I wrote a couple of months ago I thought Obama was beginning to lose his support among blacks. Seems that was quite an overstatement. While his black support is not as strong as it was in 2008, it is still overwhelming. Turns out the statistics I was relying upon were not comparable to those previously used to measure his popularity. They were measuring somewhat different indicators.
The Gallup Daily tracking polls … interviews 500 Americans each day, allowing for combined weekly samples of roughly 3,500. Their weekly tracking broken out by race shows that Obama’s approval rating has seen a small decline among blacks, from an average of 92 percent during 2009 to 86 percent so far in 2011.
The Pew Research Center, which conducts national surveys of 2,000 or more adults on a near monthly basis, shows even less change in Obama’s overall approval rating among blacks since 2009. In fact, Obama’s approval rating among blacks on the Pew Research surveys averaged 89 percent in both 2009 and 2011.
…Obama’s share of the black vote may be less of a concern to his campaign than the level of black voter enthusiasm. Whether black voters will turn out in 2012 at the same levels as 2008 is more difficult to resolve with survey questions. But a good place to start is questions that track intensity of feeling about Obama. How many stronglyapprove of his performance as president? How many report a strongly favorable impression?
Unfortunately, pollsters do not track and report intensity of feeling as often as overall job rating, but the Pew Research Center has tracked strong approval for Obama frequently since 2009. Their data show a significant drop in Obama’s strong approval rating among blacks from 89 percent in April 2009 to 73 percent in January 2010, but since then it has remained in the mid-70s (although it dropped to 64 percent in August and jumped back up to 74 percent in late September).
The Washington Post reported a different trend for Obama’s favorability rating, which asks respondents for their general impressions of Obama rather than focus on the job he is doing as president. The Post‘s September survey, conducted with ABC News, found a 25-point drop since April (from 83 to 58 percent) in Obama’s strongly favorable rating among African Americans.
Still, the apparent drop measured by the Post/ABC poll depends on the difference in that rating as measured by two individual surveys, which may be exaggerated by the usual gyrations of random sampling error. The more general, long-term pattern among black voters evident in the various tracking surveys is mostly stable.
Black voters may be “disappointed” about Obama’s ability to change the political system, but they continue to express the same nearly monolithic support for him as they did in 2008. And more important, while cracks may be forming in expressions of enthusiasm, strong approval among blacks of Obama’s performance has remained roughly constant over the last two years.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/10/obama-black-voters-jobs-approval-ratings_n_1003973.html
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