Maybe they should be called the Oboptimists.

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll found a striking difference between the way that Senator Barack Obama’s voters think about the future and the that way Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s voters do. Both groups overwhelmingly say that the country is in rough shape — headed in the wrong direction, with an economy that is bad and getting worse. But when they are asked how well the next generation will live, the two groups diverge.

Mrs. Clinton’s supporters fall into three roughly equal-sized camps: those who say the next generation will live better than people do today (35 percent), those who say living standards will remain roughly the same (31 percent) and those who say living standards will decline (30 percent), according to a poll analysis done by my colleague, Marjorie Connelly. (For details on how the poll was conducted, click here.)



These attitudes closely track those of the population as a whole, 33 percent of whom say the next generation will be better off. Clinton supporters have a similar outlook about the future as Republican voters do — and are somewhat more upbeat than people not voting in this year’s primaries. But Clinton supporters are far less optimistic than Obama supporters.

Among people who say they have voted for Mr. Obama already or plan to do so in an upcoming contest, 50 percent predict that the next generation will live better than people do now; only 23 percent say it will live worse. This is one of the main ways that Obama supporters stand out, both from other Democrats and from the rest of the public.

Perhaps this is not so surprising, given the Obama campaign’s call for “change we can believe in” and given the large number of young people supporting him. But in a year when the Democrats have split into two groups of similar size, optimism about the country’s future still stands out as a notable dividing line.