By Matt Rooney
Chris Christie is back, Save Jerseyans!
And, naturally, he’s here to save us.
That’s the premise of NJ.com’s latest garbage Christie rehabilitation effort: “Can Chris Christie save the N.J. Republican Party again? He’s going to try.”
There’s just one inconvenient question:
Save it from whom?
The timing alone is remarkable. The story landed as New Jersey Republicans descended on Atlantic City for the NJGOP’s annual statewide leadership summit, a September 18-19 gathering explicitly organized to “connect, strategize, and RALLY to the Midterms.”
So while Republican candidates, activists and elected officials were assembling to build momentum for November, the former Republican governor was making headlines explaining why the current Republican Party has it all wrong.
Some rescue mission!
Christie’s argument isn’t new. Donald Trump is toxic, MAGA is the problem, and Republicans can only win New Jersey by attracting Democrats and independents who supposedly won’t consider a candidate associated with Trump. He’s made the same argument when Trump’s fortunes have been in the toilet AND when they’ve soared. He’s a bitter man.
You’re still entitled to agree with him?
But you’re not entitled to your own facts, and let’s please dispense with the notion that Christie is some disinterested Republican elder statesman descending from Mount Mendham to impart the ancient wisdom of winning elections.
This is a guy who endorsed Trump in 2016, joined his transition operation and remained in Trump’s orbit before Trump World realized he was a charlatan and kicked him to the curb mid-transition. Since their rupture, Christie has made opposition to Trump a defining feature of his national political identity.
He even built his 2024 presidential campaign around confronting Trump, a campaign which couldn’t get through New Hampshire.
Christie is also hardly a neutral observer of New Jersey Republican politics. He has continued involving himself in the party’s internal debates and contests while frequently finding himself at odds with the voters who presently constitute its base.
Christie is perfectly correct that Republicans cannot win statewide elections by talking only to Republicans. Republicans obviously need independents. They need persuadable Democrats to the extent they still exist. They need suburban voters. They need to relentlessly attack Trenton’s spending addiction, affordability, property taxes and a state budget that has exploded since Christie left office.
But there’s a rather large difference between expanding the Republican coalition (which is what President Trump did in 2024) and perpetually lecturing Republican voters that they’re the problem. This lecture is particularly obnoxious coming from Christie since he left the movement and the NJGOP itself in absolute shambles when he left office in January 2018. The state party still hasn’t recovered financially from rampant spending on Christie’s national travel and legal bills.
There’s also some selective history involved in pretending the Christie era represents a lost Republican paradise.
Yes, Christie won twice. His 2013 reelection was a landslide facilitated by forging self-interested alliances with Democrat party bosses and, in so doing, guaranteeing that he “won” with no coattails.
He also left office in January 2018 with historically poor approval numbers, and New Jersey Republicans haven’t won statewide since.
That history is considerably more complicated than “Chris Christie knew how to win, Republicans stopped listening, and everything fell apart.”
Maybe Christie sincerely believes his renewed intervention is helpful. Narcissists can talk themselves into almost anything.
New Jersey Republicans can and must decide that for themselves based upon his odious history.
But dropping a major story about rescuing the NJGOP at precisely the moment the NJGOP is gathering in Atlantic City to rally for the midterms is certainly an interesting way to demonstrate party unity.
For the better part of the post-Trump era, Christie has been much more comfortable explaining what’s wrong with Republicans than helping Republicans explain what’s wrong with Democrats.
Now he wants another turn at the wheel.
Republicans should reasonably wonder where he thinks he’s taking them.
