(The caricature above of Chris Christie is by the inimitable DonkeyHotey.)The political pundits, who are mostly based in New York and Washington, are crowing about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as being the leading GOP candidate for the 2016 presidential nomination, and some polls are even showing that. I am just not ready to buy that.
First of all, the states where Christie is the most popular are in the areas of the country that he would have no chance of winning in a general election -- the Northeast and the West Coast. There is no chance that Christie could beat either Clinton or Biden in these areas. In the areas ruled by Republicans, he doesn't do nearly as well.
In the Deep South, Christie would lose a Republican race for the nomination to several other candidates. And I believe the same is true in the Midwest, the Southwest, and most of the West. These areas are ruled by the teabaggers in the Republican Party, and those teabaggers consider Christie to be a big city liberal -- and they still haven't forgiven him for shaking hands with and saying nice things about President Obama after Hurricane Sandy.
Republicans weren't real happy with Mitt Romney in 2012, but they went with him because they accepted the argument that he had the best chance to win. They aren't going to do that in 2016. Too many of the teabagger-types are convinced that they lost in 2012 because their candidate wasn't conservative enough. They're going to fight for a Rand Paul/Paul Ryan/Ted Cruz prototype as their nominee (although many could probably support Jeb Bush if he ran).
It's still a long way off, and Christie might squeak out a win for the nomination like Romney did, but if that happened there is a good chance that many in the far-right of the GOP could go for a third party. Don't underestimate their dislike of Christie.
But I still don't think Christie can get the GOP nomination. The party is still just too far to the right in many areas of the country. Before I consider him a viable candidate, he's going to have to show that he can win some Republican states outside the Northeast -- and at least so far, he has not done that. A good example of this is the recent Public Policy Polling survey taken between December 12th and 15th of 540 GOP primary voters in Kentucky (with a 4.2 point margin of error). And Kentucky is not even a Deep South state.
