Chris Christie heading to New Hampshire later this month, sparking more 2024 speculation

First on Fox: Former Republican Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is returning later this month to New Hampshire, the state that holds the first primary and votes second overall in the GOP presidential nominating calendar.

The former two-term governor who unsuccessfully ran for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and who’s considered one of the best communicators in the GOP, has repeatedly said for well over a year that he’s "thinking" about making another bid for the White House in 2024.

Christie will headline a town-hall style event at 5pm on Monday, March 27 at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, Fox News has learned. For over two decades, the institute — which hosts the well-known "Politics and Eggs" speaker series — has been a must-stop for actual or potential White House contenders from both major parties.

Christie traveled to New Hampshire to headline "Politics and Eggs" last April.

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"I’m definitely thinking about it. I haven’t made any final decisions about what I’m going to do or not do and I won’t make any final decision until next year," Christie told Fox News Digital in an interview last fall.

But other than briefly speaking in November at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual leadership meeting in Las Vegas — which was seen as the first major 2024 Republican presidential cattle call — Christie hasn’t made many overt moves toward a potential 2024 campaign. But by traveling to New Hampshire to hold a town hall, Christie appears to be openly flirting with a White House run.

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Christie placed all his chips in his campaign for president seven years ago in New Hampshire, which for a century has held the first primary in the White House race. But Christie’s presidential campaign crashed and burned after a disappointing and distant sixth-place finish in New Hampshire, far behind former President Donald Trump, who crushed the competition in the primary, boosting him towards the nomination and eventually the White House. 

Christie became the first among the other GOP 2016 contenders to endorse Trump, and for years was a top outside adviser to the then-president. But the two had a falling out after Trump’s unsuccessful attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss to now-President Biden.

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Trump announced his third White House run in November, and the early polling in the GOP nomination race indicates that he’s the clear front-runner, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — who remains on the 2024 sidelines but is expected to launch a campaign later hits year — firmly in second place, and with everyone else in the burgeoning field of contenders far behind in the mid to lower single digits.

But Christie told Fox News last year that "I disagree with the premise that [the Republican Party is] dominated by Donald Trump. I don’t think that it is. What it’s dominated by are conservative principles that we want to stand for."

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"We want to win again. The problem here as you know is that we haven’t done much winning since 2016," Christie said. "It’s time to start winning again and that’s the kind of approach if I run that I would bring. We need to nominate someone who can win a general election. Not someone who will go down in flames in one."

Christie, a former federal prosecutor, has said in recent weeks that he believes Trump will be indicted in at least one of the several open investigations he’s facing before the start of the primary and caucus calendar early next year.