The long-delayed campaign for Delaware’s 2010 U.S. Senate special election will be jump-started soon, as Beau Biden — the state’s Attorney General and the prospective Democratic front-runner for the seat — has returned home from a year-long tour of duty in Iraq as a captain with his state’s Army National Guard .

Biden is expected to decide soon whether he is a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat long held by his father, Joseph R. Biden Jr., who in November 2008 was elected vice president even as he won a seventh Senate term in Delaware. Biden resigned the seat in January, and was replaced by Democratic appointee Ted Kaufman, a friend and longtime aide, who is not running in the special election to fill the final four years of the elder Biden’s unexpired term.

The vice president appeared Wednesday afternoon at a welcome-home ceremony in Dover for 110 soldiers, including his son.