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As former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie gets set to announce a bid for a Republican presidential nomination, a new poll finds him scoring historically low marks with the kinds of voters who may decide his political future.
Christie's favorability rating among registered voters who identify with or lean toward the GOP stood at just 21% in the new Monmouth University poll, while 47% view him unfavorably.
Twenty-four percent say they have no opinion of Christie and 8% say they haven't heard enough about him.
That's a higher unfavorable rating than any of the 10 potential GOP presidential hopefuls tested. And it's among the highest of any presidential candidate tested in Monmouth's polling over the last decade, putting him on par with a handful of Republicans whose political careers ended up going in dramatically different directions.
In May of 2019, Monmouth found that former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld had just a 24% favorable rating and a 48% unfavorable rating among likely Republican primary voters. Weld struggled to find an opening running as a Republican critic of and alternative to then-President Donald Trump, securing only one delegate from the Iowa caucuses before ending his bid in March of 2020.
Christie's numbers haven't improved since Monmouth's August 2015 poll of Republicans and Republican leaners, taken a little more than a month after the former governor announced his presidential bid that year. At that point, Christie had a 30% favorable rating and a 45% unfavorable rating.
But he could take some solace in another Monmouth finding from April of 2015, where one candidate sported just a 28% favorable and a 56% unfavorable rating from Republicans and Republican leaners: businessman Donald Trump.
