His waistline is catching up with his poll numbers.
Democrat Cory Booker, 44, is starting to resemble rotund Republican Gov. Chris Christie as he packs on the pounds while campaigning for the Senate seat vacated by the late Frank Lautenberg.
The formerly fit Newark mayor, who is leading his opponent in the race by 28 percentage points, has been chowing down on far too many funnel cakes at the Jersey Shore, where he waddled down the boardwalk last week with his shirt untucked and clinging to his chest.
“I’m eating my way through New Jersey,” Booker laughed when asked by The Post yesterday about his weight gain at a street fair in East Rutherford.
“The good thing about me is it’s easy for me to gain weight — and I can lose weight, too.”
Booker sweated through his blue Oxford shirt at a South Plainfield, NJ, Labor Day parade where he really “pounded” the pavement.
“It’s hot,” he huffed. “You should have seen me — I soaked through my last shirt. I had to change shirts.”
The darling of celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey said he has plans to shape up.
He’s ironically an honorary vice chairman of Michelle Obama’s Partnership for a Healthier America. And as Newark mayor, he’s focused on expanding food options in the city and promoting healthy lifestyles.
He actually tried to get grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods to stop selling “food desserts” and instead stock shelves with healthy food.
But the mayor said his own guilty pleasures include pizza, pancakes and late-night pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
The 6-foot-3 former Stanford University football player admitted to Men’s Health magazine that he ballooned to an “embarrassing” 309 pounds last summer — the most he’s ever weighed. He said his weight has yoyo’ed since he entered politics, so much so that nanny Mayor Bloomberg advised him to “stop eating” at the time.
During his second term as mayor, Booker’s staff staged an intervention because he wasn’t dressing for his body when his weight fluctuated.
“I was so stressed, with massive layoffs and terrible police negotiations, I gained 50 pounds,” Booker told Menswear magazine in November 2011.
“My staff has definitely had to do fashion interventions over the years. They’ve said, ‘Your suit is attracting attention to you that’s bad.’ ”
He took to social media to help him lose 40 pounds at the time. He pledged on Twitter and Facebook that he would get down to 240 pounds by his birthday on April 27.
This past February, he was called a “walking New Year’s resolution” by Town & Country magazine because he’s vegetarian, doesn’t drink alcohol and exercises regularly.
Booker slimmed down when he challenged himself to eat off only food stamps for a week in December 2012.
He teamed up with Weight Watchers to start a “Let’s Move!” campaign in Newark to combat obesity.
He weighed around 267 pounds earlier this year and reportedly planned to drop an additional 10 pounds.
But he seems to have fallen off the wagon.
Despite the ups-and-downs on the scale, a Fairleigh Dickinson University-PublicMind poll out Thursday shows him ahead of Republican rival Steve Lonegan, 50 percent to 22 percent.