Chris Christie has a message for those calling for him to exit the Republican presidential primary to help consolidate the field against front-runner Donald Trump: “I’m not going anywhere.”
“If they were up here in New Hampshire and saw the crowds we were getting, the reaction we were getting, they wouldn’t honestly be able to say any of that,” the former New Jersey governor told CNN in an interview Friday.
Christie, who is counting on a strong performance in the first-in-the-nation primary on January 23 to buoy his campaign, has positioned himself as a “truth teller” in the race, drawing a contrast with Trump and often criticizing his onetime ally’s conduct.
But he has struggled to register in the national polls and, a little over a month before voting begins in the GOP primary, several top party financiers looking to boost a Trump alternative are throwing their support behind former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
Still, Christie remains undaunted.
“I haven’t had one donor, not one of my significant donors or any donor at all, call me and say that we should get out of this race. I haven’t had one supporter call me and tell me to get out of this race,” he said.
Though Christie defended Haley against onstage jabs by rival Vivek Ramaswamy at the fourth GOP primary debate Wednesday, he insisted the moment was purely personal, telling CNN, “I’ve been friends with her for 13 years, and Vivek basically compared her intellect to his 3-year-old son. It pissed me off, and I reacted to it.”
“You’re gonna see over the next seven weeks here, there’s no alliance between me and Nikki Haley,” he said.
That ongoing competition is already apparent. The day after the debate, Christie criticized Haley in Henniker, New Hampshire, for saying at an evangelical forum in Iowa last month that she…
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