Exclusive | Chris Christie declares the Trump era is over, but warns Dems that voters didnt give them mandate for socialism

WASHINGTON — Former New Jersey Republican Gov.Chris Christie declared to The Post that “the Trump era is over” after the GOP’s electoral decimation on Tuesday, but warned Democrats the results don’t mean voters want socialism.

Christie, 64, who has long pushed for the GOP to move past President Trump, believes the midterm bloodbath was a clear rebuke of how Republicans governed under the MAGA boss, rather than a vote of confidence in Democrats.“I think there’s a very real and serious chance that the Democrats will overplay their hand — that they will misread [the election],” the former Garden State governor told The Post on Wednesday.“Let me be clear, I do not believe that the voters last night picked Democrats.”“I think they decided to defeat Republicans for our broken promises and our lack of character,” he went on.

“And if Democrats believe that’s a mandate for democratic socialism in America, they’re dead wrong, and they could wind up on the other end of this beating in two years.”Democrats’ approval rating is underwater by 15.6 percentage points, while the GOP’s approval rating is down by 19 points, according to the RealClearPolitics aggregate of polls.While the party in control of the White House usually takes heavy losses in midterm cycles, the scale of Republicans’ string of defeats in the Nov.3 election was historically massive.

Democrats are on track to grab their largest House majority since at least 2008 and may have succeeded in locking Republicans out of power in the Senate well into the next decade.Moreover, Democrats’ popular vote margin of victory appears to be their largest since the Watergate era.

Republicans lost so many governors’ offices and state legislatures that progressives might now have an opening to effectively cancel out the Electoral College by getting enough states to commit to giving the popular vote winner in presidential election cycles 270 or more electors.“Unfortunately, this was ...