In recent months, Chris Christie has embraced numerous opportunities to tweak Kim Guadagno. | AP Photo Christie undermines LG's campaign to succeed him

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has had a contentious relationship with his lieutenant governor, Kim Guadagno, as she runs to succeed him.

They have squabbled over Christie’s decisions to raise the state’s gasoline tax, spend $300 million renovating the Statehouse and sit with his family on a shuttered state beach in the middle of a government shutdown.


Now, Christie is casting doubt on a central plank of Guadagno’s platform: that an audit of state government could find some $1 billion in savings and pay for much of her plan to reduce property taxes.

“I just fundamentally disagree with her on that,” Christie told POLITICO after an event at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan. “It’s not there.”

Guadagno, who has conspicuously distanced herself from the unpopular incumbent, has made “audit Trenton” a campaign mantra and the answer for much of what ails New Jersey. She says it would help her fund numerous policy proposals, most notably a “circuit breaker” that would cap the property taxes of many homeowners.

The proposal has led to questions about why such an audit hadn’t been done during the past eight years if it could have such a profound impact.

"You can ask the governor that question,” she said.

Christie said such a broad-based audit had not been recommended to him “by anyone in the administration over the last eight years,” even as he faced massive budget holes and was forced to pull back on a commitment to ramp up pension payments in order to close the gap. He noted he had cut discretionary spending by some $2 billion since he took office.

“If the lieutenant governor can come in and do better than that, God bless her,” Christie said. “I don’t know where she’s going to do it because, believe me, as you know, we’ve had some really difficult budget times in certain years and we couldn’t find it. She thinks she can find it? Great. But a billion dollars? No.”

It is not the first time Christie has been sharply and publicly critical of Guadagno, who easily won the Republican nomination in June and now trails her Democratic opponent, Phil Murphy, by a double-digit margin that reached 25 points in a recent poll of likely voters.

But the governor's recent remarks could be the most damaging, calling into question a cornerstone of her campaign and leaving her without a rebuttal. A spokesman for Guadagno did not respond to repeated requests for comment since Tuesday.

In recent months, Christie has embraced numerous opportunities to tweak Guadagno. During the primary earlier this year, the governor not only refused to make an endorsement, but also went out of his way to publicly name all of Guadagno’s opponents in what was essentially a two-person race.

When Guadagno announced her running mate in July, on one of the biggest days of her campaign, Christie held a news conference of his own that butted right up against hers. Not content with just stealing her thunder, he told reporters that running mates “don't matter,” that it wasn’t clear whether the race could be competitive and that he wasn’t helping her because she hadn’t asked.

“If I'm asked for help, I'll certainly give it,” he said. “I have not been asked for any help.”

Christie has yet to appear at any Guadagno campaign events, but he has put in some work behind the scenes and made clear he thinks Guadagno would make a better governor than Murphy. Earlier this month, he joined former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, at an RGA fundraiser in which both men gave strong endorsements to Guadagno, who was in the audience.

Christie has also ripped some of the proposals presented by Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs executive and ambassador to Germany.

Keeping his distance could be beneficial to Guadagno, given Christie is the least-popular governor in modern New Jersey history. His approval rating bottomed out at 15 percent over the summer, following the first state government shutdown in a decade, and it remains in the teens to this day.

Christie plucked Guadagno from relative obscurity in 2009, putting the former federal prosecutor and Monmouth County sheriff on the statewide ticket, and she became the state's first lieutenant governor the following year.

At the time, Christie said Guadagno would "be in the room on anything she wants to be in the room on," though she seemed to be mostly relegated to ribbon cuttings and nurturing behind-the-scenes relationships with the business community. When she launched her own campaign for governor this year, she was still largely unknown to the average New Jersey voter.

“Somewhere their relationship went off the rails,” said Matt Hale, a political science professor at Seton Hall University. “Their relationship never turned into mentor, mentee. And part of that could be that Christie always wants to be the biggest float in the parade. He doesn’t play well with others. And part of it is that.”

On Wednesday, talking to reporters after an event related to his new, $200 million anti-addiction program, Christie criticized both candidates for not taking clear positions on whether they would continue his work if elected.

“There you go,” the governor said. “Profiles in courage.”