More than six in 10 voters believe America is ready for a woman president in 2008, and 53% of the voters think Senator Clinton, a New York Democrat, should try for the job, a nationwide poll has found.

The poll, conducted by the Siena College Research Institute and sponsored by Hearst Newspapers, found that 81% of voters surveyed would vote for a woman for president; 62% said the country is ready for a woman president, and 67% said a female president would be better than a male chief executive in handling domestic issues.

Other polls have identified the former first lady as the favorite among Democratic voters for the party’s presidential nomination. In the Siena poll, 60% of voters said they expect a woman to be on the Democratic ticket for president in 2008. Only 18% of voters said they expected the 2008 Republican ticket to be headed by a woman.

New York GOP Chairman Stephen Minarik said the high percentage of voters who think a woman will head the Democrats’ 2008 ticket is due to the widespread belief that Mrs. Clinton will run for the job.

“I think everybody recognizes that, as the poll indicates,” Mr. Minarik told the Associated Press yesterday.

The telephone poll of 1,125 registered voters was conducted February 10-17 and has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The poll results were first reported in Monday’s editions of Times Union of Albany, a Hearst newspaper.

“There was very little difference between men (64%) and women (60%) on whether the country was ready for a woman president in 2008,” said the director of the Albany-area research institute, Douglas Lonnstrom.

While voters surveyed said a woman president would be better on domestic issues, there was no such advantage on who would do a better job as “commander in chief” – 18% said a woman would do better on that aspect of the job, 23% said a woman would do worse, and 45% said gender wouldn’t make a difference. On foreign policy issues, 24% said a woman president would do better; 11% said worse, and 52% said the president’s gender didn’t matter.

The Albany-area pollsters found that 37% of voters felt Mrs. Clinton should not run for president.

On the Republican side, 42% of voters said Secretary of State Rice should run for the White House while 41% said she should not, and 33% said Senator Dole of North Carolina should run for president while 48% said she should not.