New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says he can teach national Republicans an important lesson: if they want to appeal to voters beyond their traditional conservative base, they need to go to where those voters are.
As he made the rounds of Sunday's Washington talk shows, Christie explained his rationale to Fox News' Chris Wallace:
"You know, at the end of the day, Chris, here's what people in Washington, D.C., don't understand," he said. "If you want to win a vote by that kind of margin, if you want to attract the majority of the Hispanic vote, if you want to nearly triple your African-American vote, you need to show up. You need to go into those neighborhoods. You need to campaign in places.
"I'll give you a perfect example, Chris. I did a town hall meeting while I was governor about a year and a half ago in the city of Irvington, New Jersey, in Essex County. I got 4.7 percent of the vote there in 2009. There were more people in the church I did the town hall than voted for me in 2009. That's the way the Republican Party will make itself more relevant to a whole much broader group of folks. And the fact is, that's exactly what Ronald Reagan would have done — and did do — when he was campaigning for president."