Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie Enters the 2024 Republican Primary Race | International

The former governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, who advised Donald Trump's campaign for the White House in 2016 to become an outspoken critic of the former president four years later, presented his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday for the presidential elections of 2024. With meager support, around 1% of registered Republicans according to polls conducted last week, Christie intends to stop Trump's new race for the White House, whom he has disqualified as a "coward" and "Putin's puppet." ”. Christie, 60, has presented the relevant documentation to the Electoral Commission and this afternoon he plans to officially announce his candidacy at an event in Manchester (New Hampshire).

The former governor of the twin state of New York offers a trump card to traditional Republicans, those who deplore Trump's stridency, but judging by his scant support - 1% of registered voters, according to a poll last week - he may run the same luck as in 2016, when he withdrew from the race. According to his team, quoted by local New Jersey media, he will formulate his campaign in a positive tone, with a wink of hope directed at the "exhausted majority" of the US; standing up to kidnapping or patrimonialization of the party by Trump. In his bet, Christie surrounds himself with his traditional collaborators, those who helped him in the 2009 gubernatorial campaign, long before Trump's emergence. distorted republican essences.

Christie's candidacy will therefore focus on marking a contrast with the former Republican president, whom he supported not only in the 2016 electoral campaign, but also during his presidency, until he withdrew his confidence on the same election night in November 2020, when Trump began to say that the Democrats had stolen the election.

In Christie's political career, unlike DeSantis, Pence and other representatives of the hard wing, a classic Republican, of those who dialogue with their political opponents, one image will forever remain: his collaboration with then-President Barack Obama in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy devastated New Jersey and New York. The democrat visited the places most affected by the natural catastrophe and he and Christie appeared before the media in good company, lending their shoulders without distinction of color. The greeting that both gave to each other at the foot of the track, in Atlantic City, immediately became ammunition on the part of the Republicans, while the current vice president, Kamala Harris, recently claimed it as a "model" of political behavior. The harmony of Christie and Obama, Harris said in February, at a meeting of governors, "established a tradition" of bipartisanship in a crisis, despite the fact that a few days later the elections were held, in which Obama revalidated his mandate against the Republican Mitt Romney. The current president, Joe Biden, was then vice president.

Far from rectifying or qualifying the opportunity of the hug (it was not, just a gesture with his arms), Christie promised that he would never apologize for it, "ever, to anyone", stating that he would not have done his job as governor if he had snubbed for political reasons to a president who offered aid for his State. But the gesture did not sit well with the Republican base, which was taken into account in the 2016 primaries, in which he saw his candidacy frustrated. Nearly eight years later, in an even more polarized country, friendly fire may be reaching Christie again.

Subscribe here to newsletter from EL PAÍS America and receive all the key information on current affairs in the region