Chris Christie brings a whole lotta Jersey to South Carolina

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has said he will focus his presidential campaign on New Hampshire. It’s where the Christie team feels he has the best chance to win and shake up the race for the Republican nomination. But on Friday evening, Christie was in a very different place, the Vista district of Columbia, South Carolina, promising to focus on the Palmetto State as much as New Hampshire. “We are going to spend as much time here in South Carolina as we spend in New Hampshire, which is a lot,” Christie told reporters.

Christie flew into Columbia to hold a town hall meeting. He chose an event space that his staff filled with about 200 chairs, plus room for the media. (There were a lot of cameras.) The room was virtually filled; at one point, I counted maybe 30 empty chairs scattered around. It was a good-sized crowd, but a far cry from the thousands who showed up to see former President Donald Trump a few weeks ago in Pickens, S.C., about 125 miles away.

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Who comes to see Chris Christie in South Carolina? The short version is that most seemed to be Republicans, with some independents and a few Democrats, but all came because of Christie’s vocal criticism of former President Trump. When asked about other Republican candidates they might consider, they were anywhere from mildly to bitterly critical of those other candidates for not taking on Trump. They said most of the GOP field, like Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), and South Carolina’s own Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), are walking on eggshells, tiptoeing around the Trump issue because they are afraid to confront it head-on. The reason they like Christie is because he confronts it head-on.

As much as Christie attacks Trump, he complains that his press coverage is one-dimensional, focusing only on his case against Trump when in fact, he talks about a lot of other issues. He’s right: Christie’s coverage is mostly one-dimensional, and he does indeed talk about other issues. Christie opened the town hall with a long explanation of why he is running for president. The first reason, he said, is “We have to get rid of Joe Biden.” The second reason is to get rid of Trump.

Christie makes the standard Republican case against Biden. The president promised to govern as a moderate, Christie said. Instead, “he came into office, and he ran as far to the left as he could.” Biden pushed unheard-of levels of federal spending. He created the “worst inflation since the 1970s.” “He stripped away our energy independence,” Christie continued, and oversaw “that awful withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

And then, of course, Biden is just too old. “When you sit down for a meeting with a fellow head of state in the Oval Office of the White House, as he did just a day or two ago with the president of Israel,” Christie said, “and you fall asleep in the middle of the meeting — I’m sorry everybody, that means you’re past your sell-by date. It means it’s time to go.”

So there’s no doubt Christie talks about non-Trump topics. But there’s also no doubt he shifts into a higher gear when he starts talking about Trump. He began with 2020. “I am tired, tired of hearing about the 2020 election,” Christie said. As far as the election fraud that Trump still alleges: “Let’s start there: It didn’t happen.”

Christie can spend a lot of time talking about Trump’s various offenses. In Columbia, he was thinking of Trump using campaign contributions to pay for personal legal expenses. “It is disgraceful, it’s beneath the office he asks for, and that and that alone should disqualify him from being our nominee in 2024,” Christie said, to audience applause. He was also thinking about Trump’s New Jersey casinos going bankrupt. And he was thinking about Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner receiving a $2 billion investment from the Saudis for his private equity firm. “The whole damned family’s in on the grift,” Christie said.

Christie is well familiar with Trump supporters who dismiss things like that because they like Trump’s “policies.” Christie is not impressed. “So on the issues that you care about,” he told the crowd, “If you say, ‘I know Donald Trump is not a good person. I know he lies. I know he’s broken the law. I know he’s grifting for himself and for his family. But I like his policies.’ I’d ask you a question: Why the hell would you hire him to implement those policies? He’s proven he can’t do it.”

Christie reinforced the message that a number of audience members told me about the power of Trump over the other Republican candidates. He likes his rivals, Christie said. He doesn’t have anything bad to say about them. “But here’s my problem with them, and the reason I got in: They won’t tell you the truth about Donald Trump. They won’t do it. They’re afraid of him.” The audience applauded Christie telling them what they already thought.

Of course, Christie’s anti-Trump message is not the sort of thing a representative audience of South Carolina Republicans would want to hear. A new Fox Business poll of the 2024 primary race shows Trump ahead in South Carolina with 48% of GOP primary voters; Haley second with 14%; DeSantis with 13%; Scott with 10%; Mike Pence with 4%; Vivek Ramaswamy with 3%, and Christie with 2%.

So it’s fair to say that at the moment, the Christie message, built around the attack on Trump, is not sweeping South Carolina. But in Columbia on Friday night, the 170 people who gathered in the Vista loved it. You can sometimes tell that a crowd really likes a candidate when question time comes, and they don’t really ask questions — they just want to tell him that they feel the same way he does. That’s what happened on a number of occasions when Christie opened the floor for questions.

First to ask a question was a man who had moved to South Carolina from Connecticut. He told a meandering story of an overpriced breakfast at Trump Plaza in the 1990s, which he said he was reminded of by Christie’s mention of Trump’s casinos failing. “That shows the character we’ve all seen, what’s been going on,” the man said. Christie agreed and added that “We need someone who cares about the country as a whole, not just about themselves.”

The next question came from a man who began by saying he served 30 years in the Air Force. “I never thought I’d see the day that our Capitol would be rioted,” he said. “It really disgusted me. That’s not why we serve.” The question was about special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump. “I think the chess game is on, and Trump is losing,” the man said to Christie. “What do you think?” Christie, a former U.S. attorney, expressed caution about predicting such things, but went on to analyze at length the current indictments and investigations facing Trump, concluding that the former president is in big trouble and disqualified from holding future office. “We need to move on,” Christie said.

The scene shed some light on Christie’s complaint that his media coverage is one-dimensional. Yes, it is, but it’s that one dimension that brought most, if not all, of his potential supporters to his town hall. He told them what they came to hear.

Of course, there were questions about other topics, too. There was one about Social Security. One about wokeness in schools. One about the Supreme Court. One about fentanyl. One about guns. One about Ukraine. One about Cuba. Here’s something about Christie: His answers were direct, detailed, knowledgeable, and well-argued. He’s one of the most substantial candidates in the race. The town hall lasted two hours because he took the time to address questions thoroughly. And on a few of the questions, Christie told his anti-Trump audience what they did not want to hear.

There was, for example, the man who described himself as a “centrist” and began his question by citing Trump’s influence on the Supreme Court. He appeared to hope that Christie would criticize the court for its recent decisions, such as overturning Roe v. Wade. But Christie spoke well of all three of Trump’s nominees. He said he did not know Neil Gorsuch very well, so he couldn’t say much about him, but he said he would have appointed Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett himself. For the questioner, who said he wanted to know how Christie would make the court conform to “the hopes and the wishes of the political body as a whole,” it was not a happy answer.

Christie did something similar with a woman whose question about school shootings seemed designed to elicit a statement from Christie on banning or limiting guns. She didn’t get that statement; instead, Christie spoke in some depth on mental health and the Second Amendment. And then there was the man who seemed to want Christie to come out in favor of improved U.S. relations with Cuba. He received, instead, an answer from Christie that cited possible Chinese military moves in Cuba and pledged no better relations with Cuba as long as things like that are going on.

A few final notes about the audience. After talking with 20 or so of them, and listening to the town hall, there’s no doubt the main reason they came was to hear Christie talk about Trump. But another reason some of them came was that they are part of America’s latest great migration. They’re in South Carolina now, but they’re originally from Christie’s home state of New Jersey.

You might remember an article in the Hill last year headlined, “Americans are leaving New Jersey and heading to South Carolina, Florida, and Vermont.” Based on a study from United Van Lines, the article reported that New Jersey is “the most popular state to move away from,” while South Carolina is a highly popular state to move to. The moving company’s report is backed up by the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which found droves of New Jerseyans moving to South Carolina. Some Christie supporters in New Jersey have brought their support south.

It’s amazing how much Christie identifies with New Jersey, how much of his identity he seems to take from his home state. He constantly tells people he is from New Jersey; it’s his all-purpose way of explaining who he is. In Columbia, he mentioned New Jersey dozens of times, not only to cite his record as governor, but just as often in this way: When Christie is about to say something he thinks is tough, or promise to give it back to anyone who argues with him, or just be contentious, he will say, “I should remind you, I am from New Jersey.” That’s his way of saying, I’m about to be obnoxious, but don’t take it too seriously.

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At times the town hall, taking place less than a mile from the South Carolina Capitol, turned into a celebration of New Jersey. At one point during the question-and-answer session, a member of the audience tweaked Christie about New Jersey’s quirky law-forbidding self-service gas. Christie went on a long, mock-indignant defense of the practice, explaining the iron rule that “Jersey girls don’t pump gas.” Another man in the audience almost beat Christie to the punch, saying, “Orange here — Jersey girls don’t pump gas!” “That’s exactly right,” Christie said to the man. “He’s got a Ridgewood softball shirt on — he knows.”

Given America’s constantly moving population, some people who light up when they hear “Jersey girls don’t pump gas!” are now voting residents of South Carolina. The problem for Christie is that there surely aren’t enough transplants to propel a former New Jersey governor to victory in what is known as the First-in-the-South primary. Christie’s 2% standing in the new Fox Business poll is evidence of that. And, of course, unless the race turns upside down, it could be that Christie won’t even make it through Iowa and New Hampshire to get to South Carolina. But for the moment, Christie is appealing to that relatively small number of South Carolinians, native or not, who stand on his side of the Trump divide.