Elections

A bigger field in the G.O.P. primary could chip away at DeSantis’s chances of overtaking Trump.A crowded field could help Donald Trump, as it did in 2015-16. Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressIt’s been feeling a bit like 2016 lately.Back then, the opposition to Donald J. Trump was badly divided. The party couldn’t coalesce behind one candidate, allowing Mr. Trump to win the Republican primary with well under half of the vote.With Mike Pence and Chris Christie bringing the field up to 10 candidates this week, it’s easy to wonder whether the same conditions might be falling into place again. Despite high hopes at the start of the year, Ron DeSantis has failed to consolidate Trump-skeptic voters and donors alike. Now, the likes of Mr. Pence and Mr. Christie — as well as Tim Scott and Nikki Haley — are in the fray and threatening to leave the Trump opposition hopelessly divided, as it was seven years ago.In the end, Mr. Pence or Mr. Christie might well break out and leave the opposition to Mr. Trump as fractured as it was in 2016. But it’s worth noting that, so far, the opposition to Mr. Trump has been far more unified than it ever was back then. It’s not 2016, at least not yet.So far this cycle, polls have consistently shown Mr. DeSantis with the support of a majority of Republican voters who don’t support Mr. Trump. Nothing like this happened in that past primary, when at various points five different candidates could claim to be the strongest “not-Trump” candidate, and none came even close to consolidating so much of the opposition to Mr. Trump. Ted Cruz got there eventually, but only after a majority of delegates had been awarded and it was down to him and John Kasich.Perhaps surprisingly, Mr. DeSantis’s share of not-Trump voters has remained constant, even though his own support has dropped. This suggests Mr. DeSantis has mainly bled support to Mr. Trump, not to another not-Trump rival. It also suggests that the other not-Trump candidates may have bled support to Mr. Trump over the last half year as well.Consolidation of Not-Trump Voters More

Mr. Johnston, a former Colorado state senator, benefited from far more outside spending than his opponent, who conceded on Tuesday night.Mike Johnston, a former Colorado state senator buoyed by millions of dollars in outside spending, declared victory on Tuesday night in Denver’s mayoral election, beating out a candidate who had been vying to become the first woman to hold the office.As of 10 p.m., Mr. Johnston had pulled ahead with about 54 percent of the vote in the runoff contest, which is nonpartisan though both candidates are Democrats. His opponent, Kelly Brough, a former head of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, had about 46 percent. Ms. Brough conceded minutes later.Tens of thousands of ballots were still left to be counted as of Tuesday night, and the city said that the official results would not be released until later this month. But Mr. Johnston continued to hold a steady lead throughout the evening after polls closed.“We can build a city that is big enough keep all of us safe, to house all of us, to support all of us,” Mr. Johnston said in a victory speech on Tuesday night. “That is our dream of Denver.”Mr. Johnston, 48, and Ms. Brough, 59, had emerged as the top contenders from a crowded field of 16 candidates in the April general election to replace Mayor Michael B. Hancock, a Democrat who has been in office for 12 years. Term limits prevented him from running again.Both candidates had said that they wanted to make space for more affordable housing, invest in services for homeless people and improve diversity in police recruitment in Colorado’s capital city. But Mr. Johnston appeared to have more support from left-leaning voters, and from wealthy donors outside the state.Ms. Brough said in a speech that she had called Mr. Johnston to concede. “We set out to restore the promise of Denver,” she said. “And I still believe in this campaign, and the work we did.”A handful of more progressive candidates had considerable support from voters before the April 4 election, but they seemed to sap each other’s momentum as the first round of voting neared.Tami Matthews, 53, a marketing director, said she had voted for Mr. Johnston in the runoff because he seemed like a creative politician who was more progressive than Ms. Brough. She said she liked his support for more regulations to address climate change, as well as his plans to build small communities of tiny homes for the city’s homeless population.Denver voters had been excited about the idea of having a woman as mayor, Ms. Matthews said. “But I think that there were so many other better women candidates,” she added, mentioning progressive candidates who hadn’t made it past the April election.Still, she said she had voted for Mr. Johnston both times, even though she did not like the reports of his donations from out of state. “That does give me some heartburn,” Ms. Matthews said.In the 12 years under Mr. Hancock’s administration, Denver has seen major population growth — despite some losses during the coronavirus pandemic — and many of the challenges that come with it. Housing costs have risen, and homelessness has gotten worse.“Whoever wins I think will have, at least for a while, a fair mandate to make some pretty significant public policy shifts on these issues,” Seth Masket, the director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver, said in an interview before the early results were in. “I think a lot of other mayors of similar-size cities will be looking at Denver, just to see what comes out of this.”Mr. Johnston — a former teacher, principal and education adviser to President Barack Obama — was first elected to the State Senate in 2009 and served until 2017, when he reached his term limit. Since then, he has run unsuccessfully both for governor and for the United States Senate.More recently, he was the chief executive of Gary Community Ventures, an organization that combines philanthropy, investing and political funding. There, he played a leading role in advancing Proposition 123, an initiative to dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars annually to providing affordable housing. It was approved by Colorado voters last year.Before serving as the chief executive of the city Chamber of Commerce, Ms. Brough was Denver’s head of human resources, and she served as chief of staff for former Mayor John Hickenlooper, who is now a U.S. senator.She was endorsed by Democratic leaders in the city and state, as well as the city’s police union and its Republican Party. But endorsements from some of the progressive candidates who were edged out of the April election bolstered Mr. Johnston’s chances in the runoff.His campaign also benefited from far more outside spending than did Ms. Brough’s, public records show.Advancing Denver, a super PAC that supported Mr. Johnston but was not formally affiliated with his campaign, received more than $2 million from donors including Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, and Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City.Both men also supported Mr. Johnston’s unsuccessful run for governor in 2018, The Colorado Sun reported.A Better Denver, a super PAC that supported Ms. Brough’s candidacy, was funded by donors including the National Association of Realtors, which spent more than $400,000.Although Tuesday was Election Day, votes for the runoff contest have been rolling in since last month. That is because registered voters in Denver receive their ballots in the mail, giving them the option to send it back, drop it off or show up in person to cast a ballot on Election Day. Ms. Brough dropped off her ballot last week, and Mr. Johnston submitted his on Sunday. More

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie announced his presidential run in a town hall at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in Manchester, New Hampshire. Christie joins the primary as a rank outsider but promises a campaign with a singular focus: to take the fight to Donald Trump, who Christie said was ‘obsessed with the mirror, who never admits a mistake, who never admits a fault and who always finds someone else and something else to blame for whatever goes wrong, but finds every reason to take credit for anything that goes right’. More

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At his New Hampshire kickoff, the former New Jersey governor called Donald Trump “a bitter, angry man” and said his time in office was a failure.Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey who was eclipsed by Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential primaries, announced on Tuesday that he would seek the 2024 Republican nomination, setting up a rematch with the former president and expanding the field of G.O.P. candidates.In making a second run for the presidency, Mr. Christie, 60, has positioned himself as the person most willing to attack both Mr. Trump, his former friend turned adversary, and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has been in second place in nearly every public Republican primary poll for months.Mr. Christie, who declared his run on Tuesday evening at a town-hall-style event in New Hampshire, set himself apart from all other Republicans running by going directly after Mr. Trump. He called him “a bitter, angry man,” said his record in office was a failure and, in an unusually personal attack, accused Mr. Trump and family members of profiting off the presidency, referring to an investment from the Saudi crown prince.“The grift from this family is breathtaking,” Mr. Christie said. “It’s breathtaking. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis?”“That’s your money he stole,” he continued, adding, “That makes us a banana republic.”Over more than two hours, Mr. Christie also chided other Republicans in the race as being too timid to criticize Mr. Trump by name. Describing a recent appearance in Iowa of other 2024 hopefuls, he mocked their euphemistic swipes at the former president. “‘We need a leader who looks forward, not backwards,’” Mr. Christie said, his voice dripping sarcasm. “I get it! You’re talking about the way the 2020 election was stolen. And you won’t say it wasn’t stolen.”In earlier appearances, Mr. Christie has called Mr. Trump a loser because of his 2020 defeat, and said that he was unfit to return to the White House after inciting a mob to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Christie has said that if Mr. Trump is the nominee, he will not vote for him.Still, with polls showing Mr. Christie to be the most unpopular 2024 candidate among Republican voters, the existential question for his race is, Who will he appeal to?The crowd at Mr. Christie’s event. New Hampshire’s many independents could play a crucial role in the 2024 Republican primary.John Tully for The New York TimesThe audience on Tuesday, at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, appeared to be almost entirely independent voters. Registered Republicans were hard to find. In interviews, almost everyone disapproved of Mr. Trump, which suggested that Mr. Christie could activate a small but passionate group of supporters.“He’s a very capable guy,” Paul R. Kfoury Sr., a retired judge from Bedford, N.H., said of the former governor. “Very centrist. Not a right-wing nut like so many of them, frankly, if I may be candid.” But he was skeptical of Mr. Christie’s chances in his party. “It’s a heavy lift,” he said.New Hampshire’s many independents could play a crucial role in the 2024 Republican primary because there is unlikely to be a competitive Democratic race.Carolyn Cicciu, 77, from Goffstown, N.H., voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020 “because I had no choice,” she said. Now, she said she had concerns about Mr. Biden’s age.“Whatever candidate I choose, I want it to be somebody that is not so partisan that they can’t see what’s good about the other side’s position,” added Ms. Cicciu, a retired middle-school teacher.Mr. Christie has said he sees a path to the nomination and is not running merely as a “paid assassin” to take on Mr. Trump for the benefit of other candidates.On Tuesday, he cited political punditry about his candidacy in a mocking voice: “Christie doesn’t really care about winning, all he cares about is destroying Trump,” he said. Then he added: “How are those two things mutually exclusive?”“Let me be very clear,” he said. “I am going out there to take out Donald Trump, but here’s why: I will win. And I don’t want him to win.”Still, Mr. Christie’s path to securing the nomination is complicated. He is a northeastern Republican who has not been enmeshed in the culture wars of the Trump era. His main path would necessarily be through New Hampshire, a state where he waged a fierce campaign in 2016 but ultimately came up short. And to gain traction, he will need to rely on attention from candidate debates.His campaign will depend heavily on media coverage and a nimbleness to travel to places where that is likeliest. New Hampshire is the state where he will begin his campaign, but not necessarily where he will hunker down.He still needs to meet the criteria set by the Republican National Committee to get on that debate stage, which includes 40,000 unique donors.Yet if he makes it, as a onetime friend of Mr. Trump, he has a keen understanding of the former president and how to get under his skin. Depending on how the race goes, Mr. Christie’s main impact could be in badly damaging Mr. Trump, whom he has been attacking with gusto. But he has been encouraged by a number of Republican donors and senior officials in recent weeks, particularly as Mr. DeSantis stumbled before even becoming a formal candidate.“I guarantee you that at the end of it,” Mr. Christie said on Tuesday, “you will have no doubt in your mind who I am and what I stand for.”John Tully for The New York TimesMr. Christie, a former federal prosecutor, will be in a unique position to attack Mr. Trump’s various legal travails, as he is the first former president to be indicted and is facing the potential for additional indictments in other cases.Still, Mr. Christie will face questions about his conversion from Trump supporter to detractor. (Mr. Trump, after leaving office, referred to Mr. Christie as “an opportunist.”)Mr. Christie was a favorite of some Republicans to run for the nomination in the 2012 campaign, when he was one of the country’s most famous governors, known for tangling with union leaders and selling himself as knowing how to balance a budget. But instead of running that year, while his star was rising, he chose to focus on running for re-election, receiving national attention for his response during the devastating Hurricane Sandy — and criticism from some Republicans for appearing with President Barack Obama in New Jersey days before the election at an event related to the storm’s aftermath.The anger among Republicans presaged a political environment in which Republicans punished their elected officials for comity with Democrats.By the time Mr. Christie announced he was running for president in 2015, his candidacy had been hobbled by the so-called Bridgegate political revenge scandal that swamped his administration two years earlier. Mr. Christie denied involvement in the alleged payback scheme involving closing lanes on the George Washington Bridge to get back at a political opponent of the governor, and convictions against two defendants were overturned in 2020 by the U.S. Supreme Court. But by then, Mr. Christie’s political fortunes had been damaged.Asked by an attendee on Tuesday about his biggest mistake in public life, he cited Bridgegate. Without accepting direct responsibility, he called it a “fraternity prank” by people who reported to him. “It cost me a lot,” he said. “It cost me credibility. It humiliated me.”After dropping out of the 2016 race, Mr. Christie endorsed Mr. Trump that February, one of the first prominent national Republicans to do so. That endorsement was valuable to Mr. Trump as he tried to appeal to Republicans who were skeptical of him over his comments calling for a ban on Muslims entering the country, or his misogynistic statements about the Fox News host Megyn Kelly. More

The two men had a relationship that could be genuinely warm, and at other times transactional. Now they are vying for the presidency in open hostility.Their friendship began after an introduction through Donald J. Trump’s sister. It ended nearly 20 years later, when Mr. Trump refused to concede the 2020 election to Joseph R. Biden Jr.In between, Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, and Mr. Trump had a relationship that could be genuinely warm, with chats about politics and current events, and at other times transactional.Mr. Christie gave Mr. Trump a boost by endorsing his 2016 candidacy after ending his own bid for the Republican nomination, and then coached him for debates and led his initial presidential transition team. In return, Mr. Trump passed him over for the roles of vice president and attorney general.Mr. Trump eventually turned back to Mr. Christie for other advice during his term. But by the midway point of the presidency, Mr. Christie seemed content to be on the outside.Their last exchange was in August 2021, according to a person briefed on the matter, when the former president had an aide send Mr. Christie a testy message.Now, they have entered a new chapter: open hostility. Mr. Christie announced his second presidential campaign on Tuesday in New Hampshire, aiming to stop Mr. Trump from a second term in the White House.“I think he’s a coward and I think he’s a puppet of Putin,” Mr. Christie, speaking recently to the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, said of the man he once supported.Here’s a look back at how their relationship grew, thrived and then wilted.Casual Acquaintances, Then Presidential RivalsMr. Christie was a United States attorney in New Jersey, where Mr. Trump still had casinos, when the two men first dined together.That May 2002 introduction over dinner came through an intermediary, Maryanne Trump Barry, Mr. Trump’s older sister, who was a federal judge in the state at the time and described Mr. Trump to Mr. Christie as “my little brother.” In Mr. Christie’s 2019 memoir, “Let Me Finish,” he wrote about his first impressions of Mr. Trump, who in two years would begin his run as the star of the reality TV show “The Apprentice.”“Donald was opinionated,” Mr. Christie wrote. “He was bombastic. He was entertaining. He talked about his business with infectious enthusiasm and considerable detail. I came away with the impression that public Donald and the private Donald were pretty much one and the same.”It was soon clear that Mr. Christie could end up as a candidate for governor someday. He won the office in his first attempt, in 2009, two years before Mr. Trump considered running for the White House against President Barack Obama.Mr. Christie won the governorship in 2009 alongside Kim Guadagno, who served as lieutenant governor.Jeff Zelevansky/ReutersBoth men knew each other in the way that prominent people in the New York media market tend to: casually, with paths that periodically crossed.In 2015, both Mr. Christie and Mr. Trump ended up declaring presidential candidacies.Mr. Christie, by then hobbled by the “Bridgegate” political retribution scandal, had nonetheless fashioned a national political brand as a straight-talking candidate.By contrast, some viewed Mr. Trump as a sideshow who would eventually fade, even as he was leading in the polls. At the time, Mr. Trump told Mr. Christie privately that he didn’t expect his campaign to last beyond October 2015.Their relationship began to be tested. Two months after Mr. Trump’s entrance into the race, Mr. Christie told Fox News that the New York businessman didn’t have the “temperament” or experience to be president. Mr. Trump taunted Mr. Christie for being absent from New Jersey, where he was still governor.Ultimately, Mr. Trump overshadowed his newfound rival — and all other rivals — with an endless stream of inflammatory pronouncements, including a proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country.Mr. Christie and Mr. Trump traded barbs after they both entered the race for their party’s presidential nomination.Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesMr. Trump saved his most hostile barbs for candidates other than Mr. Christie. In turn, the governor trained his most aggressive fire on Senator Marco Rubio of Florida during a debate in New Hampshire shortly before the state’s primary, mocking him for a “memorized 25-second speech.”But after staking his candidacy on New Hampshire, Mr. Christie finished a dismal sixth and dropped out of the race.A Key Ally, Up to a PointWhen Mr. Trump won the South Carolina primary, Mr. Christie told allies the writing was on the wall — it was clear Mr. Trump was on track to become the nominee.“I am proud to be here to endorse Donald Trump for president of the United States,” Mr. Christie said at an endorsement event in Florida in February 2016, as astonished reporters watched him praise Mr. Trump’s candidacy. After Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Mr. Christie was one of the first prominent Republicans to endorse Mr. Trump at a time when the party’s leadership was still trying to stop his ascent.Soon, Mr. Christie was a key adviser to Mr. Trump. He was also for a time considered as a potential running mate, but some of Mr. Trump’s advisers, including members of his family, argued against it. (Mr. Christie had also prosecuted the father of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner years earlier, and Mr. Kushner was opposed to the selection of Mr. Christie.)After Mr. Christie endorsed Mr. Trump, he became a member of Mr. Trump’s inner circle and helped lead his transition to the White House.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesMr. Trump ultimately chose Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana, who had been introduced to Mr. Trump through Mr. Christie.Mr. Trump tried to keep Mr. Christie on the hook, the former governor wrote in his memoir, insisting in a phone call to Mr. Christie that he hadn’t decided on his running mate yet, even as he made plans to fly Mr. Pence to New York for a news conference.Mr. Christie led Mr. Trump’s preparations for the general-election debates against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. But after the October 2016 release of a recording in which Mr. Trump described grabbing women by their genitals, Mr. Trump privately griped that Mr. Christie had not more vocally backed him.Mr. Christie also served as the head of his transition team, a job from which he was dismissed shortly after Election Day by Mr. Kushner; Stephen K. Bannon, the chief strategist for Mr. Trump; and Reince Priebus, who would become Mr. Trump’s first White House chief of staff.Behind the Scenes, DistancingMr. Trump asked Mr. Christie to lead a task force on opioids, an issue Mr. Christie had been concerned about as governor. Mr. Christie was also said to be a personal favorite of Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania.As president, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Christie to lead a task force on opioids but passed over Mr. Christie for other roles in his administration.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut Mr. Trump decided against giving him the job of attorney general, which went to Mr. Sessions. Instead, Mr. Christie has said, the president offered him various roles at different points, including labor secretary and secretary of the Homeland Security Department.Mr. Trump also took a suggestion from Mr. Christie as to who could replace the fired F.B.I. director, James A. Comey. It was Mr. Christie’s lawyer during the Bridgegate scandal, Christopher A. Wray, who was appointed and remains atop the agency. Mr. Trump soon started complaining that Mr. Wray was not doing what he wanted at the agency, and blamed Mr. Christie for a nomination that Mr. Trump had put forward.Mr. Christie took himself out of consideration to succeed John F. Kelly as Mr. Trump’s chief of staff at the end of 2018 after Mr. Trump had offered the job to Mr. Christie. By then, it had become clear that Mr. Trump was cycling through staff members and firing them at a rapid clip.In February 2020, Mr. Trump pardoned a former software chief executive whose clemency Mr. Christie had lobbied for.That year, Mr. Christie wrote Mr. Trump a lengthy memo instructing him how to handle the coronavirus pandemic. It was ignored.Mr. Christie’s relationship with the president grew increasingly strained and later severed after the 2020 presidential election, when Mr. Christie said he advised Mr. Trump to concede to Joseph R. Biden Jr.Al Drago for The New York TimesMr. Trump brought Mr. Christie in for debate preparations once again, and some of his aides faulted Mr. Christie when Mr. Trump’s initial debate against Mr. Biden was disastrous. (Mr. Trump appeared physically unwell at the debate and may have already been affected by the coronavirus; the news of his Covid diagnosis came days later.)When both Mr. Trump and Mr. Christie were hospitalized with serious bouts of Covid shortly after that debate, Mr. Trump called his debate coach at the hospital. “Are you going to say you got it from me?” Mr. Trump asked Mr. Christie, the former governor later recounted in his second book, “Republican Rescue.” They both recovered, but Mr. Christie made clear he thought he should have worn a mask at the prep sessions, angering Mr. Trump.BreakupHours after Election Day ended, when Mr. Trump delivered a speech claiming widespread fraud, Mr. Christie, by then a contributor for ABC News, said on air that Mr. Trump needed to offer proof.In an interview with The New York Times in November 2022, Mr. Christie said he had last spoken with Mr. Trump in December 2020, after the president saw him deride Mr. Trump’s legal team on television. Mr. Christie told him he should concede the election to Mr. Biden and host the president-elect in the White House.“He told me he would never, ever, ever, ever do that,” Mr. Christie said. “And that was the last time we spoke.”In 2021, Mr. Trump described Mr. Christie as an “opportunist” to a reporter. Four months later, he had an aide send Mr. Christie a printout of a tweet by Mr. Christie related to the pardon that he had sought for the former software executive. “Chris,” he wrote, according to the person briefed on it, “How quickly people (some) forget – Best Wishes,” with his signature.Mr. Christie responded cordially, wishing Mr. Trump well.Shane Goldmacher More

Mr. Christie, a onetime star presidential recruit who finished in sixth place in New Hampshire in 2016, has become a fierce Trump critic.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who announced a second campaign for president on Tuesday after a disappointing run in 2016, has had a roller coaster of a political career in more ways than one.In the span of four years, he went from star presidential recruit to scandal-dogged sixth-place finisher in New Hampshire. In the next seven, he went from serving as one of Donald J. Trump’s most influential advisers to advertising himself as the only candidate brave enough to denounce Mr. Trump to his face.Here are five things to know about Mr. Christie.He had a meteoric rise in his first term as governor …Mr. Christie first drew national attention in 2009, when he was elected governor of New Jersey over a Democratic incumbent, Jon Corzine.He quickly notched legislative victories for Republicans in a Democratic-leaning state, including passing a major overhaul of New Jersey’s public employee pension system.Making use of a tactic that is now commonplace but was more striking at the time, he also attacked critics at public events — in 2012, he told a law student who had heckled him that if “you conduct yourself like that in a courtroom, your rear end’s going to be thrown in jail, idiot.” His showmanship and combativeness made him appealing both to Republican voters and to party operatives, who began urging him to run for president in 2012.He didn’t, choosing instead to give the keynote address for Mitt Romney at the Republican National Convention, become the chairman of the Republican Governors Association and establish himself as an early front-runner for 2016.His profile rose further after his management of the state’s recovery from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when he famously welcomed President Barack Obama to New Jersey — an image that infuriated some Republicans but helped cement Mr. Christie’s reputation as someone who could switch modes from attack dog to bipartisan statesman as needed.… and a ‘Bridgegate’-fueled crash in his second term.If Mr. Christie’s first term as governor was politically triumphant, his second term was politically calamitous because of a scandal that became known as Bridgegate.In September 2013, not long before Mr. Christie was up for re-election as governor, high-ranking officials at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates bridges and tunnels between the two states, closed two of three lanes onto the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee, N.J. The closings caused chaos.The ostensible rationale was to study traffic patterns. But it soon emerged that a Christie ally at the Port Authority had ordered the closings as part of a scheme to punish the mayor of Fort Lee for not endorsing the governor’s re-election campaign — and that he had done so after Mr. Christie’s deputy chief of staff emailed him, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” In a trial in 2016 against the deputy chief of staff and a Port Authority official, a witness testified that Mr. Christie himself had been told of the political reason for the closings while they were happening, and had laughed.Mr. Christie denied involvement in the scandal, but it consumed his second term and proved a serious liability in his first presidential campaign. By the time he left office, he had the lowest approval rating recorded for any New Jersey governor.A campaign event in New Hampshire for Mr. Christie’s 2016 presidential run. Mr. Christie never gained much traction then — against any of his competitors, much less Mr. Trump.Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist for The New York TimesHis 2016 campaign served to knock out Marco Rubio.Mr. Christie first ran for president in 2016, a year that made mincemeat of quite a few Republicans seen as rising stars in the party, and he was no exception.He never gained much traction — against any of his competitors, much less Mr. Trump — and came in sixth in the New Hampshire primary after focusing his efforts there. He dropped out the next day.But Mr. Christie did have a significant impact on the trajectory of the Republican race, just not to his own benefit.He helped pave the way for Mr. Trump’s nomination by wounding the man who had looked to be his strongest opponent: Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.In a debate in New Hampshire in early February, Mr. Christie went after Mr. Rubio mercilessly — accusing him of being inauthentic and relying on canned lines, a criticism Mr. Rubio lent credence to by responding with canned lines. (“There it is, everybody,” Mr. Christie replied.) The attack was so effective that the debate audience began to boo Mr. Rubio.Mr. Christie and Donald Trump ahead of a Trump rally in 2016.Mark Makela for The New York TimesHe was a member of Trump’s inner circle for years …After ending his own campaign, Mr. Christie quickly endorsed Mr. Trump, praising him for “rewriting the playbook of American politics.” His endorsement was a big deal given that most of the Republican establishment was still trying to find anyone other than Mr. Trump to coalesce around.Mr. Christie became a highly influential adviser to the Trump campaign. In characteristically combative fashion, he defended Mr. Trump even when he went too far for other Republicans.Implicit in the alliance was that Mr. Christie would get a high-ranking job in the Trump administration, perhaps even the vice presidency. But while Mr. Trump chose him to lead his presidential transition team and offered him cabinet posts, Mr. Christie did not get the job he really wanted: attorney general.Even so, he stayed loyal, helping Mr. Trump with debate preparation in 2020. He did not break away until Mr. Trump tried to overturn his election loss — at which point Mr. Christie began speaking forcefully, including in a book.Mr. Christie greets voters and students at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., earlier this year.Holly Ramer/Associated Press… but has reinvented himself as Trump Enemy No. 1.Mr. Christie is pitching himself as the only candidate willing to confront Mr. Trump head-on. (Though Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has begun to do that, other candidates largely have not, lest they alienate the pro-Trump Republican base.)In a pre-campaign stop in New Hampshire in March, Mr. Christie tried to convince voters that he was the man to do this by evoking his long-ago brawl with Mr. Rubio: “You better have somebody on that stage who can do to him what I did to Marco,” he said.Voters remain unconvinced. In a recent Monmouth University poll, Mr. Christie was the only candidate or potential candidate with a net-negative approval rating among Republicans — only 21 percent of whom viewed him favorably, compared with 47 percent who viewed him unfavorably.Mr. Christie said in New Hampshire in April: “I don’t think that anybody is going to beat Donald Trump by sidling up to him, playing footsie with him and pretending that you’re almost like him.”But the fact that he supported Mr. Trump throughout his presidency went unmentioned until a teenager asked a question: Given his denunciations of Mr. Trump for undermining democracy, did he still believe Mr. Trump had been a better choice than Mrs. Clinton?“I still would’ve picked Trump,” Mr. Christie acknowledged. More

In running for the Republican nomination against Donald J. Trump, Mike Pence will be the first vice president to directly challenge the president who originally put him on the ticket.He may not make it to the Oval Office. But he will make it into the history books, at least as an asterisk.As Mike Pence formally kicks off his underdog campaign for the White House on Wednesday, he will become something almost unheard-of since the founding of the republic — a former vice president running against the president who originally put him on the ticket.While it is not unusual for tension and even enmity to develop between presidents and vice presidents, never before has a No. 2 mounted a direct challenge to a onetime running mate in the way that Mr. Pence is taking on former President Donald J. Trump for the Republican nomination next year.Vice presidents, after all, typically owe their national stature to the presidents who chose them, and even if they are not especially grateful, they rarely find it politically feasible to compete with their patrons. But Mr. Pence is gambling that Republican primary voters may eventually grow weary of Mr. Trump and turn to the other member of their party’s 2016 and 2020 tickets.“Having a former vice president contest the president he served for their party’s nomination in contested primaries is like a 234-year flood,” said Joel K. Goldstein, a specialist on the vice presidency at the St. Louis University School of Law. “It doesn’t happen.”“Defeated presidents don’t run again in modern times,” he added, “and vice presidents tend to inherit support from their administration’s supporters, not become pariahs to them” as Mr. Pence has since defying Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The broken relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence is itself a historical anomaly, of course. Mr. Trump sought to pressure Mr. Pence to claim the power to effectively reject Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the Electoral College, a power the vice president said he did not have. Mr. Trump was so angry that he publicly excoriated his own vice president, prompting a mob to hunt for him while chanting “hang Mike Pence” on Jan. 6, 2021. According to testimony, Mr. Trump suggested to aides that maybe his supporters were right.“The reason why no other vice president appears to have run against his president is that he was selected by the president, and there is almost always a personal bond stemming from a sense of loyalty and gratitude,” said Richard Moe, who was the chief of staff to Vice President Walter F. Mondale. “I can’t think of another vice president who was treated more disrespectfully than Pence was by Trump.”There are no precise parallels to the current situation. In 1800, Vice President Thomas Jefferson challenged President John Adams, defeating the incumbent’s bid for a second term. In those early days of the republic, however, the vice president was not the president’s running mate, but the second-highest vote recipient in the previous election. Adams and Jefferson had run against each other in 1796, with Adams prevailing and Jefferson becoming vice president because he was the runner-up.The 12th Amendment ratified in 1804 changed that system so that the vice president was chosen in tandem with the president as part of the same ticket. That did not mean they were always on the same team. Many tickets have been forged between rivals who had just run against each other for the nomination, including John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1960, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in 1980 and Barack Obama and Mr. Biden in 2008.The broken relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence is a historical anomaly. Doug Mills/The New York TimesSome vice presidents grew hostile to the presidents they served under, as when John C. Calhoun openly opposed Andrew Jackson during the nullification crisis pitting South Carolina against Washington over a tariff. After being dumped from the re-election ticket in 1832, Calhoun resigned the vice presidency to take a seat in the Senate to resist his former ticket mate’s agenda. Still, Calhoun never challenged Jackson as a candidate.In 1916, former President Theodore Roosevelt and his onetime vice president Charles W. Fairbanks both drew support on the opening ballots at the Republican convention but were not actively campaigning against each other. Hubert Humphrey and his 1968 running mate Edmund Muskie both ran in 1972 for the Democratic nomination, neither successfully. In 2000, former Vice President Dan Quayle ran against George W. Bush, the son of the man who put Mr. Quayle on the 1988 and 1992 tickets.But the closest the country has previously come to a direct contest between running mates was in 1940 when Vice President John Nance Garner, a conservative Texan known as Cactus Jack and no fan of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, waged a campaign for the White House.Garner was known for his love of whiskey, once noting that “I don’t get drunk but once a day.” He is most famous today for his sour assessment of the vice presidency, which he declared not “worth a bucket of warm spit,” or some variation of that.Since no president to that point had run for a third consecutive term owing to the precedent set by George Washington, it was not entirely clear that Roosevelt would be a candidate in 1940, and he made no move to stop Garner or other associates from running. Still, there was no love lost between the two. “I see that the vice president has thrown his bottle — I mean his hat — into the ring,” Roosevelt quipped to his cabinet.Garner, a traditionalist, had fallen out with F.D.R. over the president’s effort to pack the Supreme Court and opposed breaking Washington’s precedent. “As retribution, he declared that he would run for the 1940 presidential nomination, but he never put his heart into it, and no one took his candidacy seriously,” said Mr. Moe, who wrote “Roosevelt’s Second Act,” a book about the 1940 race.Roosevelt played coy all the way up to the Democratic convention, when he finally arranged to be “drafted” to run again. Roosevelt swept to the nomination with 946 delegates. Garner finished third with 61.That election ushered in another change. Until that point, the parties generally chose the vice-presidential candidates, but from then on the nominees effectively took over that decision. Roosevelt picked Henry A. Wallace, leaving Garner to retire to his Texas ranch.At this point, Mr. Trump may regret the choice he made in 2016. But it is not clear that Mr. Pence will do any better than Cactus Jack did. More