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Washington: Democratic Sen John Kerry, considering a second bid for the US presidency, finished dead last in a poll on the likeability of 20 top American political figures.
Among those placed ahead of Kerry were about a dozen potential 2008 White House rivals, including Democratic Sen Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Republican Sen John McCain of Arizona.
"This is bad bad news for Kerry," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in Hamden, Connecticut, which conducted the survey.
"Americans know who he is, and have pretty much decided they don't like him," said Brown. He noted the poll found that 95 per cent of respondents said they had heard enough about Kerry, who lost in 2004 to President George W. Bush, to rate the Massachusetts Democrat.
The poll of 1,623 registered voters was conducted after the November 7 national elections, which saw Democrats win back control of the US Congress from Republicans.
David Wade, a Kerry spokesman, dismissed the value of such polls and noted the senator's comeback to capture his party's 2004 presidential nomination.
"A lot of pundits and prognosticators have lost a lot of dough pronouncing John Kerry politically dead," Wade said.
During this year's congressional campaign, Kerry sought to help fellow Democrats but drew bipartisan fire for "a botched joke" about Bush and the Iraq war. Yet even before Kerry's attempt at humour, he did not fare well in similar Quinnipiac polls this year.
The survey asked respondents to rate 20 political figures on a "feeling thermometer".
The warmer or more favourable they felt toward a person the higher score they gave them on a scale of zero to 100. Respondents were given the option of saying they did not know enough about the figure to offer a rating.
Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican, ranked first with a mean score of 64.2, followed by Democrat Sen Barack Obama of Illinois, 58.8, and McCain, 57.7.
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