Chris Christie is the hottest candidate in the Republican presidential race right now. Oh, not with Republican voters. He’s still polling in the low single digits among the people who will actually choose the nominee. But among liberal pundits, Christie’s reputation is on the rise.

“Out of the miasma of Republican denial, a bold truth teller has emerged,” proclaims the Los Angeles Times’ Robin Abcarian, praising Christie’s “poetic” description of Donald Trump as “a lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog.” (If this is poetry, it is truly a demotic variety.)

Joe Klein watched Christie’s CNN town hall and found it “exhilarating,” explaining, “The surprise—and I must say, it was a relief—was the joy that came from watching a terrific stand-up politician at work. I had almost forgotten what that was like. Christie speaks plain English. He is self-deprecating. He was fluent and reasonable—even when I disagreed with his positions—on a broad swath of issues.”

[Read: The 2024 U.S. presidential race: a cheat sheet]

Jim Newell of Slate is just enjoying the ride: “What Christie does bring to the race that no other non-Trump candidate has brought in a while is some life. A touch of energy. A little gosh-darn fun around here!” But Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post finds a higher purpose: “Chris Christie is not in it to win it. His task is more important.” The veteran Pennsylvania journalist Dick Polman concurs: “At a time when ‘the GOP-MAGA nomination contest reeks of weakness, moral rot, political capitulation and fear’ (in the words of ex-Republican strategist Steve Schmidt), it’s good to have an ass-kicker in the mix, regardless of his flaws. If democracy is to be saved, we must welcome all comers.”

It helps that Christie is … well, not charming, exactly. New Jersey is an acquired taste, and even New Jerseyans lost theirs for Christie over the course of two terms. But he’s entertaining, and he doesn’t speak with the guarded, poll-tested patois of many politicians. (Neither does Trump, of course.) My colleague Mark Leibovich breakfasted with Christie in April, and his account captures how he can be rollicking and yet a little unnerving.

[Mark Leibovich: Chris Christie doesn’t want to hear the name Trump]

Christie has become the Elizabeth Warren of the 2024 Republican field. If the primary was held entirely among members of the chattering class, he’d win in a stroll. (One difference is that some of those chatterers may have actually voted in Democratic primaries; fewer will cast a Republican ballot.) As with Warren, they love that he speaks fluently and bluntly and delivers witty retorts. Both candidates have even effectively ended a rival’s campaign live on a debate stage—Marco Rubio for Christie, Michael Bloomberg for Warren. And neither of them is going to be president.

To be fair, none of Christie’s new semi-fans is under any illusions about that. Each paean is loaded down with backhanded compliments and acknowledgments that Christie is going nowhere. Michelle Goldberg of, yes, The New York Times nails the underlying problem: “My enjoyment of his newfound Resistance shtick doesn’t bode well for Christie. The people he needs to win over are not liberal New York Times columnists, but voters who hate liberal New York Times columnists.”

Yet even with the self-awareness, many of these rosy impressions of Christie stem from a questionable vision of how to beat Trump. Christie’s appeal relates to an Aaron Sorkin–style theory of politics, in which the way to defeat Trump is to get onstage with him in a debate and say just the right thing—that with a verbal slap that is clever and cutting enough, Trump will deflate. Soaring music rises, the credits roll, and everyone returns happy to a pre-2016 world. Christie seems to subscribe to this theory himself, telling anyone who will listen—reporters, mostly—that he is the only person who can beat Trump. “It takes a brawler to fight a brawler,” Polman writes.

[Read: What happened to Elizabeth Warren?]

As it happens, only one person has beaten Trump in an election, and that isn’t how he did it. Joe Biden didn’t hesitate to criticize Trump in 2020, but he didn’t try to match Trump blow for blow, nor did he try to knock him out with a sharp turn of phrase. He succeeded by trying to lower the temperature and let Trump seem aberrant and horrifying. To be fair, Biden had the advantage of running against Trump with the general electorate. As I wrote recently, Trump remains beloved by the Republican base and disliked by Americans overall. The former president’s primary rivals can’t quite do the same thing.

One Republican is trying something a little similar to what Biden did: Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. He’s running an optimistic campaign, the closest spiritually to Ronald Reagan’s sunny vision of any member of the field. He is neither running as a Trump critic, as Christie and Asa Hutchinson are, nor cozying up to Trump, in the manner of Vivek Ramaswamy. He praises Trump where he agrees with him but mostly avoids conversations that center around him. The result is that Scott is, according to NBC News’s Peter Nicholas and Alex Seitz-Wald, the candidate who many Democratic strategists think would pose the gravest threat to Biden in a general election.

Scott’s strategy probably won’t work. He’ll need a lot of things to go right, and Trump to utterly collapse, in order to have a real shot at the nomination. But Christie has the same hurdles, and Scott is polling roughly twice as high as him—at 3.4 and 1.7 percent, respectively, in the RealClearPolitics average. At least the press will have fun covering Christie in the meantime.