VP survey points to Edwards

Kerry has made overtures to at least one potential candidate, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who rejected the offer to forge a bipartisan alliance against Bush. Two officials familiar with the conversations said Kerry stopped short of formally offering McCain the job, sparing the Massachusetts senator an outright rejection that would make his eventual running mate look like a second choice.

A hypothetical Kerry-McCain ticket had a 14-point advantage over Bush-Cheney among registered voters, 53 percent to 39 percent, according to a recent CBS News poll.

Democratic strategists cautioned against reading too much into any poll before Kerry selects a running mate. "Polling information on potential running mates is soft and unreliable, because it's all about name identification and hypothetical," said Doug Sosnik, a top adviser in the Clinton White House. "Eventually, we'll have a campaign when people will get to know them. Right now, it's just mush."

The AP poll suggested that more than one-third of registered voters, 36 percent, said they would most like to see Kerry choose Edwards.

Among Democrats surveyed, Edwards fared even better: 43 percent preferred him over three other Democrats. The first-term senator from North Carolina remained in the primaries longer than any other major candidate and won over thousands of Democratic voters with the positive tone of his campaign.

The poll indicated that 19 percent of registered voters wanted Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the longtime Democratic leader who is retiring from the House. Eighteen percent chose retired Army General Wesley K. Clark, a political newcomer from Arkansas, and 4 percent picked Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa, a relative unknown nationally.

About 23 percent said they were not sure or offered another name.

When Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York was added to the mix, one-fourth of the respondents supported her, while Edwards's backing remained strong at 34 percent. She picked up one-half of the black vote, drawing support from Gephardt, Vilsack, and the "not sure" category. She repeatedly has ruled out accepting the vice presidential nomination; Kerry has not offered it.