Not too long ago, after much speculation and with great fanfare New Jersey Governor Chris Christie formally announced that he would not be running for President of the United States.

He’s said he’s not interested in running as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate either, but that’s not stopping some people from hoping he changes his mind.

While some Republicans and Independents aren’t thinking about Republican vice-presidential nominees (36%), many others have suggestions at the ready. According to a new national poll of registered voters by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind, Senator Marco Rubio, Representative Michele Bachman, and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich top the list, each getting 60 mentions or more out of 740 voters asked, or about 8%.

Mitt Romney comes in fourth and he’s followed by New Jersey’s Governor says poll director Peter Woolley, “Chris Christie comes up with a big handful of votes. About 4% of all the people we asked came up with Chris Christie……Chris Christie’s name wasn’t mentioned so the fact that so many people came up with his name without any prompt is pretty impressive…..If you take out three of those five who are actually current candidates then Christie comes in second. That’s an important qualifier.”

“The surprise is that Rubio has so many mentions without any prompt,” says Woolley. “The question we asked was open ended. He was not mentioned in any previous question.”

In generic terms women top this list. In addition to 60 mentions for Michele Bachman, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gets 16, former Governor Sarah Palin gets 13, former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice gets 5, Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine gets 1, and “a woman” gets 14, to comprise 15% of all responses.

Woolley says, “The reason we include independents in this study is because they make the difference between winning and losing. Choosing a running mate is either about shoring up the base or appealing to important blocks of voters outside the base.”

The poll of 740 registered Republican and Independent voters nationwide was conducted by both landlines and cell phones from Nov. 29 through Dec. 5, 2011, and has a margin of error of +/-3.5 percentage points.

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