Do you suppose that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie got much of a bump out of his debate performance on Thursday night? I actually read a few positive reviews and had to admit he had some good answers. But at the same time, I think the only thing he was really remembered for was getting in a fight with Rand Paul which doesn’t exactly make you the bell of the ball. But still, is it possible that he’ll break out a bit in the national polls after that?

He’d better hope so, because things aren’t looking very good for him back in the Garden State at the moment.

Poll Of NJ Voters Again Shows Record Low Favorability For Christie

For the second time in a month, a survey of the folks back home shows a record number of people unhappy with his performance.

First it was Fairleigh-Dickinson’s Public Mind poll showing Christie’s job performance at an all time low of 30-percent. Now you can add the Rutgers-Eagleton survey, indicating the same 30-percent thumbs up number for the Governor, his lowest since taking office.

The poll’s assistant director, Ashley Koning, says those numbers have been trending down for a while now.

There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere for other governors who are running or thinking of running in the future. This is particularly true for Republicans in blue states and Democrats in red ones. You see, it’s not as if Christie is in the middle of some major new policy initiative taking the state in a different direction of ramming through some plan which his constituents hate. So what’s changed? I’m going to put on my analyst hat here for a moment and speculate on how this has been playing out.

As long as Christie was just the Governor of New Jersey, both the state and local media as well as the Democrats seemed to be willing to put up with him to a certain degree. He was wildly popular with the voters in the early days and they didn’t want to saw off the limb they were sitting on by going after him too hard. Of course, that wasn’t terribly hard to do back then. Christie wasn’t really acting like all that much of a Republican, and certainly not like a Democrat. But he was absolutely 120% Jersey and people could relate to that. If he didn’t do anything too terrible he seemed to be in for a fairly good ride.

But then possibility of him running for President turned into a reality. Neither the press nor the Democrats could sit on the sidelines for that sort of debacle, and tolerance levels were going down. The “bridgegate scandal” which was never tied to him blew up in nuclear fashion when national Democrats got into the act and emboldened the local provocateurs. Every move he made – particularly when he was trying to look even a tiny bit more conservative for the national audience – became a huge issue and dominated the news. The pig cage fiasco, which had basically zero impact on anyone in the state, suddenly turned into a big deal. And as he started spending more time on the campaign trail and less at home, the never very tolerant Jersey crowd was ready to come out with the long knives. The rest is history.

Christie isn’t the only one and I’m sure he won’t be the last. Bobby Jindal’s numbers were down in the 20s a few months ago back home and that was before he was all the way into the battle. Scott Walker has been running in all but name for a while now and as early as April his favorability in Wisconsin had dipped more than fifteen points over the previous year to just barely above 40%. But as I said, that seems to be the pattern in blue to purple states. By contrast, a red state governor like Rick Perry can do pretty much whatever he likes and his supporters seem to hang in there with him.

Christie is floundering at home and not showing all that many signs of life on the presidential campaign trail. If something doesn’t shift soon on one front or the other, he’d better hope his retirement plan is in good shape.