After Today’s Indictments Chris Christie’s Bridge To The White House Has Been Closed

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The news that three former allies of Gov. Chris Christie have been indicted in the Bridgegate scandal has permanently shut down any chance that the New Jersey governor will ever be elected president.

Out of the three individuals that were charged, the charges against Bridget Kelly, Christie’s former deputy chief of staff represent the political kill to shot to his White House ambitions. Kelly and former Port Authority deputy executive director Bill Baroni were each indicted on nine counts including conspiracy and fraud.

Christie tried to spin the charges against his allies into a political claim of innocence, but the truth is that Chris Christie is toast.

Henry Enten at FiveThirtyEight looked at the data and found that there has never been a party nominee in recent history who was as well known and disliked as Chris Christie:

Whether or not Christie is ever charged, his position in the presidential race is already even worse than we thought it was at the beginning of the year. In January, I found that, given his name recognition, Christie’s net favorability rating1 was 25 percentage points below what would be expected of a future nominee, based upon past nominees at this point in the cycle. Based on live interview polls through mid-April, Christie is now 41 percentage points below what we would expect among Republican voters, considering how many Republicans can form an opinion of him.

….

At this point in the race — most eventual nominees are either well-known and well-liked, or not well-known. There’s no precedent for a nominee who’s this well-known and this disliked. Christie’s net favorable rating stands at just +3 percentage points, according to an average of live-interview polls conducted in 2015, despite 76 percent of Republicans being able to form an opinion of him.

In other words, Bridgegate destroyed Christie as a candidate, and ego-filled delusion is the reason why he is considering a run for the White House. Republican voters don’t like Chris Christie. The New Jersey governor seems hellbent on running, but he has absolutely no chance of ever occupying the White House.

Sarah Jones

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