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Bobby Jindal: I’ll either run for president in 2016 or leave politics altogether

Bobby Jindal
Bobby Jindal
Bobby Jindal
Win McNamee / Getty
Andrew Prokop
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.

As Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal contemplates a bid for the GOP presidential nomination, he’s been spending a lot of time in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Washington DC. And on Tuesday, Jindal told WBRZ’s Michael Marsh that he’ll either run for president or leave politics entirely when his second term as governor expires. “If I were to stay in politics, it would involve in 2016 running for president,” Jindal said. “There’s no other elected office I would seek. I’m not interested in going back to the Congress or the Senate or any other elected position.”

Jindal’s second term will come to a close in January of 2016. But in his home state, he has grown quite unpopular — a recent poll found his approval rating at 34 percent, and his disapproval at 55 percent. His attempt to replace state income and corporate taxes with a higher sales tax was blocked by his own party, and he’s awkwardly attempted to make himself over into an opponent of the Common Core education standards he used to support.

In his visits to DC this year, Jindal has released a series of policy plans on issues like health care, energy, and defense spending to try to distinguish himself as the "ideas" candidate, as Chris Cillizza put it. He's found little support in early polling of the 2016 race — the most he's gotten in any national survey has been 6 percent. But it's quite early, and the GOP still lacks a front-runner.

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