New Jersey voters are beginning to wonder if Gov. Chris Christie’s presidential ambitions will be pursued at the expense of their state.
Christie has spent the bulk of his time outside New Jersey since launching his White House bid in June and his shrinking numbers in recent polls have left voters questioning whether their governor is missing in action.
“When I talk to friends in my community, everybody says the same thing: It’s time for him to come home,” Matt Rooney, a local attorney and conservative blogger, told the Washington Examiner.
Should Christie continue campaigning for the presidency, however, 54 percent of New Jersey voters have said it’s in their state’s best interest for him to permanently leave the governor’s mansion.
The two-term governor has struggled to amass support for his presidential bid from voters in New Jersey, lost key donors to fellow White House contender and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and recently dropped to 11th place among GOP candidates in a nationwide CNN/ORC poll of Republican primary voters.
“He’s got no base in New Jersey; Republicans don’t trust him and Democrats were always going to desert him anyways,” says Rooney. “He would need Bush, Walker, Trump, all of them to implode for him to have any breathing room.”
Christie currently faces record low approval ratings both inside and beyond New Jersey’s borders. According to three different polls released in the last 10 days, Christie’s bravado has yet to settle well with voters in both early primary and swing states.
Separate polls conducted by Public Policy Polling show that just 28 percent of voters in Iowa hold favorable views of Christie while 55 percent of North Carolina voters view him unfavorably. Although he receives a net positive rating in New Hampshire, Christie was still among several candidates with high negatives in the latest Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald poll since 41 percent of voters viewed him unfavorably.
Rooney says “the damage is real.” But he believes Christie’s troubles began long before the governor launched his presidential campaign.
“I remember back in 2009 I was fist pumping when he was taking on the public sector unions and getting national fame for doing so,” he said. “But later on, after redistricting kind of went the wrong way in New Jersey, Christie started cutting deals with Democrats and that took priority over conservative reforms.”
“He began to run as this post-partisan blue state governor and that strategy gave birth to Bridgegate,” Rooney said, adding that “by the time [Christie] went to announce for president, it was kind of the last straw.”
Christie was cleared in 2014 of any involvement in the “Bridgegate” scandal. However, his short-lived alliance with President Obama following Hurricane Sandy and decision to expand Medicaid in 2013 led some New Jersey residents to permanently sour on him. And while the Garden State governor has tried to renew his reputation with his “tell it like it is” attitude, Rooney says voters aren’t buying it.
“The things he was touting before his announcement and back before Hurricane Sandy in 2010 and 2011 were very different from his political aspirations now,” Rooney said. “His entire brand was built around authenticity — ‘you may not always agree with me but you know I’m being honest with you’ — so as soon as he started making overtly political decisions, at that point the trust was just gone.”
Nevertheless, Christie’s chief political strategist, Mike DuHaime, expressed optimism and defended his boss’ performance in the first Republican primary debate during a radio segment with a local media group.
“The more people see of him, the more they’re going to gravitate to him,” DuHaime said. “You have a number of people in the race who haven’t been tested the way he has whether it’s through a national crisis like Hurricane Sandy or even the exposure that you get being in the New York media market.”
“I think at some point as other candidates become serious, they’re going to go through press scrutiny and they’re going to have issues,” he said.
For now, however, Rooney says voters in New Jersey are primarily concerned about issues involving Christie and whether his campaign is crippling his effectiveness as governor.
“The saddest part about this whole thing is that he had the skills to be a good president and he can still come home and do a lot of good, but I don’t know if he has a future in presidential politics beyond the 2016 cycle,” Rooney said.
“He could definitely come home and be a conservative reformer and whether that gets him a radio gig or a second life in national politics, who knows,” he added.
