Chris Christie throws in the towel. The only candidate openly hostile to Donald Trump in the GOP primary is abandoning his campaign just days before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire caucuses. The fight is being simplified, which hurts Trump, even though the former president has a clear advantage.
The former New Jersey governor never had a chance of being nominated. From the start, he went against the party's majority trend and dedicated himself to the former president. He criticized him whenever he could. He was the only one who preferred to attack the absent Trump, the leader in the polls, rather than the rest of the candidates in the debates.
However, his candidacy ultimately led to a split in the vote that Trump does not want to repeat. Christie was under intense pressure to withdraw and unite the party's anti-Trump vote around a single alternative. Christie has occasionally stated that she did not want to recommend Nikki Haley, for example, because she feared she would look foolish if she later agreed to vote for Trump as her vice presidential candidate.
“I would like to get out of the way in favor of someone who is actually running against Donald Trump,” he said at a forum in Rochester, New Hampshire, arguing that none of his rivals have come forward. “I’m famous enough. I have many titles. “The only reason for this is to win,” he added. “That’s why I would like to stand up for someone if it was really against Donald Trump.”
Haley is definitely the one who stands to gain the most from Christie's retirement, particularly in New Hampshire, where she may have a chance of overtaking the former president in the primaries. Among those who have pressured Christie to retire is New Hamshire governor Chris Sununu, who said last week: “He has the opportunity to come in and be the hero, take Nikki to the top , to give her, to give Trump this defeat, Nikki “this victory” in that state's primary election, which takes place on January 23rd.
In this, the sum of Haley's and Christie's voting intentions exceeds Trump's. Should the only female candidate manage to attract a majority of the now-eliminated votes, she would have a unique opportunity to inject some excitement into a battle that Trump appears to have already won before it begins.
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Christie has repeatedly warned his party's voters against nominating a candidate who has already been impeached four times and who could well be doomed to failure in November's presidential election. The former governor of New Jersey also believes that Trump will lose in a tough fight against President Joe Biden, the likely Democratic nominee, because he is mobilizing so many votes against him.
Still, the former governor himself doesn't think it's very likely that his withdrawal will help Haley beat Trump in the primaries.
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