By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
I was in a sentimental mood preparing for Election Day, Save Jerseyans, so I took an election eve look back at my April 2009 interview with then-gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie shortly before the Atlantic County GOP convention voted to give him the primary line.
Pay special attention to my question — and CJC’s answer — beginning at the 3:24 mark:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrHUOiBSn0M&t=3m24s
“You need to build that bench,” he told me while the delegates voted and his team whipped supporters in the venue’s hallways. “Once the Christie governorship is over, you want a Republican Party that’s vibrant and strong and that can come back and continue those policies along the way.”
Not everything’s gone according to plan since that interview. Today, however, there’s still a chance that things could go extremely right. Just not in a way that anyone contemplated back in 2009…
Chris Christie won an amazing, earth-shattering victory in 2009 but lost what I would argue was the equally crucial legislative redistricting battle two years later despite a genuine and dogged effort on his part to influence the process with a direct, personal appeal to the late Alan Rosenthal.
Up until the 2011 redistricting fiasco, Governor Christie and his political organization focused intently on two goals: (1) breaking the public sector union establishment’s grip on Trenton’s levers of power and (2) generating gains for the party in disperate battlegrounds like CD3 and Bergen County. And he was very successful, at times, through sheer force of his inherent political skill and personality. That’s not say the presidency wasn’t always on Team Christie’s collective mind. It has been since Election Night 2009, and rightly so.
Things began to shift , however, when it became apparent that recapturing the legislature with Rosenthal’s endorsed Democrat map would require nothing short of a Christie landslide married to a miracle. The Governor’s media apparatus toned down his combative rhetoric aimed at the public sector unions, reemphasized bipartisanship themes on the legislative front and, particularly in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, devoted their energies to marketing a template for national Republican leadership. Sure, he still eats a teacher from time to time, but his “YouTube” moments have wanted over the past 18 months.
Revisionist history has no place in this discussion. The courageous and honest articulation of core conservative principles made Chris Christie a national figure in his first two years at the helm. It’s easy to forget for those of you with a short lens (and unbalanced media diets) that Chris Christie was solidly rating above 50% in public polls conducted in our “blue” state well before horrible hurricanes and presidential hugs.
Election 2013 nevertheless presents a very different “choice” for voters than Election 2009. A real choice? Absolutely! But not the same one.
That year, Christie ran as a traditional albeit tough-talking conservative happy warrior battling to oust an out-of-touch and distressingly cold liberal technocrat.
This time around, Christie is still a conservative by any textbook definition (pro-life, pro-school choice and anti-tax), but one running a coalition ticket comprised of the multi-faceted minority NJ GOP faction, affiliated coalition groups cultivated over the past four years and several entrenched Democrat machines led by ethically-challenged but ideologically moderate bosses. In the end stages of the campaign, Chris Christie’s victory phone banks aren’t churning out red meat but rather hitting low-propensity voters that don’t traditionally show up for the Republican ticket, at least in non-presidential cycles. Some consultants, operative and party leaders fret it’s helping turn out “the wrong kind” of voters. Christie’s people are betting it’s the only way to produce a wave capable of compensating for Rosenthal’s map.
Consequently, Governor Christie’s hopes of retaking the legislature for Republicans on Election Day are now pinned not on ideological arguments like back in the heady days of 2009 but on a hypothesized landslide produced by endless coalition building and a carefully-crafted post-partisan brand that’s made him a national pop culture icon but a pariah in certain conservative circles.
It’s a stealth campaign which insiders will tell you is also designed to gin up turnout without antagonizing those machine allies, but it’s also one intended to produce a broad-based electoral victory that makes Chris Christie the logical front runner for 2016. The Christie media machine doesn’t want to be accused of leaving down-ballot Republicans in the dust, but not more than they want to deal with the mainstream media narrative that Christie went hard for the legislature but couldn’t get the job done.
Consider the fact that it’s only been in the closing days of this cycle that the incumbent GOP governor, consistently ahead in the polls by double-digits since public polls began tracking the head-to-head numbers, has asked voters directly for a Republican legislature. Remarkable and risky stuff, to be sure.
Will the gambit pay off? Can Chris Christie win today by 20+ points and still generate significant enough legislative gains – whatever that means varies from person to person – to make good on his promise made to Save Jerseyans back in April 2009?
We’ll know in a mere matter of hours.
Win, lose or draw, Save Jerseyans, the last chapter of the Christie legacy (New Jersey edition) is being written as voters head to the polls today at both ends of the Turnpike. A big “win” – which we’ll define as either capturing one or two houses of the legislature or making substantial gains – will alter the leadership dynamic in Trenton and produce a bench of potential Christie successors.
A loss – which for the purposes of this article we’ll call a “goose egg” down ballot or something close to it – will inaugurate a fresh round of soul searching and leadership questions among those who won’t accompany Governor Christie on his next campaign.
Stay tuned…
