WASHINGTON — He’s for real.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has given himself until tomorrow to decide on a bid for the White House, is running in a virtual dead heat with President Obama before even jumping in the race.
Obama leads the Republican governor by 43 percent to 42 percent, a statistical tie, in the latest Rasmussen Reports poll.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is the only GOP candidate Rasmussen found to be leading Obama in a head-to-head matchup. He was ahead 44 percent to 42 percent.
But Christie’s neck-and-neck showing with the president comes before he’s even launched a campaign, compared with Romney’s effort, which has been years in the making.
While the Rasmussen poll found the New Jersey governor to have a good shot at toppling Obama, only 26 percent say they think he will end up deciding to run, and only 20 percent think he should.
The telephone survey of 1,000 likely voters was taken Wednesday and Thursday, following Christie’s nationally televised speech at the Ronald Reagan Library in California on Tuesday, when he ripped into Obama in what sounded like a campaign announcement.
After the speech, he pointedly left the door open to a White House campaign after a woman in the audience practically begged him to run.
Christie said he needed to make a final decision this weekend and had plans to go public as early as Monday or Tuesday.
But he doesn’t have much time to waste.
Yesterday, Florida moved up its primary to Jan. 31, flouting national GOP rules and setting off a scramble for other states to move up their contests to preserve their influence.
Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada all would jump ahead, giving Christie precious little time to put together organizations in key states.
New Hampshire’s secretary of state even said his state might hold its first-in-the-nation primary before the new year, and the Iowa caucuses would go before that.
“The challenges of putting together a presidential campaign in a compressed period of time are enormous,” said Bill Lacy, who ran Republican Fred Thompson’s 2008 presidential campaign and is director of the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas.
“At this point, you’re defying the odds to make a run for it.”
Bad news for Bam
How Chris Christie and Mitt Romney would fare in a run against President Obama, according to a new poll:
Obama vs. Christie:
43% to 42%
Obama vs. Romney:
42% to 44%