Evan Roth Smith breaks down Democrats’ 2023 election wins

 Slingshot partner Evan Roth Smith spoke to The Daily Beast’s Jake Lahut after the off-cycle elections and how to reckon with Democrats’ continued string of wins in spite of President Biden’s low approval numbers.

Evan Roth Smith, the founder of Slingshot Strategies, conducted a recent poll for Blueprint—a new shop “​​designed to take a sober, hard look at what Democrats need to do in 2024”—and found voters most commonly associate Biden with his pandemic-era policies and student loan forgiveness.

While Blake noted that student loan forgiveness was key to Biden securing the younger Black voters, Roth Smith pointed to several more popular policies Biden could run on besides abortion rights, as well as a seemingly simple tweak on the White House’s economic messaging.

Most voters associate Bidenomics—Bidenworld’s attempt to reclaim an initially pejorative term as an indicator of a strong economy—with creating jobs, the Blueprint poll found, but 64 percent of the voters surveyed said they care the most about lowering the price of goods and services. If Biden can shift that connotation from job growth to lowering prices, he’ll find plenty of running room to boost his numbers, Roth Smith said.

“When Democrats strongly associate themselves with their most popular accomplishments, they do well,” Roth Smith said. “There is plenty of room for the president to be associated with very popular policies that critical voting groups, such as independents, simply aren’t aware of.”

Read the full Daily Beast story here.