Can Christie Succeed as ‘Trump Slayer’? New Jersey Has Thoughts.

Chris Christie left office in New Jersey with abysmal popularity ratings. His 2016 presidential run was a short-lived flop. He has a reputation as a bully and is perhaps best known for a notorious political retribution scheme called Bridgegate.

But as Mr. Christie, a two-term governor and former federal prosecutor, prepares to wade into the 2024 Republican presidential primary on Tuesday, voters who know him best appear open to his underdog rematch with former President Donald J. Trump, if only for its potential as a grab-the-popcorn thriller.

A one-on-one debate between Mr. Trump and Mr. Christie “would have more viewers than the Super Bowl,” said Jon Bramnick, a Republican state senator who moonlights as a standup comic.

“Trump may be able to call you a name,” he said. “But Christie will take that name, twist it and come back with three or four things that will leave Trump lying down waiting for the count.”

Any race that pits Mr. Christie against Mr. Trump is bound to be especially personal. Mr. Trump seemed to find joy in belittling Mr. Christie from the White House; Mr. Christie blamed Mr. Trump for giving him a bout of Covid that left him gravely ill and hospitalized.

In interviews with New Jersey voters, Mr. Christie’s assets and liabilities were repeatedly described as two sides of the same coin.

To moderates thirsty for a centrist voice: He is not Mr. Trump.

And to Trump loyalists who might prefer that Mr. Christie retreat permanently to his beach house in Bay Head, it was much the same refrain: He is not Mr. Trump.

“Anybody in the mix who’s not Trump is good,” David Philips, 64, said Friday during his lunch break in Trenton, the capital, where he has worked as a state construction official for 20 years. He said he tended to vote for Democrats and was never a big fan of Mr. Christie.

“But he’s a reasonable guy compared to Trump,” Mr. Philips said.

After dropping out of the 2016 presidential contest, Mr. Christie became one of Mr. Trump’s biggest boosters. But he is now positioning himself as the teller of hard Trump truths — a perhaps unlikely messenger with a message that will be challenging to sell to a party full of Trump supporters.

Mr. Christie’s entry into the race comes less than six years after he left Trenton with an approval rating of just 15 percent, according to two polls taken during his last summer in office. At the time, it was the worst rating of any governor in any state surveyed by Quinnipiac University in more than 20 years.

Last month, a Monmouth University poll of 655 Republican-leaning voters nationwide showed Mr. Christie with unfavorable ratings of 47 percent, higher than any other official or likely Republican presidential candidate.

Jeanette Hoffman, a New Jersey Republican strategist, predicted that Mr. Christie would cast himself as the candidate best positioned to be “the Trump slayer.”

“This whole tell-it-like-it-is strategy — he’s going to double down on that,” she said.

Still, she acknowledged that the odds against him were long.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Christie, 60, is famously combative. And many of his most memorable clashes are well documented.

There was the time he was filmed shouting down a heckler on a Jersey Shore boardwalk while holding an ice cream cone.

Memes linger from 2017, when he was photographed lounging with his family on a state-run beach closed to the general public over Fourth of July weekend because he and the Legislature had failed to approve a spending plan for the fiscal year.

And it was clear that his baseball days were behind him in 2015 when he took the field at Yankee Stadium for a charity game wearing a Mets uniform during his second term as governor. But he also earned widespread kudos that night, and an M.V.P. award, for having the guts to step into the batter’s box in the first place.

For those in New Jersey cheering on his presidential run, that in-your-face chutzpah remains a key selling point.

Even detractors express grudging respect for the former governor’s willingness to flex his political and rhetorical muscles.

“He’s an audacious guy,” said Mark Sokolich, the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., where two of the George Washington Bridge’s three lanes were closed down for four days in 2013 as part of a plot that endangered public safety and became known as Bridgegate. “He’s a man who speaks his mind, and I think in today’s day and age you do need that.”

Still, Mr. Sokolich said there was no way he would ever vote for Mr. Christie.

“If he was ever to reach the office of the presidency, I just hope his talents for selecting people for high-level positions have improved,” Mr. Sokolich said, referring to a Christie aide who unleashed havoc on the borough’s roadways with an email: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”

Mr. Christie was never accused of criminal wrongdoing, and the convictions of two aides were overturned in 2020 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the plot, designed to punish a political opponent, was an abuse of power but not a federal crime.

David Wildstein, who admitted to being an architect of the traffic gridlock while working at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, has known Mr. Christie since the two attended Livingston High School. He was the star witness at the trial, testifying that Mr. Christie was told about the bridge plan two days after the lane closures began and that he laughed approvingly. Mr. Christie has maintained that he had nothing to do with the closings.

Mr. Wildstein, in an interview, characterized his onetime ally as a cartoonlike character.

“He’s the guy who stands on the sidelines at a Little League game and yells at the umpire,” said Mr. Wildstein, 61, whose guilty plea was vacated in 2020 after the Supreme Court ruling and who now runs the New Jersey Globe, a popular political news site in New Jersey.

But, he added, “It would be crazy for anybody to definitively say somebody can’t win.”