Tim Murphy / Mother Jones
Chris Christie is down in the polls in New Hampshire and he’s got less than 24 hours to turn things around. So when Ann Antosca, an undecided voter from Nashua, asked him a question about Social Security at a Monday morning town hall, the New Jersey governor rushed over to her corner, dropped to one knee, put his hand on the shoulder of the man to her right, and begged her for her vote.
Antosca’s concern going in was that Christie’s means-testing for Social Security would hurt people like her, with 401(k)s in the low six figures. But she was reassured that the ceiling would in fact be much higher. Christie, a shameless name-dropper who was joined at the event by the star of the reality TV show Cake Boss, recalled a conversation he had with Mark Zuckerberg in which the Facebook CEO expressed concern that he’d lose his Social Security. His response: “You get nothing, Mark.”
“They don’t wanna talk about [Social Security] because they’re afraid of you; I’m talking about this because I trust you,” Christie concluded. A few minutes later, she spoke up again to say she’d made up her mind to vote for Christie.
“That was cute, that was cute!” Antosca, a real estate agent who was deciding between Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Christie, told me afterward. Social Security “was really the only thing that was holding me back.”
Christie needs undecided voters to swing in his direction in a big way in the final days. But New Hampshire is a wonderland where the political cliches all happen to be true. Voters move late. Christie can only hope that movement is enough.
