Democrats set to intensify attacks on Project 2025

Democrats are ramping up their attacks on Project 2025, the sweeping conservative strategy designed to guide the next Republican president, intensifying their public messaging campaign during the long August recess with plans to escalate those efforts even further in the final sprint to November’s elections.

A small House Democratic task force formed to combat Project 2025 has warned for months that the controversial GOP agenda poses a material threat to the country’s democratic traditions.  

But as the attention surrounding Project 2025 has swelled outside the Beltway — and public surveys increasingly reveal that voters broadly oppose its contents — Democrats also see the conservative strategy as something else: a political goldmine, one that both validates their warnings about the perils of a second Trump administration and holds the potential to drive voters to their side on Election Day.

Democratic leaders have taken notice. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) met twice with members of the Democratic task force in his Capitol office before the long August recess. He’s coordinating with the group on several Project 2025 forums on Capitol Hill when Congress reconvenes in September. And he’s eyeing several related field hearings around the country in the final weeks leading into November’s elections, hoping the eleventh-hour scrutiny will push apprehensive voters toward Democrats at the polls.

The heavy involvement of Democratic leaders marks an evolution in how the opposition task force is operating, as members of the party brass — from Jeffries, at the highest tier, to the leaders of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee (DPCC), which acts as the party’s messaging arm — step off the sidelines to join the messaging blitz. 

“That has changed in a big way,” Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), who launched the opposition task force in June, said of the leadership role. “Things are very integrated now. And so from Leader Jeffries on down to the DPCC, and the caucus, and our task force — everybody is working together with this as a priority. 

“This is going to be part of Democrats’ closing argument, certainly, in the next 85 days.”

Indeed, in Democratic strategy discussions, Project 2025 seems to be everywhere. 

The leaders of the DPCC blasted an email to Democratic offices last week challenging each lawmaker to use the long summer break to hold at least five district events “exposing the extremism of Trump’s Project 2025.” The three members who rack up the most events will win a plaque.

Separately, the Democrats’ campaign arm launched a recess press campaign highlighting various components of Project 2025 — a different issue every day. The idea is to tie the more controversial elements of the document to vulnerable Republicans in the battleground districts that will decide which party controls the House next year. 

“We want to hold them accountable for their positions,” Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said by phone Wednesday. 

“Project 2025 is a compilation of Republican policies,” she continued. “We want to continue to remind folks that that’s where they stand, that those are the positions that Republicans have been supporting, and this is what’s at stake this election: our rights, our freedoms, our democracy and our future.”

The House efforts jibe with the message coming from Vice President Harris, who has lambasted Project 2025 on the campaign stump. For those who miss the rallies, a portion of Harris’s campaign website is dedicated to warnings that the conservatives’ policy plans would gut federal benefits, eliminate women’s reproductive rights and shift power from working-class Americans to their employers.

Some Democrats said they were stunned that an obscure policy document from a Washington think-tank has broken through the election-year noise to become a major issue in the campaign. Yet a number of recent public opinion polls reveal that most voters are familiar with the agenda — and most don’t like what they see. 

“This is a deeply resonant issue with the public because everyone stands to be impacted by it, and it’s a matter of life and death for our democracy and our communities,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), another member of the opposition task force, said in an email. 

A senior Democratic aide said the attention of party leaders was piqued in early summer, weeks after the task force was formed, when interest in Project 2025 exploded on social media and began to be reflected in public polls. 

“Project 2025 in like, late June, early July, had this renaissance online. It was a trending topic on Twitter; a lot of influencers were talking about it. Awareness sort of started to organically go up,” the aide said. “And then we noticed in the polling that there was a real opportunity, because when you tell more people about it, they do not view it favorably. So it’s really on us to educate people about it.”

The contentious blueprint is almost certain to be a focus of attention at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next week, where Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are scheduled to secure the party’s formal nomination. How much focus, however, remains unclear. 

Huffman, for one, has lobbied for a “Project 2025 pavilion” to be a centerpiece of the event — “a kind of hub of programming,” he said, to showcase the GOP’s policy plans in contrast to the Democrats’ own. 

“I don’t know if they’re going to do that,” Huffman said. “But I’ve tried every way that I could to get that into the convention.”

Even before then, Democrats are eyeing every chance to shine a light on the project. The Biden administration on Thursday, for instance, is rolling out the names of 10 new prescription drugs subject to price negotiations under Medicare — a process, designed to cut costs to seniors, that would be repealed under Project 2025.

“They’ve just given us this awesome opportunity to paint full contrast on every single issue of importance,” the aide said, “and we intend to continue totally taking advantage of it.” 

Spearheaded by the conservative Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 offers a long list of policy recommendations intended to guide the agenda of the next conservative in the White House, whether it’s former President Trump or another Republican further afield. 

Among the proposals raising eyebrows are provisions to crack down on abortion access nationwide; revoke federal approval of mifepristone, a widely used abortion pill; eliminate the departments of Education and Commerce; establish that only “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure;” and adopt a “whole-of-government unwinding” of federal efforts to combat climate change.

It also proposes steps to eradicate the so-called “deep state,” making it easier for the next GOP president to fire federal employees deemed insufficiently dedicated to advancing conservative policies.

Last month, after the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of near-blanket immunity for former presidents, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts suggested the decision would help Trump overhaul Washington, à la Project 2025, without fear of legal consequences. 

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he told “The War Room” podcast, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Trump, for his part, has taken great strides to distance himself from Project 2025, disavowing any connection to both its drafting and the policies it proposes. In a Truth Social post last month, he was terse, writing that “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 2025.” 

In an email Wednesday, a campaign spokesperson amplified that message, accusing Harris and Democrats of “LYING and fear-mongering” about Trump’s ties to the document “because they have NOTHING else to offer the American people.”

“Since the Fall of 2023, President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, wrote. 

“President Trump personally led the effort to establish 20 promises made to the forgotten men and women across our nation, as well as [the] RNC Platform — these are the only policies endorsed by President Trump for a second term.”

Other Republicans have rushed to Trump’s defense, noting that outside groups on both sides regularly issue policy papers while dismissing the notion that Project 2025 will hurt Republicans at the polls. 

“Voters understand that the policy positions of people who are not elected, who are in think tanks or other organizations, are ideas, and a lot of people have a lot of ideas,” Rep. Larry Bucshon (R-Ind.) said. “And I know that President Trump himself has disavowed what’s in that, because his policy positions are different in many respects.”

Still, the reaction to the document has prompted enough concern in the Trump campaign that it has compiled a reference document, entitled “Project 2025 Pushback.”

Democrats, meanwhile, have rejected the claims of disassociation, noting that many of the contributors to Project 2025 worked in Trump’s first administration, and some of those figures are expected to join a second if he wins. That list includes Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, and John McEntee, head of personnel in Trump’s first term, who launched an effort to purge the president’s critics from federal agencies in a campaign reminiscent of that proposed in Project 2025.

The skeptics are also quick to point out that Trump had flown on a private plane with Roberts to a Heritage event where he touted the group’s playbook as “exactly what our movement will do.” 

“It’s an example of just a mountain of receipts,” Huffman said. “We could spend a lot of time walking through all the ways in which Trump and JD Vance and pretty much everyone else in their inner circle have been up to their neck in Project 2025.” 

The task force’s most recent alarm surrounding Project 2025 came last week, when Huffman led a letter to Roberts requesting he meet with lawmakers to discuss the agenda. The Democrats want to focus, in particular, on the only part of the plan that hasn’t been released publicly: a “fourth pillar” laying out the “180-day playbook” for implementing the policy and personnel changes outlined in the published parts of the document.

Roberts has not responded to the entreaty, which proposed an Aug. 16 deadline. The Heritage Foundation did not respond to several requests for comment.

Huffman, meanwhile, suggested the fourth-pillar secrecy is designed to conceal “the truly draconian stuff.” 

“This is the Insurrection Act. This is potentially deploying the military in different parts of the United States, domestically, possibly even invoking martial law,” he said. “I mean, none of this is out of the realm of authoritarian possibility for these people. 

“And I think we need to know what they’re up to.”

Mychael Schnell and Emily Brooks contributed.