As he seriously mulls a second Republican run for the White House, former two-term New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is back in New Hampshire for the second time in less than a month.
And Christie says he’ll make a decision on whether to launch a campaign for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination by the middle of next month.
“But I’m not there yet. I don’t know enough yet. And I haven’t spoken to enough folks yet to be able to make a final decision,” Christie told this reporter.
During a trip last month to New Hampshire, which holds the first primary and second overall contest in the GOP presidential nominating calendar, Christie argued that he’s got the debate chops to potentially take down Donald Trump should he face off with the former president, who now five months into his third White House run remains the clear front-runner in the early Republican primary polls.
Christie, back in the Granite State Thursday and Friday for a two-day swing, said “I know what I’m good at. I know how to articulate an argument. I know how to make it. I know how to land it. And I feel like I have the ideas that people are genuinely attracted to. So if you have those things, you have a good chance to be able to do it. No guarantees, but a good chance.”
And Christie, who is considered one of the best communicators in the GOP and was known during his tenure for the kind of in-your-face politics that Trump has also mastered, pointed to his past debate clashes and touted what he’s been “able to do before under the brightest of lights.”
Nodding to his potential rivals in the emerging Republican 2024 presidential field, Christie said that “lots of people can do things when the lights aren’t the brightest. But when those lights get really bright and everybody’s watching, can you perform or can’t you? And that’s a lot about what these races have to do with.”
Christie placed all his chips in his campaign for president seven years ago in the Granite State. However, his campaign crashed and burned after a disappointing and distant sixth-place finish in New Hampshire, far behind Trump, who crushed the competition in the primary, boosting him toward the nomination and eventually the White House.
Christie became the first among the other GOP 2016 contenders to endorse Trump and for years was a top outside adviser to the then-president and chaired Trump’s high-profile commission on opioids. However, the two had a falling out after Trump’s unsuccessful attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Biden. The past two years Christie has become one of the most vocal Trump critics in the GOP.
But the former governor, a weekly political pundit on Sunday morning’s on “ABC’s This Week,” said on Thursday that “there’s one lane that leads to the Republican nomination for president and at the front of that lane right now is Donald Trump. If you want to win the Republican nomination for president, you have to beat Donald Trump and get in the front of that lane.”
Asked if he’d concentrate a potential 2024 campaign in New Hampshire, at the expense of the other early voting states of Iowa, South Carolina, and Nevada, Christie said “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that all the way through yet. But I like New Hampshire.”
Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who was comfortably re-elected in November to a fourth two-year term steering the Granite State, is also seriously considering a 2024 GOP presidential run.
“I have great respect for the governor. He and I have been friends since before he was governor,” Christie said. “I think he’s a very good governor. And on top of that I think he’s a really good guy. And he seems to be having a lot of fun right now, and that’s good.”
Asked if a potential Sununu campaign would be an obstacle to a Christie path to the nomination, the former governor said that Sununu will “make his own decision on his own timetable.”
Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami, Florida, says if he moves ahead and launches a 2024 White House run, the path to victory in the burgeoning GOP presidential nomination race over bigger names with larger campaign war chests – such as fellow Floridians former President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis – is by “inspiring people.”
“You have to compete with other things, by inspiring people. You have to compete by explaining to people you have a track record of success, a vision for the future. That you can inspire people with a positive view of what their future can look like in ways other candidates can’t,” Suarez told this reporter on Tuesday.
The former president launched his third straight White House run in November, and while DeSantis remains on the 2024 sidelines, he’s is expected to launch a presidential campaign after the conclusion next month of Florida’s legislative session. DeSantis stopped in New Hampshire last weekend.
“I think if you’re good enough at communicating those ideas and those ideals, and you’ve listened enough to create and draft an agenda that’s going to work for people, then I think you can be successful potentially,” Suarez said.
The 45-year-old two-term mayor is the son of former Miami mayor and former Miami-Dade County Commissioner Xavier Suarez. The younger Suarez was interviewed during a full-day swing through New Hampshire.
Speaking to an audience at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, a must-stop for nearly a quarter century for actual and potential White House contenders, Suarez joked that “I’ve spent some time in Iowa and South Carolina, and now I’m here in New Hampshire. It’s a nice coincidence.”
Iowa’s caucuses kick off the Republican presidential calendar, and South Carolina holds the third contest.
Suarez noted in the early voting states – where there’s long been an emphasis on candidate-to-voter small scale retail-style politics, that “you can do a lot of personal contact. You can get to know people. They can get to know you as a human being. And you can listen to them and absorb their concerns and sort of push that back.”
“I think it’s important to connect with the people, listen to the people, to give them an opportunity to understand what you’re about, why you’ve succeeded and why someone who’s a mayor and someone my age could be qualified to run a country as complex and as large as the United States of America,” he emphasized.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley returns to New Hampshire on Wednesday for her third campaign swing in the Granite State since declaring her candidacy in February.
The former two-term South Carolina governor who later served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the first two years of the Trump administration kicks off her latest trip with a town hall in Bedford.
On Thursday, she’ll headline a town hall at New England College in Henniker, and next Friday she’ll hold a similar event at American Legion Post 1 in Laconia.
Environmental lawyer and high-profile vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Wednesday formally launched a 2024 Democratic presidential primary challenge against President Biden.
Kennedy, the 69-year-old son of the late senator, attorney general and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy, declared his candidacy for the White House at a campaign launch event at a hotel in downtown Boston, Massachusetts.
“I’ve come here today to announce my candidacy for Democratic nomination for President of the United States,” Kennedy said after taking the stage. “My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign, and throughout my presidency, will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism on our country.”
Describing himself as a truth-teller, Kennedy charged that state and corporate powers have “poisoned our children and our people with chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs, strip mine our assets to hollow out the middle class and keep us in a constant state of war.”
Pointing to his famous family political dynasty, Kennedy said “my whole family including myself have long personal relationships with President Biden.” He added that many of his family members disagree with him on a range of issues, but he still loves them. “Is it too much to hope that we could have the same thing for our country?” Kennedy asked.
He warned that “we have a polarization in our country today that is so toxic, so dangerous, than at any time since the Civil War.”
Kennedy pledged that his goal will be to end that division by encouraging people to talk about common values rather than the issues that divide. “I’m going to do that by telling the truth to the American people,” he said.
He also took aim at the media, charging that “we know the media lies to us. Everybody knows that.”
Kennedy becomes the second nationally known Democrat to launch a long-shot primary challenge against the president. Marianne Williamson, the best-selling author and spiritual adviser, last month launched her second straight campaign for Democratic presidential nomination, and has been campaigning in New Hampshire, South Carolina and other early voting primary states.