President Obama still gets overwhelming support from black, largely Democratic voters. His support hovers around 90 percent despite the economy and high unemployment.

But a new poll out hints that Obama might have lost black voters on policy . . . Obama’s position on education vouchers and merit pay for teachers has no significant impact on black opinion.

Question-experiments in the yearly Education Next/Harvard poll allow us to compare support and opposition to various education reforms when respondents are just asked in the standard way to their levels of support when they are told what President Obama thinks about the issue.

In 2009, informing respondents that Obama supports merit pay for teachers increased the margin of black support for the policy by 30 points. Obama’s opposition to vouchers dampened the margin of black support for them by 26 points. But this year, mentioning that Obama supports merit pay actually decreases the black margin of support by a couple of points and Obama’s opposition to vouchers increases the margin of black support by a few points.

In other words, even core supporters don’t seem to trust President Obama on policy.

The intersection of race and politics is a complicated place; a jumble of socio-economic, ideological, and Party differences. Black Americans are predominantly Democratic, are more liberal than the general population on many issues (although more conservative on some), and on average have lower incomes. All of these characteristics have a major impact on an individual’s political opinions, and they are highly correlated with race in America. What this confluence of correlations translates into is overwhelming support for Democratic Presidents in general and President Obama in particular; 88 percent approval compared to 54 percent from Hispanics and 38 percent from whites.

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Barack Obama’s public approval rating has dropped to as low as 47% in the last week, according to Gallup.  Although the President will not appear on the ballot again until 2012, how the public views his presidency will have a direct impact on each party’s performance in next year’s mid-term elections.

The party holding the White House has lost seats in 10 of the last 12 mid-terms, going back to President Kennedy’s 1962 losses.  Even in that year, with a 74% approval rating following the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s Democrats lost seats in the House.  Historically, the public uses mid-term elections to correct for the perceived excesses of the party in power, while the absence of coattail effects may result in some seats reverting back to the party with the natural advantage in the district.

IMPACT ON CONGRESSIONAL RACES.  The magnitude of the net losses suffered by the President’s party in Congress has been in direct, inverse proportion to the President’s public approval rating on Election Day.  The party in control of the White House suffered the most in 1966, 1974 and 1994 when the incumbent’s approval ratings were all under 50%.  High approval ratings of President Clinton in 1998 (66%) and President Bush in 2002 (63%) helped the governing party gain seats in those two years — a historical aberration.

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