Hunter Wright, a 27-year-old evangelical Christian from Gwinnett County, is leaning toward Republican John McCain in the upcoming presidential election.

John Cooper, a 26-year-old evangelical from Atlanta, likes what he hears in Democrat Barack Obama's speeches.

Both say that no candidate has his vote locked in.

"It's not an easy choice this year," Wright said.

An estimated one-quarter of U.S. voters in 2004 were evangelicals.

In Georgia, 38 percent of adults identify themselves as evangelicals, according to a poll released this month by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Seventy-eight percent of evangelicals voted for Republican President George Bush in 2004. That lopsided advantage in such a large bloc of voters helped push Bush to victory in key states like Ohio.

That advantage is dwindling, many agree.

"I don't think Republicans can just assume [evangelicals] are an automatic vote for Republicans unless you give them a reason to do it," said Ralph Reed, the longtime master of rallying evangelicals for Republicans.

The Christian political landscape is changing.

Evangelicals are emphasizing broader political issues, the old leadership of the religious right is dying, and the young don't care as deeply about divisive issues such as gay marriage. Some are disenchanted after having one of their own in the White House for eight years.

"Among my evangelical friends who voted for Bush in 2000, they thought he was going to end abortion and gay marriages. Instead, they got the war in Iraq, tax cuts for the super rich and they got Katrina," said Shaun Casey, a professor of ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington.

"Half of the evangelical electors are in play," Jim Wallis said in a February visit to Georgia.

Wallis is an author and national leader of evangelical progressives.

"How it turns out in the fall depends on how each party and the candidates deal with the issues," he said.

Democrats have leveled the field by stealing plays from the Republican book.

"To the Democrats' credit, they are no longer going to write off the evangelical vote. They are going to fight for it," said Reed, now president of Century Strategies, a public relations firm in Atlanta.

Last June, Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards debated faith and values on CNN. They gave interviews to CBN, the TV channel owned by Pat Robertson, a captain of the religious right. Obama and Clinton recently appeared at the California megachurch pastored by the influential Baptist Rick Warren.

Obama's and Clinton's speeches are dotted with biblical allusions and they talk easily of their faith, unlike the embarrassed-sounding Sen. John Kerry in 2004.

Meanwhile, evangelicals have not coalesced around McCain. Though he attends a Baptist church, he does not have the insider credentials Bush flashed when he talked of Jesus as his personal savior and favorite philosopher. McCain also alienated some in 2000 when he called Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," though the men later reconciled.

Evangelicals never zeroed their support in on one candidate during recent Republican presidential primaries, even though one of their own, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, had a strong early start.

Huckabee won the Georgia primary with about 34 percent of the vote. Sadie Fields, chairwoman of the Georgia Christian Alliance, supported Mitt Romney and expressed disdain for McCain.

Voters showed interest in Democratic candidates in later primaries.

A poll sponsored by Faith in Public Life showed that in Democratic primaries in Tennessee and Missouri more than 30 percent of voters identified themselves as evangelicals, as did more than 40 percent in Ohio.

"There's no doubt in my mind that there are more votes up for grabs this time," said the Rev. Joel Hunter, the pastor of a Florida megachurch who briefly headed the Christian Coalition in 2006.

Evangelicals' interests are broadening, he said. Though evangelicals have long been advocates on some social and foreign-policy issues, such as relieving poverty or genocide in Darfur, there is a growing emphasis on weighing them in the scales along with hot-button issues such as gay marriage and abortion.

"So you see this expanding role for leaders who want to tackle some of the social problems for the good of everyone. When you do that, you get out of the pocket of one political party," Hunter said.

Hunter said young evangelicals seem particularly motivated and have led older ones in seeing the importance of issues such as global warming and foreign initiatives like fighting slavery.

Mara Vanderslice, who was brought in late to the 2004 Kerry campaign to advise on the faith vote, said she thinks young evangelicals' global consciousness comes from mission trips. One- or two-week trips to Third World countries to build houses, feed the poor or evangelize have become a rite of passage for them.

"All those trips the kids have been doing for years have broadened the church perspective," she said. "They want to restore that sense of moral leadership that America is a shining city on a hill."

They want to be involved locally as well on issues such as climate change.

With a growing list of concerns, evangelicals don't seem to be in one camp or the other now, Hunter said. Democrats have a chance to snatch a chunk of votes.

In 2004, shifting votes by 2 or more percentage points in states like Ohio, where Bush's margin of victory was narrow, could have made the difference, according to information from the Pew Forum.

Jim Guth, a professor of political science at Furman University in South Carolina, said "I think McCain is going to get a solid majority of evangelical votes in the fall."

The question is how many evangelicals will slip over to vote for the Democratic candidate. "No Republican candidate can afford to suffer major losses from that group," he said.