Through democracy At the highest levels of the party—inside Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and other leading party messaging and election operations—liberal operatives and politicians are plotting to ensure that between now and Election Day, as many voters as possible know about the 2025 project, as well as the deep connections between Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and GOP leaders to it.
With just three months to go until the U.S. presidential election, various segments of the Democratic elite are planning to invest significant resources toward amplifying a far-right policy and staff initiative hosted by the Heritage Foundation, in order to damage the Trump-Vance ticket and other GOP candidates, particularly in swing states, according to four people familiar with the operations.
According to one source familiar with Harris’s team’s efforts, Democratic leaders are working to “suffocate” Republican candidates “with their own vision for the country,” and will spend a significant amount of time and money — on targeted ads, other messaging, and fundraising campaigns — to further cement the 2025 project in the consciousness of American voters.
Recent public opinion polls underscore why the Democratic Party is so eager to tie Republicans to Project 2025: The data suggests that many of the policy priorities outlined in its agenda are deeply unpopular.
Moreover, according to a person familiar with the matter and another Democrat familiar with it, there are a number of internal polls among Democratic organizations that show how deeply the 2025 project has penetrated the media ecosystem, even for many average voters. Multiple sources in the Democratic Party, including some lawmakers in Congress, tell us independently: rolling stone They were stunned to discover that Project 2025 had already reached a surprising number of ordinary, largely offline Americans, and they couldn’t believe how many times they were asked about the project by voters and other so-called “ordinary” people.
Indeed, there is some public data, such as one published by YouGov earlier this summer, that suggests how information about Project 2025 is beginning to emerge from closed party bubbles. “Overall, 20% of U.S. adults say they have heard a lot about Project 2025, while 39% have heard a little and 42% have heard nothing at all,” YouGov reported. “Most independents who have an opinion about Project 2025 dislike it (7% favorable, 38% unfavorable), while Republicans are more positive (26% favorable, 12% unfavorable).”
All of this explains why Trump and his top staff have falsely claimed that Project 2025 has nothing to do with the conservative project, to the point where his supporters booed Project 2025 during his campaign stops. Trump and his ilk are aware of how much interest the project has among voters and how unpopular many of his specific policy prescriptions are with ordinary citizens. In recent weeks, as in 2011, Trump has been claiming that Project 2025 has nothing to do with the conservative project, to the point where he has been urging his supporters to boo. rolling stone Earlier, it was reported that Trump had privately told his political advisers that the 2025 plan, particularly its abortion-related components, threatened to undermine his electoral chances before November.
Paul Danes, a former Trump administration official who headed the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Project, recently resigned after trying to claim that Trump had nothing to do with it. Last week, Trump campaign co-chairs Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita were pleased in a statement: “Reports of the demise of Project 2025 will be most welcome and should serve as a warning to anyone or any group trying to discredit their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you.”
The 2025 Project is not dead. And even if it were, its massive political book has long been published, the Trump staff database has already been built, and the many conservative organizations—including the Heritage Foundation—that formed the 2025 Project are still in existence and doing the work (sometimes blessed by Trump himself) to lay the groundwork for a possible second Trump term.
“Trump can try to distance himself from this, but 70 to 80 percent of the people who wrote the book will be in his second administration—the Cabinet, the undersecretaries, the assistants, the senior advisers. They will all be soldiers in the second Trump administration!” one former Project 2025 contributor said. “You can’t look at this group of organizations and people without seeing that they are all his people.”
Recent polls by Navigator—a group of liberal pollsters, organizations, and workers—show that some of the 2025 Project’s abortion proposals don’t perform well at all. Nearly 80 percent of registered voters oppose allowing the government to monitor people’s pregnancies to prosecute them for abortion, 73 percent say allowing employers to deny workers access to contraception would be harmful, 70 percent say a nationwide abortion ban would be harmful, and 71 percent say a nationwide IVF ban would be harmful.
But it's not just about abortion.
Other 2025 proposals have also been tested on the floor, when presented to potential voters and focus groups. The Navigator poll found that 82 percent of voters say it would be harmful to remove Affordable Care Act protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions; 79 percent oppose preventing Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices and removing the $35 price cap on insulin for seniors; 73 percent oppose abolishing the Department of Education; 66 percent of voters oppose allowing the president to fire thousands of federal civil servants and replace them with loyalists; and 68 percent of voters oppose making it easier to discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.
“Our campaign will ensure that Americans understand how Trump 2025 is harming their lives, including cutting billions of dollars in education funding, monitoring women’s pregnancies, raising prescription drug prices for seniors, and emptying our government of nonpartisan officials to install dangerous and unpopular Trump loyalists,” Harris 2024 campaign spokesman James Singer said Monday.
“The Trump-Vance 2025 agenda should horrify every American: banning abortion nationwide, threatening doctors with jail time, restricting access to contraception, and even monitoring women’s pregnancies,” said Emilia Rowland, national press secretary for the Democratic National Committee. “Voters this November will remind Trump and Vance that they have no place in our doctors’ offices.”
The Explorer’s findings support new polls conducted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst to gauge respondents’ views on Project 2025 policy priorities. The UMass poll results, provided exclusively to rolling stoneA Pew poll found that 68% of Americans oppose the idea of firing thousands of federal employees and replacing them with political appointees loyal to the president, 64% oppose abolishing the Department of Education, and 72% oppose restricting women’s access to contraception.
The poll also found that 56 percent of Americans oppose cutting funding for renewable energy research and investment, while only 23 percent support it. A majority of respondents said they oppose cutting federal protections for LGBT Americans, compared with 22 percent who support it.
According to a University of Massachusetts poll, 53 percent of Americans have read, seen, or heard about Project 2025.
“Our findings suggest that Trump’s move away from Project 2025, despite its strain to believe, makes sense if Trump intends to return to the White House,” says Tateshi Nteta, director of the University of Massachusetts Polling. “While our politics are typically divided by class, generation, race, gender, and party identities, among these groups we find near-universal opposition to many of the policies associated with Project 2025.”
“Even former Trump voters have shown their opposition to many of these policies, which bodes ill for the Republican Party and the Trump campaign,” Nteta continues, ominously for the American right’s 2024 ambitions.
