Young Voters Favor Obama 66 - 32%; Make Up 18% Share of the Electorate (Updated)

Update: CIRCLE has revised this number down to 66 - 32%. Still quite impressive and the largest margin for any age demographic.
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CIRCLE has released data on the youth share of the electorate and the partisan margin of the youth vote. The numbers are base on the National Exit Polls, but they look fantastic. Young voters are choosing Obama by 38 34 percentage points - towards the upper end of all the polling we saw this year.

Young voters preferred Obama

Young voters diverged sharply from the population as a whole, preferring Obama/Biden over McCain/Palin by 68% to 30% 66 - 32% in the NEP. This is by far the highest share of the youth vote obtained by any candidate since exit polls began reporting results by age categories in 1976. In past elections from 1976 through 2004, young voters diverged by an average of only 1.8 percentage points from the popular vote as a whole. 2004 had set the previous record for an age gap.

CIRCLE also released data on share of the electorate. Young voters are predicted to increase their share to 18%. This may not sound huge, but remember that it's not a measure of youth turnout:

Young people (ages 18-29) represented 18 percent of the voters in today’s election, according to the early released National Exit Polls (NEP) conducted by Edison/Mitofsky. This is the one point higher than in 1996, 2000, and 2004, when young voters represented 17 percent of voters in each presidential election, according to the NEP. However, this number does not indicate how many young people voted or whether there was a rise in youth turnout. In recent elections, the youth share of the vote remained constant, because youth turnout rose at the same rate as the total turnout. See the table below for more information on the difference between turnout and share.

Remember, share of the electorate is not a measure of turnout. We'll have turnout numbers for the youth vote tomorrow morning.

For the data geeks, here's a note on CIRCLE's methodology:

There is no official count of voters by age. Therefore, any statistic on youth share or youth voter turnout is an estimate based on survey data. Like any survey, the National Exit Polls use methods that may introduce sampling bias. However, our estimates of youth turnout from the National Exit Polls (shown above) have produced a trend that closely tracks the trend in the Census Current Population Survey (CPS), which is the other reliable source for estimating youth turnout. Since CPS voting data for 2008 will not be available until spring 2009, our method produces the only current and reliable estimate of youth turnout.