Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s strange exit from the 2024 Republican presidential race on Wednesday highlights the difficulty of getting the candidates to work toward a common purpose.
That includes the sole purpose they all have in common, at least until the general election: defeating former President Donald Trump, the established front-runner.
Christie did more than most observers expected of him by ending his campaign before the first votes were cast in the GOP nominating contest.
That not only means that there will be one fewer candidate vying for support when it really matters, beginning with the Iowa caucuses next week. It appears to set things up for former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley to have the best shot she possibly could for a one-on-one fight with Trump, if everything goes according to plan, and the polls, in Iowa.
Haley is only behind Trump by a Christie-sized margin in most New Hampshire polls. Trump is at 43% in the RealClearPolitics average for the state to Haley’s 29.3% and third-place Christie’s 12%, numbers that if anything may understate the recent trends.
But Christie was also caught on a hot microphone seemingly disparaging Haley and her chances of beating Trump moments before he cleared a path for her in New Hampshire.
Not only did Christie pointedly decline to endorse Haley, but he also made comments that will likely be used against her in the coming weeks. “She’s gonna get smoked. And you and I both know, and she’s not up to this,” he said just before his announcement. He has reportedly trashed her in similar terms in other private conversations, including with fellow candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).
Christie acknowledged in his withdrawal speech that he had no realistic path to the Republican nomination. But that had been clear for months. What Christie has left for him is a path to becoming a Liz Cheney Republican, feted on media outlets like MSNBC and, he hopes, remembered favorably in history.
That would have been compromised by winning just enough votes in New Hampshire to ensure a first-place finish by Trump, possibly enabling an early state sweep by the former president. Among Christie’s new constituency, that would have made him more of a Ralph Nader- or Jill Stein-like figure than a Liz Cheney profile in courage.
The fact is that all of these candidates have their own ambitions and their own reasons for running. Their desire to defeat Trump is secondary to their true motivations.
If that is true for Christie, who had no real shot at winning the nomination, it is even truer of DeSantis and Haley, who perhaps do.
That’s why neither Haley nor DeSantis are willing to put a ceiling on their support by becoming a single-issue anti-Trump candidate. There is a possible majority open to a candidate other than Trump, but there is no Never Trump majority inside the GOP.
The challenge for DeSantis and Haley is that siphoning off soft Trump supporters while also holding on to anti-Trump Republicans has been more difficult than expected.
DeSantis’s nuanced Trumpist-but-not-Trump campaign helped create a lane for Haley. Haley’s refusal to go full Never Trump — saying she’d endorse him if he was the nominee, pardon him if she was elected herself, and seeming reluctant to issue a Sherman statement ruling out becoming his running mate even as she professed to be offended by the notion she was running for second fiddle — helped preserve a lane for Christie, at least among independents and in the Northeast.
Anti-Trump Republicans are themselves not monolithic despite their minority status in the party. Some view themselves as more conservative than the former president, and others think he is too far to the right. Others still are a different flavor of conservative, a distinction that has grown more important as centrists have largely lost in the fight for the GOP’s future.
Never-Trumpers also differ in what the phrase means to them. While some simply prefer a different nominee, others want to see a total purge of Trumpian forces from the Republican Party, something that no candidate who wants to actually win the GOP nomination can advocate.
Haley and DeSantis are likely both clear-eyed about Trump’s myriad flaws and the risks posed by a multi-indicted nominee in a competitive general election. But they also both plan to rectify those problems by winning the nomination themselves.
That’s why the two of them joining forces to beat Trump is unlikely to be in the cards. They are both running because they believe they can be president. And they have both allied with Trump in the past in furtherance of their political careers, something that can also be said of two of the most overt anti-Trump candidates in the race, Christie and former Vice President Mike Pence.
Both Pence and Christie are now gone from the race. Things don’t look much better for their prospects in 2028. Neither DeSantis nor Haley wishes to find themselves in that same position.
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Christie may still have done Haley a favor, removing himself as an obstacle without offering an endorsement that her opponents can use as “RINO,” or “Republican in name only,” evidence against her.
But if they all collectively fail to stop Trump, it will be in part because that is not the No. 1 thing any of them individually hoped to accomplish.