Siena poll finds Chris Christie’s GOP primary base: Joe Biden voters

In a new New York Times/Siena College national poll of Republican presidential primary voters, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie barely registers overall, getting just 2% support – far behind former President Donald Trump’s 54% and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 17%.

But the crosstabs of the poll reveal that Christie does have a base of supporters after all: people who voted for Joe Biden.

Among poll respondents who said that they voted for Biden in the 2020 presidential election, Christie earned a whopping 22% support, the highest percentage of anyone in the GOP field. Christie’s repeated criticisms of Trump, and his denunciation of the conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was rigged, have evidently caught on in the most Trump-skeptical wing of the Republican Party.

But of course, in a Republican primary, Biden voters don’t make up a particularly large share of the vote. Just 8% of the Siena poll’s respondents said they voted for Biden, versus 81% who were 2020 Trump voters – and among those voters, Christie got less than 1% support.

The results are similar when broken down by opinions of Trump himself. Christie is at 16% support within the small slice of the GOP electorate that views Trump “very unfavorably,” but he barely registers among those who view Trump favorably or even “somewhat unfavorably.”

Perhaps most intriguingly, Christie did best among respondents who said they use the mainstream media for news (6% support), while he got less than 1% support from respondents who primarily use Fox News or other conservative media organizations.

The sample size in each of these crosstabs is small enough to warrant some caution. For example, the total number of Joe Biden voters sampled was only 85, meaning that just a few respondents could swing the outcome dramatically.

Still, the poll’s results corroborate what many observers probably already suspected. Christie – one of two New Jerseyans in the race – has virtually no shot of defeating Trump and becoming the Republican nominee. But he does have the ability to become the race’s leading Trump critic, and among the small minority of GOP voters who still dislike Trump, he seems to have the upper hand.

The New York Times/Siena College Poll was conducted from July 23-27 with a sample size of 1,329 registered voters – including an oversample of 818 registered Republican voters – and a margin of error of +/- 3.67%.