clearly, he believes that trying to defeat donald trump and the republican party is bigger than his candidacy. significant development indeed. stand by. i want to bring in s.e. cupp, our political commentator. christie is not necessarily expected to immediately endorse nikki haley or anyone else, for that matter. are you surprised by these developments? no, and this is a tacit, indirect endorsement of nikki haley and there s no other reason to do it before new hampshire if you re not trying to do her a favor and the field a favor. that doesn t mean he s maybe psyched about nikki haley and it definitely benefits her and her alone. so in a way, this is a huge, huge win for her at a time five days before iowa and another week before new hampshire at a time when she could really build
i ve seen in polls in new hampshire which clearly show that among chris christie supporters, nikki haley is their second choice. so presumably, this could very much help nikki haley in the contest. van jones, i m anxious to get your thoughts. christie has tried to damage donald trump in this race. do you think he was able to accomplish that? doesn t look like it if you look at his numbers and trump s numbers. this was a kamikaze mission and kamikaze pilots don t tend to survive. there is a thesis here that someone has to take on donald trump. how can you defeat donald trump if you don t take him on frontally. some of the candidates say how can you defeat him if you take him on frontally. chris christie had that thesis and he did it at his own personal peril in that it would have been easy to do what other
narrower than it was in 2016. that, of course, allowed donald trump to split the party and the vote and get the nomination. he s splitting it with nikki haley, ron desantis and vivek ramaswamy and there simply is not a large market share for this anti-trump message, if you will. this likely does not have an effect on the iowa caucuses which is an immediate debate with ron desantis and nikki haley and it could have a dramatic effect and two weeks from now we ll know the winner of the new hampshire primary. so look for his supporters and his voters as we talked to them over the weeks and months in new hampshire. nikki haley is likely to be a second choice and the big point is the endorsement from the very popular new hampshire governor late last year to endorse nikki haley. that was essentially was the death knell for the christie candidacy. he thought he would fight forward and find his way, but
what s this assessment of this major announcement from chris christie? yeah. it s a significant development in this race and the field is narrowing here just on the eve of voters beginning to weigh in and having christie who, of course, has been the most vociferous trump opponent inside the republican field depart from the stable tells the story of where the republican party is right now. according to sources, wolf, that i ve spoken with, he is expected to say that he s done the calculation here and simply doesn t see a path to winning the nomination and that is where he came to this conclusion to suspend his campaign that he knows it s the right thing for him to do and that he is still going to stay committed to the rationale that got him into this race which is being opposed to donald trump and his dominance inside the republican party, to try to coax the republican party to move on from donald trump and
process he alienated himself and if you take a step back and you look at what he was trying to do, he was fighting for the future direction of the republican party, but i think as we ve seen it s become more clear that the anti-trump voices, the room for those types of voices has become much more difficult at the national level. so i think it is unclear where he goes from here. a lot of people really turned off by donald trump and we ll see what he tries to do next. we will see in a few minutes and we ll have live coverage of that coming up. david, let me get back to you. do you expect that nikki haley and ron desantis will try to reach out to christie s voters during tonight s republican presidential debate right here on cnn? you know, that s such a good question, wolf. it puts them in a bit of a box. nikki haley is a natural place for a lot of christie supporters