Poll: Majority of N.J. Residents Don’t Want President Chris Christie

Chris Christie's unpopularity has "shades of Woodrow Wilson," says a pollster. Fifty-three president polled in N.J. think Christie would be a bad president.

A new poll from Quinnipiac University says that New Jersey residents are less than enthusiastic about a Chris Christie presidency.

Though he’s won two terms as governor with relative ease, 53 percent of Jersey residents think he’d be a bad president. Forty percent think he’d make a good chief executive. Quinnipiac has been asking this question since 2010, when 61 percent of New Jersey residents thought he would not make a good president. (The high for Christie was 44 percent “bad president” and 41 percent “good president” — in March 2013.)

“Even Jersey guys, actually Jersey girls, don’t think the nation will go for a Jersey guy like Gov. Christopher Christie,” Maurice Carroll, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said in a press release. “Shades of Woodrow Wilson. The last Jersey guy who got elected president did not carry the state in his 1916 reelection. And this poll shows we haven’t changed in the last century.”

Republicans in Jersey do think Christie would make a good president: 70 percent think he’d be up to the job. But only 15 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of independents think he would be good at the gig.

Sixty-two percent of New Jerseyans surveyed think that, if Christie runs for president, he should step down as governor. This includes 42 percent of Republicans surveyed. Sixty-seven percent “don’t know enough” about Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno to decide whether she’d be a good governor or not.

[Quinnipiac via AP]