Photo: The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who spent three years as president of his high school class, is returning to his alma mater to announce he's running for president of his country.

The Republican governor is set to launch his campaign Tuesday in the old gymnasium of Livingston High School in the town of Livingston, N.J., where he experienced some of his first political victories. Christie remains close to many of his former classmates, who had inklings even then that a career in politics was in his future.

"If you were to poll and ask who would one day be governor, I think Chris would have overwhelmingly won," said Harlan Coben, now a bestselling author, who served as student council president when Christie was senior class president and played with him on the Little League baseball team in the town about 20 miles west of New York City.

In an interview with The Associated Press ahead of his 35th high school reunion earlier this year, Christie, who also served in student government during his junior high school years, talked about some of the lessons he learned from those early races. Among them: Always vote for yourself.

"The first race I ever ran in, I did not vote for myself. I voted for the other person because I actually thought that you know it was conceited to vote for yourself. And I wound up losing the election by two votes," he said. "So I learned always to vote for yourself, that's the first thing."

Another lesson he said he learned: The more friends the better. "So much of this was about letting people get to know you and having lots of friends," he said. "You know, if people got to know you, you had a good chance to get them to vote for you. If you didn't know them, it was a lot less likely."

Christie's remarks on Tuesday, to be delivered without a teleprompter, will be aimed at reintroducing himself to a national audience that has seen him fade from favour among Republicans and then try to climb back.

He'll draw heavily on how his upbringing shaped him in articulating his vision for the country. The governor faces a tough sell with many conservatives, while seeming to find his stride at times in visits to early voting states with the lively town hall meetings he's known for at home.

Christie's former high school friends were among the first to receive word that Christie would be launching his campaign at their old school.

"He's respecting his roots," said Stephen Slotnick, another fellow classmate, who applauded the governor for including "the people who've grown up with him, the people who've supported him his entire life."

Christie's classmates remember him as a popular kid, not the pushy figure that many people think of now.