  The purely nonperturbative soft contribution to the $\gamma^* p \to \Delta^+$
transition form factors is estimated using the local quark-hadron duality
approach. Our results show that the soft contribution is dominated by the
magnetic transition: the ratio $G_E^*(Q^2)/G_M^*(Q^2)$ is small for all
accessible $Q^2$, in contrast to pQCD expectations that $G_E^*(Q^2) \to
-G_M^*(Q^2)$. We also found that the soft contribution to the magnetic form
factor is large enough to explain the magnitude of existing experimental data.
