Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is expected to join the increasingly crowded field of Republican White House contenders and officialize his 2016 bid on Wednesday, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported. His decision has been "months -- if not years -- in the making," the newspaper commented.

The 44-year-old, born Piyush Jindal in Baton Rouge in 1971, is a former Rhodes scholar who became the nation's first Indian American governor in 2008, NPR noted. Seen as a "policy wunderkind," he was invited the following year to give the Republican response to President Barack Obama's first address to a joint session of Congress -- a flunked performance for which Jundal was widely ridiculed.

The governor's name was frequently mentioned as a likely 2012 presidential contender, but Jindal eventually passed on the race, the station recalled. That decision may well come to haunt him this time around, Five Thirty Eight editorialized.

Four years ago, the then "wildly popular" Jindal would have entered a "historically weak primary field" with "rock-solid conservative credentials," the website judged. But today, the candidate is "unpopular in his home state" and is facing a tough bunch of Republican competitors; in a hypothetical matchup with Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, he would not even carry Louisiana's eight electoral votes, Five Thirty Eight added.

"His timing couldn't be worse," Yahoo News' Andrew Romano commented. "To say that Jindal is 'barely registering' in the latest 2016 polls would be an overstatement."

Undeterred, Jindal's gubernatorial staff has begun moving over to his campaign operations, the Times-Picayune noted. His wife, Supriya, meanwhile, is scheduled to give the introduction for her husband at this afternoon's announcement, which will feature video message from Mike Foster, one of Jindal's predecessors as Louisiana governor, and Archie Manning, a former NFL quarterback who played for the New Orleans Saints from 1971 to 1982.

Jindal's best shot at a successful 2016 bid is his appeal to religious conservatives, especially in the early primary states of Iowa and South Carolina, NPR noted. The governor has described himself as an "evangelical Catholic" and received a positive reception from the crowd at last week's Faith and Freedom Coalition gathering in Washington, the station recalled.