Rubio argued that President Obama — who also was a first-term senator in his 40s when he was elected in 2008 — has actually been very successful. Rubio said Obama has a record of liberal accomplishments, such as Obamacare, and vowed to reverse his agenda if elected president.
Christie countered: “Marco, the thing is this: When you’re president of the United States, when you’re a governor of a state, the memorized 30-second speech where you talk about how great America is at the end of it doesn’t solve one problem for one person.” But Rubio made the point a couple of more times, after which Christie said:
“There it is. There it is; the memorized, 25-second speech. There it is, everybody.”
And with that, Christie had delivered the knockout blow, a determination that was the consensus conclusion of the national press corps covering the debate, even as reporters acknowledged that Rubio ultimately recovered. Following that tough moment, Rubio performed at the usual high level that has been a selling point for his campaign, competently fielding complex questions about national security and delivering GOP crowd pleasers on issues like abortion and what it means to be “conservative.”
After the debate, the Rubio campaign attempted to downplay Rubio’s early struggles. The senator’s advisers said their candidate had absorbed the slings and arrows that come with being a front-runner, and emerged still standing. The campaign said after the debate that it raised three times as much money online during this debate as it had during any previous debate, after most of which Rubio was declared the winner.
“Chris Christie gave him four opportunities to attack Barack Obama, and he did,” Rubio communications director Alex Conant told CNN, in regard to the exchange with Christie. “People are responding in a positive way to Marco’s performance tonight.”
Rubio has been running second in most polls here and trending upward. The question for the senator — and the rest of the GOP contenders — is whether New Hampshire voters are going to interpret his debate performance the same way the media is.
If so, Rubio’s momentum could stall and Bush, Christie and Kasich, who have been on the ropes and in need of a breakout performance in New Hampshire, where they’ve been campaigning almost exclusively for months, could breathe new life into their campaigns ahead of the Feb. 20 primary in South Carolina. For Rubio, there were a few hopeful, granted hard to quantify, signs that he might have survived a scare. To begin with, Rubio was No. 1 in talk time.
Republican digital strategist Patrick Ruffini tweeted that Rubio had more Google searches in New Hampshire during the debate than Donald Trump, the New York celebrity businessman who has led all Granite State polls by wide margins for several months. Said Ruffini, in his tweet: “I think that’s a good thing” for Rubio. The senator’s other in-debate digital activity also was more robust than many of his opponents.
However, warned Republican pollster Frank Luntz, in another tweet: “Rubio took a beating tonight. He better hope Google searches don’t make NH voters change their minds before Tuesday.
