He told ABC five years ago that he supported citizenship, leaving him with two options now. One: Stick to his guns and give conservatives another reason to treat “Christie” as a curse word. Two: Follow Scott Walker’s lead by pleading ignorance in his earlier views and claiming that he’s since seen the light. Actual quote from Christie: “I have now learned some of the ramifications for all of these things.” What those things might be isn’t clear, but it’d be impolite after such an earnest pander to badger the poor guy for details. He’s trying, Republicans. A for effort?

This clip is interesting less because of Christie’s reasoning — which Kelly, sensing the pander, doesn’t bother asking about and he doesn’t offer — than what it signals about his campaign strategy. The night he was reelected governor, people expected Christie to be the establishment hero in the 2016 race, the one guy who might be able to go a bit further left on issues like immigration than the rest of the field because he’d have so much donor-class money propping him up. Two years later, after Bridgegate and Jeb Bush’s entry into the race, he’s a guy without a niche. He’s not going to out-establishment Jeb so pandering to centrists now on illegals will earn him nothing except more enmity from the right. (Bush’s own feelings about a path to citizenship have been nuanced to the point of opacity, which I’m sure is just how he likes it.) Meanwhile, he’s burned way, way too many bridges with grassroots conservatives to hope they’ll fill the vacuum of his lost support in the center. The obvious solution is to try to keep pace with Walker and Marco Rubio by competing for center-righties who might find Jeb a bit too squishy and conservatives like Ted Cruz a bit too ideological. I think his speech a few weeks ago about entitlement reform was a bid to show center-righties that he could be even bolder on fiscal reform than Walker was when he overhauled PEU collective bargaining in Wisconsin. That was a gamble, calculating that “somewhat conservative” voters would be more impressed by his show of leadership than alienated by the thought of tweaking Social Security and Medicare, but he needed to try something to grab their attention. Now he’s signaling to them that he might be a good fit for them on immigration too, not quite the notorious sellout that Rubio was when he joined the Gang of Eight but also not necessarily a guy who may try to curb legal immigration, as Walker’s recently hinted at. (Ironically, Christie’s apparent legalization-without-citizenship position also happens to be the position of alleged right-wing nutjob Cruz.) If he can remain kinda sorta politically acceptable to center-righties through the summer, then he’ll show up at the debates hoping to leapfrog Walker and Rubio through sheer force of personality and charisma. It’s a longshot but that’s what he’s got.

I can only assume, though, that this means Christie’s written off whatever claim he once had to having “special appeal” to Latino voters. His reelection campaign in New Jersey worked hard to run up the score with that group in hopes that it’d be a credential for his eventual presidential run. He ended up with 51 percent of the Latino vote in his landslide victory, a 19-point improvement over 2009. Now that Bush is in the race, though, and Rubio seems a legit threat to become the first Latino major-party nominee, maybe Christie figures that his path with Latinos is sufficiently blocked that he might as well flip on citizenship and see if that gets him anything among center-right voters generally. Exit question: What will his response be when Democrats inevitably accuse him of wanting “second-class status” for illegals by barring them from citizenship? Kind of surprised Kelly didn’t press him on that.