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Mark Penn, chief executive officer of Burson-Marsteller and former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, talks about the outlook for President Barack Obama’s speech Wednesday where he is expected to announced long-term proposals for cutting the federal deficit and a timeline for reaching them. Penn speaks with Margaret Brennan on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness.”

Watch the video at Bloomberg.com

A majority of voters see the midterm election as a referendum on Barack Obama, but most have not decided whether they’ll vote against the president in 2012, according to a poll by The Hill.

Seventy percent of respondents in The Hill’s latest survey of 10 battleground districts said their feelings about President Obama will play an important role in how they vote on Nov. 2.

That tracks closely with polling conducted by The Hill in other districts across the country during the past three weeks, where 69 percent of voters said Obama would affect their choices on Election Day.

The focus on Obama was high among voters in both parties; 47 percent of Republicans in the latest poll said Obama would be a very important factor in their vote, while 46 percent of Democrats said the same thing.

Yet 54 percent of those polled said Republicans winning back control of Congress this year would have no impact on their vote in 2012. An even higher number of independents, 62 percent, said a Republican Congress would have no impact on their vote for president in 2012.

The results point to a paradox of the 2010 election: While it is clear voters worried about government spending and record deficits want to put a brake on the Obama administration, they do not appear to have given up on the president.

“The results indicate voters want to see Obama move to the center and work more with Republicans, particularly on spending”, said pollster Mark Penn of Penn Schoen Berland, which conducted the survey.

While Penn said that the 2010 election is “in many ways” a referendum on Obama, he added: “Voters didn’t see any direct correlation between who holds Congress and who they’ll vote for president.”

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A majority of voters in key battleground races say President Obama has either brought no change to Washington or has brought change for the worse.

In 10 competitive House districts, 41 percent of likely voters say Obama has brought change for the worse, and 30 percent say he has made no difference.

Almost two years after Obama declared on election night that “change has come to America,” only 26 percent believe he’s delivered on his promise to end business-as-usual in the capital.
Strikingly, 63 percent of voters under the age of 34 said the president either has not changed Washington or has made it worse.

In 2008, voters under the age of 30 voted 2-to-1 for Obama against his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). But in The Hill 2010 Midterm Election Poll, only 34 percent of young people say the president has effected change for the better.

The poll was conducted by Penn Schoen Berland and surveyed 4,276 voters in 10 House districts held by two-term Democrats. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.5 percent.

“All change is not good change, and the voters are expressing overall dissatisfaction with the direction of change so far,” said pollster Mark Penn of the findings.

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Reviewing President Obama’s first 100 days in office, with Mark Penn, president of Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates and CNBC’s Dennis Kneale.

Mark Penn says President Obama is showing great “experience, leadership, and ability to answer one crisis after another”. Watch the video now at CNBC

WSJ’s Kelsey Hubbard speaks with CEO of Burson-Marsteller about the challenges that world leaders will be facing and how deep these issues actually are and his reaction to the Prime Minister’s ideas.