While Trump’s commanding lead in the polls has been the biggest story of the 2024 GOP primary, the media has been desperately trying to boost Chris Christie’s blatantly anti-Trump presidential campaign. CNN actually argued a couple of months ago that Christie has a viable path to victory.
Yeah, I wouldn’t bank on that.
It doesn’t take a brilliant political strategist to see that Christie has no chance of becoming the GOP nominee. Any objective person can see that he is running in order to get the opportunity to face Trump on stage and throw some sort of temper tantrum. He’s basically admitted as much. “You’d better have somebody on that stage who can do to [Trump] what I did to Marco [Rubio] because that’s the only thing that’s going to defeat Donald Trump,” Christie said back in March.
What kind of impact can Christie have at this point? Very little. Even if he qualifies for the first debate (which he claims he has) Trump may not participate, and even if he does, Christie’s antics won’t earn him much praise from GOP primary voters. In fact, GOP primary voters don’t like him much at all. According to recent polling, he’s the most disliked GOP candidate in the field.
A recent Morning Consult poll of GOP primary voters revealed that Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis have the highest favorability among GOP primary candidates, 71% and 63% respectively. Former Vice President Mike Pence has a 50% favorable rating, however, 39% have an unfavorable view of him.
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The other candidates all have favorable ratings below 50% — though many suffer from low name recognition. Vivek Ramaswamy, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, former Rep. Will Hurd, and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie all have favorability ratings underwater, but Chris Christie has the highest unfavorable rating among all the candidates.
“Christie is less popular than ever,” the Morning Consult declares. “Potential GOP primary voters are 21 points more likely to hold negative views than positive views about former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, marking his worst showing by that metric since he entered the race in June. He has 3% support for the nomination, matching the level of backing for the two South Carolinians in the race, former Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott.”
According to the poll, 45% of GOP primary voters have an unfavorable view of Chris Christie, and only 24% have a favorable opinion of him. It’s hard to imagine how he actually qualifies for the first debate, but it doesn’t really matter because his base of support is so small that he’s irrelevant anyway.
