Heard in the Hall

A poll out today says that presidential candidate/motormouth Sen. Joseph Biden would lose the Democratic presidential primary in his home state of Delaware.

The Fairleigh Dickinson University Public Mind Poll finds that 57 percent of our neighbor's voters have a favorable view of Biden - as a senator.

A plurality of Democrats say he he would not be a good president, and, more important, all but a statistically insignifcant few think there is no way he can win. Strategic voting is all the rage in primaries, as partisans calibrate the competing demands of their hearts and their heads. Like horse bettors, most primary voters are looking ahead to the general election and want to pick somebody who looks like a winner.

Only 19 percent of First State Democrats say that Biden is their first choice for the presidential nomination, while 41 percent back the national frontrunner, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton. Seventeen percent favor Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, putting him in a statistical tie with the homestate guy.

Only 4 percent believe there is an "excellent" chance of Biden becoming the Democratic nominee, while 50 percent rate his chances of success as "poor." A third of Democrats, however, say that Biden has an excellent chance of being the party's vice-presidential nominee.

Fifty-four percent of Delaware Democrats think Biden would make a good president.

“"Any candidate, especially one trying to move up from the second tier, needs to be able to count on the support of their home state, especially if it has an early primary,” said Dan Cassino, a politics professor at FDU and analyst with the PublicMind poll. “People approve of Biden, but many of his potential supporters in Delaware seem convinced that he can’t win, and that’s hurting him.”

Delaware has a Feb. 5 primary scheduled on the so-called Tsunami Tuesday when dozens of states will hold nominating contests.

Without a favored son in the race for the Republican nomination, Delaware mirrors trends in other mid-Atlantic states. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has the support of 37 percent of Republicans, with Fred Thomson (13 percent), John McCain (14 percent), and Mitt Romney (10 percent) all in a distant statistical tie for second. Twenty-one percent of Republicans remain undecided.

Results are based on telephone polls with 700 registered Delaware voters and smaller samples of self-indentified Democrats and Republicans from the state. The margin of error for the overall sample is plus-or-minus 4 percentage points. Results for the Democratic sample are subject to an error margin of plus-or-minus 5 percentage points, and Republican findings are subject to a margin of plus-or-minus 6 percentage points.