WASHINGTON — That didn’t take long.
With his 22-point re-election victory barely behind him, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is already putting building blocks in place for a presidential campaign in 2016.
Matt Mowers, one of the political directors of Christie’s blowout victory Tuesday, is taking over as executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, the Granite State GOP announced Wednesday.
That places him in an influential post in the first-in-the nation primary state.
Early sketches of a potential Christie presidential campaign have the New Jersey Republican trying to shake a win out of New Hampshire, with conservative strongholds Iowa and South Carolina looking like more of a stretch.
The development in New Hampshire came just hours after Christie taunted Washington to follow Jersey if it wants to see how real cooperation works. In his re-election, Christie captured a majority of female votes, 50 percent of Hispanics and about a fifth of the black vote.
Republicans are desperate to make inroads with all three groups.
“It’s a perfect recipe for a presidential bid,” said political scientist Terry Madonna of Franklin & Marshall College.
“Of course he’s not going to turn down this chance to be president. He’s running. It’s obvious he’s running,” agreed University of Virginia Professor Larry Sabato, who said Christie’s polished election-night speech was “less a talk about his second term in New Jersey than his first term as president.”
Christie has also said he wants to help out Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is facing a conservative primary in South Carolina, another early battleground state.
His new post as head of the Republican Governors Association will send Christie around the country, including to battleground states where he can try to cultivate a national following.
But even after winning a mandate in a blue state, Christie remains out of step with conservatives who hold sway in Republican primaries.
Some conservatives are wary of replaying 2012, when Mitt Romney knocked off a series of more conservative Republican challengers but failed to excite the GOP base in the general election.