It’s a little after 6.30am on a steamy Friday in South Miami. A road sweeper appears in the pre-dawn twilight and trundles noisily past a man fixing red, white and blue bunting to a hedge at the Casa Cuba restaurant.
Chris Christie is up early for his campaign event, as he has been on many mornings of his ambitious presidential run. Yet this one has a different feel. It’s essentially a raid on an enemy stronghold. This turf is held by Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, the two prominent Floridians in the race for the Republican nomination. Christie is aware he has to make a good impression.
“I do know that you have a couple of candidates. I have been advised that there’s a couple of guys running for president who actually call Florida home,” the former New Jersey governor quipped to an audience of about 200 as they breakfast on plates of croquetas and assorted Cuban pastries.
“Some people would say, why bother coming to Florida if two of the other candidates already live here? What’s the chance of doing well in Florida?”
He continued: “I’m here because we need to talk … We need to have this conversation. And I’m not conceding that conversation to Ron DeSantis. And you can be sure I’m not conceding that conversation to Donald Trump.”
Therein lies Christie’s problem. Everywhere, but especially here in Florida, where the state’s governor and former president remain hugely popular, his candidacy is overshadowed by the presence of those two men.
Admittedly, Christie has deliberately positioned himself as the anti-Trump, almost the only Republican in a crowded field willing to directly take on and criticize the four-times-indicted frontrunner – despite being a former friend and ally.
“Do we want a president focused on your problems and making them better in partnership with you, or do we want a president who will be spending his time trying to fend off the next criminal trial?” Christie asked the largely sympathetic Casa Cuba gathering.
And there are indications that his messaging might be beginning to gain traction elsewhere. Polling last week showed Christie leapfrogging the Florida governor into second place behind Trump for the New Hampshire primary.
But standing out as anything other than the guy who’s there to impugn Trump and DeSantis is where things get more complicated. As if to highlight the point, Christie delivered a perfectly reasonable stump speech in Miami, promoting the tenets of “smart conservatism”, and the perils of re-electing Joe Biden to a second term.
Notably, the audience only properly stirred when Christie began to lob disparaging personal volleys at his Republican opponents, including the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who is emerging as an unlikely challenger.
Christie won applause for hammering DeSantis for feuding with Disney over trans rights, for his “anti-woke” crusade and interpretation of the word “woke”: “It’s kind of like pornography. I know it when I see it, I know what they’re talking about, but the bottom line is that … the governor of this state believes he should decide what can happen in your family with your children. I don’t want him to decide what happens inside my family.
“We have folks like DeSantis, Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy who believe in big government conservatism,” he added. “If there’s something going on in the country they don’t personally like, they want the government to pass a law to stop it.”
It played well with the Casa Cuba audience, mostly made up of moderate Republicans, curious independents who came to hear what one described as “the voice of reasonable Republicanism” and even some Democrats disillusioned with Biden.
Yet winning over Florida’s more hardline Republicans will be a different challenge, especially in Miami. The city is where Cuban-American voters and Venezuelans came out in force in 2020 to help win the state for Trump, and again last November to return DeSantis to the governor’s mansion by a landslide.
“Christie is making a gamble that attacking Trump and DeSantis will establish his position for when or if they fall down,” said Charles Zelden, professor of history and politics at Nova Southeastern University, and a veteran Florida poll watcher.
“[He’s saying:] ‘They failed us, I’ve been telling you they’re gonna fail us.’ Well, for me that’s problematic. Nobody likes a Cassandra, and that’s kind of the role he’s playing here.
He added that it’s “very hard for Christie to break through in Florida” because “Trump was very popular, DeSantis was popular, and there’s not a lot of room for a third candidate”.
“He’s basically coming here to make points, maybe raise some money, but his odds of actually winning Florida are very small. What would be necessary is for Trump and DeSantis to implode. If they fall down, he could be there to pick up the pieces, but they’re not going to come to him,” said Zelden.
During the Miami town hall, Christie appeared to acknowledge as much and insisted he was running to try to deny Trump, “a divisive, horrible figure” continuing to dominate the party.
“I don’t know if that means a win or a loss – I don’t know, none of us can predict it,” he said.
“But I’ll tell you this: you’ll hear my voice loudly, clearly and honestly, and then you make the decision for yourself. And that’s what this country is supposed to be all about.”
As far as addressing the local concerns of Miami’s ultra-diverse electorate, it was hard to escape the impression that Christie’s approach was at best functional. He faced only one question – from a journalist, not a voter – over what he would do for Cubans and Venezuelans. The former governor of New Jersey swatted it away with a stock answer about how no section of society could afford another Trump administration.
Zelden argued that Christie “could play to the Venezuelans, the Cubans, on their anti-communism, their anti-socialism, it plays well to his economic message, that Biden’s a socialist and you can’t afford that”.
“The problem is that’s also essentially the Trump message,” he said.
Christie followed the town hall with a trip to Little Havana’s Café Versailles, an obligatory photo op for any self-respecting Republican candidate. The cafe was recently in the spotlight when Trump showed up there after his federal criminal arraignment in Miami in June. He promised “food for everyone” then left without paying for any.
While Christie spent about an hour talking with patrons, customers were almost outnumbered by the media and the event made few ripples.
“He’s the Italian guy, right?” Carlos Sanchez Torres, a Cuban-American accountant, wondered as he bought cafecitos and pastelitos for his colleagues from the Versailles kiosk during his lunch break.
“Most people around here are still supporting Trump. I didn’t even know the guy was in town.”
Torres was among a small crowd of customers who listened in as Christie made his pitch to Florida’s voters.
“They have a choice. They don’t have to go with their governor, and they certainly don’t have to go with Donald Trump,” Christie said.
“I’ve come down to make sure they realize there’s someone else who’s going to compete for their votes. I say the same thing no matter what state I’m in.”
It wasn’t enough to convince Gary Sisler, a retiree from Miami’s Cutler Bay, who said he “regretted” voting for Trump in 2020, but had not made a choice yet for next year’s election.
“Christie is the only one running on the Republican side that has the courage to be outspoken against Trump, even though it may cost him a lot of votes, and I think he would come across very strong with people wanting a straight answer, and feel the guy’s honest,” he said.
“But there were a couple of things I thought he was a little bit slippery about in his answers, especially about DeSantis. It’s too early to decide. I want to listen to what every candidate has to say.”
