by Mark Silva

Barack Obama has built some of his campaign for the White House on a hope that young voters will respond to his party's call this year.

Not a bad calculation.

"The current generation of young voters, who came of age during the George W. Bush years, is leading the way in giving the Democrats a wide advantage in party identification, just as the previous generation of young people who grew up in the Reagan years -- Generation X -- fueled the Republican surge of the mid-1990's,'' the Pew Research Center reports.''

Increasingly each year, more young voters are leaning Democratic.

"In surveys conducted between October 2007 and March 2008, 58 percent of voters under age 30 identified or leaned toward the Democratic Party, compared with 33 percent who identified or leaned toward the GOP,'' reports Pew's Scott Keeter, director of survey research. "The Democratic Party's current lead in party identification among young voters has more than doubled since the 2004 campaign, from 11 points to 25 points.

"In fact,'' Keeter writes, "the Democrats' advantage among the young is now so broad-based that younger men as well as younger women favor the Democrats over the GOP -- making their age category the only one in the electorate in which men are significantly more inclined to self-identify as Democrats rather than as Republicans.

"While more women voters in every age group affiliate with the Democratic Party rather than the GOP, the gap is particularly striking among young women voters,'' Keeter adds. "More than twice as many women voters under age 30 identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party as favor the Republican Party (63 vs. 28 percent).

For more on the survey's findings, see the Pew report.