If Christie Wants Trump to Lose, He Should Endorse Haley – The American Spectator

I’d gladly vote for Chris Christie for president. But he’s not going to be president. Unlike Ron DeSantis, whose supporters might split between Nikki Haley and Donald Trump if he (DeSantis) were to drop out, Christie’s current supporters would likely go by a wide margin to Haley.

I have no idea if the new poll in New Hampshire showing Haley behind Trump by only 4 points is accurate, but if it is and given that it shows Christie with 13 percent support there — probably a higher percentage than he’ll get anywhere else — if Christie wants to help beat Trump he should drop out, endorse Haley, and continue on the campaign trail as a Haley surrogate making the aggressive case against Trump.

Especially in recent years, New Hampshire has a marginally better record than Iowa at picking the eventual GOP nominee. The issue isn’t whether New Hampshire is somehow representative of other states’ voters; it really isn’t. The issue is that a win by someone other than Trump in an early state that gets a lot of attention could swing momentum in this race if it can damage the sense, enjoyed by some and terrifying to others, that Trump is the inevitable nominee.

Remember, in 2008 Hillary Clinton was the inevitable Democratic nominee. Until Obama took it away. (He won Iowa; Clinton won New Hampshire. So it’s not specifically about winning NH but it’s about denting the armor of inevitability early.)

One thing that I don’t know: How seriously does Team Trump take the Haley threat and, if they take it quite seriously will they determine that the best approach is to attack her aggressively (which isn’t that easy, not least because she’s a woman) or to stop calling her “bird brain” and instead try to lure her as Trump’s running mate? I suspect the former. Playing nice with her just seems too far out of character even though I suspect some of his advisors will at least mention the possibility.

Momentum is an incredible force in politics. At the moment, and I emphasize how short-term a snapshot this is, Haley has momentum and it’s coming mostly at Trump’s expense (and a bit from DeSantis but he had fallen precipitously already). In betting odds for the GOP nomination, over the past week Trump has dropped about 5 percent and Haley has gained a similar amount. BUT, we’re still talking about Trump at 75 percent and Haley at 19 percent, so you’d still clearly rather be him.

Last thing on this today: As noted earlier, probably a decent chunk of DeSantis voters have Trump rather than Haley as their second choice. And roughly all Ramaswamy supporters would go to Trump if Vivek dropped out. So, it’s not impossible to imagine a situation that seemed extremely unlikely earlier this year that having more than two people in the field could actually hurt Trump rather than help him if all but one of them are actually taking votes from Trump rather than from one anti-Trump candidate whom anti-Trump Republicans are coalescing around.