Chris Christie is confused:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), in a speech in Vermont this week, said the Republican Party’s problems are about its candidates, not its party.

“There are some people running around the country right now saying that our party has a problem with its brand, that we’re not relating to folks,” Christie said Tuesday, according to video of a private event obtained by WPTZ-TV. “It’s not our party’s problem, it’s our candidates’ problem.”

It makes sense that Christie would say this. He has some incentive not to criticize the party as a whole, and he wants to encourage Republicans to think that if they just had the “right” candidate their electoral problems would be solved. Since he seems interested in presenting himself as that candidate, it is to his advantage inside the party to make the GOP’s woes seem easily fixable. As a description of political reality, it is almost completely wrong. Obviously, there are weaker and stronger Republican candidates, and one can identify specific races where a weak candidate cost the party a seat that it could have otherwise won or held, but all Republican candidates are less competitive than they would otherwise be because of the terrible reputation that their party has. Romney was a poor candidate in many ways, but he still probably cobbled together the largest Republican coalition possible under the circumstances. It is doubtful that even a great candidate could have done much better so long as he was running against a sitting president and hobbled by the party’s disastrous record of misrule during the Bush era. The next presidential nominee may not have to worry as much about Bush-era baggage as previous nominees have, but he will still be dragged down by the party’s high unfavorability numbers and the generally uninspiring performance of the House majority.

That is what Christie misses. The party has a terrible reputation in large part because of what its members did when they had unified control of government in Washington and what they have done in the last two years since winning control of the House. The trick for the next Republican nominee is to retain the support of his party’s traditional supporters while making it clear to the rest of the country that electing him will not result in a return to the incompetence and failure of the previous decade. A politician that can’t or won’t come to terms with the party’s political and policy weaknesses probably isn’t going to be able to pull off that trick.