NJ gov's approval rating hit by Turnpike plan: poll

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A sizable percentage of New Jersey voters disapprove of Gov Jon Corzine, partly due to his plan to "monetize" the Turnpike, and he now faces a dead heat in a race with a possible Republican gubernatorial candidate, a new poll said on Tuesday.

By a margin of 48 percent to 42 percent, New Jerseyans disapprove of how the Democratic governor is doing his job, though this is an improvement from the wider disapproval rating of 52 percent to 38 percent that he got in June, the Quinnipiac Institute's latest survey said.

"It may be unfair, but voters view Corzine's plans to use the New Jersey Turnpike to reorganize state finances as blue smoke and mirrors," Clay Richards, assistant director of the polling institute, said in a statement.

Corzine wanted to cut the state's debt in half by turning the Turnpike over to a public benefit corporation that would have sharply increased tolls. His plan faced stiff resistance from legislators and voters. The poll of 1,519 registered New Jersey voters had an error rate of 2.5 percentage points.

The so-called monetization plan was devised with the help of UBS AG but it is one of several state privatization plans that have stalled despite strong interest from banks, including Goldman Sachs, and overseas developers, such as Australia's Macquarie Group and Transurban Group and Spain's Cintra.

A Republican federal prosecutor, Christopher Christie, would get 40 percent of the vote, just one percentage point less than Corzine, in a match-up for the 2009 gubernatorial race, if the election took place now, the Hamden, Connecticut-based polling institute added.

"As more voters learn Christie is the man who has been putting corrupt New Jersey politicians in jail for years, things could get worse for the Governor," said Richards, whose poll was conducted from August 4 to 10.

(Reporting by Joan Gralla; Editing by Jan Paschal)