Sununu’s Haley endorsement is a huge blow to Chris Christie

HOOKSETT, New Hampshire — Chris Christie wanted to end the night on a good note. He was tired. He’d come to New Hampshire from the debate in Tuscaloosa for a two-day campaign swing that had taken him from the Vermont border to the seacoast. All he had to do was take one more question.

“Would it not be better,” a man in the crowd asked, for Christie to end his campaign now and back Nikki Haley to help consolidate the anti-Donald Trump vote ahead of the state’s primary?

Christie scoffed: “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

But just four days later, Christie's rationale for staying in the race has been significantly weakened — with the GOP field’s most vocal Trump critic losing traction among the broader anti-Trump establishment. On Sunday, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said it’s Haley, not Christie, who is the “only one that has a shot” at beating the former president. And on Tuesday, Chris Sununu, New Hampshire’s popular governor and a longtime friend of Christie, endorsed Haley.

Christie couldn’t even land the support of the guy who once called Trump “fucking crazy.” Not even in the state in which he’s staking his campaign.

“The question for Chris Christie is: You’ve put it all on the line in New Hampshire. What’s beyond this? And if the governor’s not with you, how do you get there?” said veteran GOP strategist Jim Merrill, who is not working for a candidate this cycle.

“He’s done well in the debates. He has run an effective campaign here,” Merrill said. “But it’s hard to sugar-coat how tough a day this is for him.”

Christie seemed to know it was coming. He sought to downplay the importance of Sununu’s endorsement as Haley’s polling surge made it increasingly unlikely he was going to get it. And his campaign did much the same on Tuesday.

“This puts us down one vote in New Hampshire,” campaign spokesperson Karl Rickett said in a statement. “When Governor Christie is back in Londonderry tomorrow, he’ll continue to tell the unvarnished truth about Donald Trump and earn that one missing vote and thousands more.”

Christie badly needed the boost a Sununu endorsement could bring as he struggles to broaden his base in the state that ended his 2016 campaign. He’s been stuck in third place in recent New Hampshire polls, trailing Haley in second and far behind Trump in first. The state steering committee his campaign rolled out earlier this month is largely composed of supporters leftover from his last bid. And at one stop on Christie’s expand-the-electorate college tour last week, aging graduates outnumbered current students two-to-one.

“It’s not like his crowds are growing in size,” said former New Hampshire GOP Chair Fergus Cullen, who is not affiliated with any candidate. “He’s not attracting more support outside of the core, strong never-Trump people. And he’s also not lighting a spark among undeclared voters, which is really his path to making some real numbers in this primary.”

“Even if Sununu was inclined to support Christie,” Cullen said, “he wasn’t going to throw away his endorsement on someone for whom it wasn’t coming together.”

Allies of Christie had hoped he could still snag Sununu’s support based on the pair’s long-standing ties and similar politics, and the former governor’s fiery performance in Tuscaloosa. Sununu has credited Christie, a former Republican Governors Association chair, for pumping millions of dollars into New Hampshire to help him win the governor’s office in 2016.

But it was not enough. Sununu, who passed on running for president himself, will now work to tip more moderate Republicans and independents who can vote in the GOP primary — and who, polls and interviews show, have been torn between the two former governors — toward Haley.

Christie will be on the outs — left to make the case to voters searching for alternatives to the former president that neither Sununu nor Haley are sufficiently anti-Trump. He has some fodder there. Both Sununu and Haley have said they would support Trump if he ultimately becomes the nominee.

“The endorsement is ultimately a tad confusing,” coming from someone who has said over and over he wants to block Trump from the nomination, said an adviser to Christie, granted anonymity to discuss the campaign’s internal thinking. “I guess that’s politics.”

Sununu argued otherwise. Christie’s “entire campaign has been really about going nuclear against Trump. And there’s a lot of truth there. And that’s his message in his campaign,” Sununu told reporters after endorsing Haley. “What Nikki has been able to do is say: ‘I’m not just going to tell what not to vote for. I’m going to tell you what I bring to the table.’”

Christie is increasingly arguing his point — that equivocating on Trump is enabling him — from an island, even as polls show the majority of likely New Hampshire GOP primary voters want to move on from Trump. And other members of the anti-Trump establishment, like Romney, appear unlikely to come to his aid — even though some of Christie’s supporters wish they would. One woman asked Christie during a campaign stop in Durham last Friday if he’d consider former Rep. Liz Cheney, an outspoken Trump critic, as his running mate, to which Christie said she’d have to endorse him first.

Hours later, while waiting for Christie to arrive at a town hall-style event in Hooksett, one of his supporters called out Romney for keeping his distance.

“Shame on [Romney] for not coming out and supporting Chris Christie,” said Matthew Comai, a Hooksett independent. And “shame on [Sununu]” for supporting Haley, “because she would support Donald Trump if he became the nominee.”

Still, it’s questionable whether the support of Republicans who have been ostracized by the party’s pro-Trump base would do much to move the needle for Christie. Romney said as much in his Sunday interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” calling any endorsement he makes in 2024 a “kiss of death” for the recipient.

Christie returns to New Hampshire on Wednesday for a Sununu-less swing. The first stop on his schedule: ringing a Salvation Army bell outside a Market Basket.