It's hard not to turn on the radio or television these days and not find Chris Christie hawking his memoir, even with left-wing comic Bill Maher, who frequently jokes about the ex-governor's girth.

"Good for me, bad for the country,'' Christie told Maher last Friday when asked about being fired as Donald Trump's transition leader in November 2016.

Yet, Christie's media omnipresence is not all that good for his successor, Democrat Phil Murphy, as a Monmouth University poll suggested on Tuesday.

It found that 46 percent of New Jerseyans feel that Murphy is concerned with his own political future, compared to 33 percent who feel his sole focus is governing the state.

In other words, residents believe Murphy is infected with the same higher-office bug that consumed Christie (and still does). They view Murphy as a short-timer, eager to get out of Trenton as fast as he can. And the poll found that the perception has only deepened over the past 10 months, when views on Murphy's ambitions were more evenly divided.

So, it doesn't help Murphy's cause to have Christie casting his long shadow on television and radio, a constant reminder of the unpopular governor who abandoned his post in pursuit of the presidency. It rekindles a feeling of being burned.

And now there is also the frequent image of U.S. Sen. Cory Booker scrambling along the same Iowa-to-New Hampshire-to-South Carolina circuit as the 2020 Democratic hopeful, ready to ditch his Senate seat before completing his first full term.

"It doesn't help him this now deluge of New Jersey office holders who run for president,'' said Patrick Murray, who conducted the poll of 604 New Jersey adults between Feb. 8-10. "So there's this doubt hanging in everybody's mind that (Murphy) is the next one."

On some level, it's hard to see why anyone would make that leap. Compared to Christie, Murphy has done little to foster the impression of being obsessed with higher office. There are no Iowa donors flying into Trenton, like the Republicans did in 2011 to persuade Christie to save the party from Mitt Romney.

Murphy doesn't have someone of Nancy Reagan's or Henry Kissinger's stature fawning over him, like Christie did. And, when Murphy assumes the chairmanship of the Democratic Governor's Association in 2020, he will get to flex his vaunted fundraising skills that helped land him the ambassadorship to Germany from 2009 to 2013.

But right now, he's a governor bogged down in the trenches of Trenton, clashing with his entrenched South Jersey foes and fending off a legislative inquiry over the hiring of a top aide accused of sexual assault — hardly the source of national buzz.

So why the growing suspicion of Murphy as a short-timer?

One reason is that Murphy remains something of a mystery to most voters. He has had some successes, such as signing a pay-equity law and a law that will gradually boost the minimum wage to $15 an hour. The poll found that 69 percent of residents approved the wage-hike law. But both measures play well to national progressive audiences. They are not Jersey-centric priorities.

"I think there is a question: what does he stand for? What's he trying to fix?" Murray said. "What's he trying to make better. Who is Phil Murphy? What is he all about?"

That doubt — and impatience — has been a drag on Murphy's job approval rating. The number of people who approve of Murphy held steady at 43 percent, but those disapproving climbed to 40 percent, a 12-point increase from the last poll taken in April 2018.

Discontent is reflected in his handling of other issues. Residents are evenly divided on whether he has helped the poor, but give him low marks for helping the middle class — a startling rebuff for a governor who has repeatedly vowed to revive the prospects of both groups with a "fairer and stronger" economy.

And residents give him stunningly poor marks for his handling of their No. 1 concern: property taxes, an issue that has bedeviled governors for decades.

The poll found that 48 percent of residents feel Murphy's policies have hurt property taxpayers, a slightly better score than April 2018. But only 6 percent feel that Murphy's policies helped property taxpayers, representing an 11-point drop from the previous year.

It's worth noting that Christie didn't fare much better on property taxes at the same time in his first term (he slashed property tax rebate checks sent to homeowners.). But Murphy has not put property taxes at the center of his Trenton mission the way his predecessors have. He has given the issue more emphasis lately, boasting of overseeing the slowest growth in property tax rates on record in last month's State of State address.

Murphy's agenda been stymied by other challenges. He vowed that recreational marijuana would be legalized in the first 100 days on the job but the issue appears to be pushed off until after the November election. His line-in-the-sand call for a tax hike on millionaires was rebuffed. And the constant delays and manpower shortages at NJ Transit are proving to be chronic problems.

So in the absence of a clear, definable record of Jersey-specific reforms, the kind that voters can point to and remember and assign to Murphy, speculation begins to set in.

"When (voters) start filling in the blanks, one of the blanks they fill in is 'he’s probably got his eye on the White House,' '' Murray said.

Murphy has always laughed away any notion of higher office. And on Tuesday, he clung to his stronger, fairer messaging.

“We don’t run our government based on polling, so whatever it says — good or bad, whether it’s really good or challenging or somewhere in between — we try to call balls and strikes to do what we were sent here to do,'' he said.

But for now, a growing number of people suspect that he's got his eye on someplace else.