Christie dismisses polling predictions as ‘shooting in the dark’

2024 GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie dismissed predictions about the outcome of the next presidential race, pointing to the criminal charges former President Trump faces and to the unreliability of polling.

In a Sunday interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Christie denied a suggestion about dropping out of the GOP primary to consolidate the field to defeat Trump, saying the race is more consolidated at this point than it had been in most other GOP primaries that didn’t have an incumbent. Anchor Margaret Brennan countered his suggestion, noting this race is different since Trump, the front-runner in the race, has many of the advantages of an incumbent.

“The other thing that makes it different, Margaret, is he’s got 91 counts of an indictment against him,” Christie shot back. “The day before Super Tuesday, he’s going to start a criminal trial, where his former chief of staff and one of the founders of the Freedom Caucus is going to testify that he committed crimes on his watch and was directed to commit crimes by Donald Trump.”

“There’s a lot of things different about this,” he added. “And that’s why anybody [trying] to predict this is just shooting in the dark.”

Trump has been indicted in four criminal cases, with a total of 91 criminal charges brought against him. It remains unclear to what extent his scheduled trials will interfere with his campaign prospects.

Christie made a similar suggestion about polling, noting respondents are not always honest when answering pollsters.

“First off, I don’t think you know exactly what’s going to happen at all until people vote. Look, if we listened to all the polling, Margaret, Hillary Clinton would be in her second term. So I don’t believe that polling is nearly as reliable as it used to be, and I don’t believe that people tell the truth to pollsters,” he said. “And so at the end of the day, everybody’s trying to make these decisions now are just wrong.”

“In my view, we can’t worry about that kind of stuff. What we need to worry about is the direction this country is going in, and most people don’t agree with it. And if you don’t agree with the direction of the country, why would you vote for either Trump or [President Biden], who have put us in this direction?” he added.