New Jersey politics are weird. People are generally pro-choice and don't mind gay people, but there's a lot of Orange County-ish anti-tax sentiment. There's lots of racism, but it tends toward standard NIMBY suburban stuff. In the 80s, lots of middle-class Asians and Latin Americans were moving into my area (suburban Mercer County) and were harassed pretty much relentlessly, but that seems to have let up once people started to realize that their new neighbors were not a threat to their standard of living. That, or the demographics just changed. NJ now has the largest population of South Asians outside of Asia, outnumbering even Britain, and a lot of the jerky white people I knew back then moved to the South.
I think Christie's been pretty clever about positioning himself as bipartisan, when he's really not. The first thing that put him on the map was his prosecution of a Republican county executive when he was a U.S. Attorney, but evidently he fell in line with Karl Rove immediately afterward and started political investigations of NJ Democrats. One of them was U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, which made headlines right before the 2006 elections, but which turned out to be baseless. He has aligned himself with a South Jersey Democratic power broker who is fairly conservative and had a long-standing rivalry with the North Jersey Democratic machine, so it's a kind of fake bipartisanship.
The biggest knocks on Christie seem to be his bullying style and his shredding of education and the public sector in NJ. Much of the state, especially North Jersey, is made up of ex-New Yorkers and/or migrants from other states who move to NJ because the schools are some of the best in the Northeast. Christie swore during the 2009 election that he wouldn't cut the education budget, but of course he did. Now the schools are either struggling, or property taxes are skyrocketing to make up for the shortfall. NJ also has the highest proportion of millionaires in America, so it's unfair among many other things.
My own big beef with him is that he slashed my job right before my son was born, and made my life hell for a year. Things ultimately turned out OK for me, but I'll never forgive that fat fucker.
