Project 2025 Is an Unmitigated Polling Disaster for Trump and Republicans
Democrats are planning to “smother” Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and the GOP with Project 2025 until November. New polls show why
ACROSS THE DEMOCRATIC Party’s most senior levels — within Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and other leading party elections and messaging operations — liberal operatives and politicians are plotting to make sure that between now and Election Day, as many voters as possible know about Project 2025, as well as Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Republican leaders’ deep connections to it.
With just three months left until the U.S. presidential election, various sectors of the Democratic elite are planning to invest considerable resources toward amplifying the hard-right, Heritage Foundation-hosted policy and personnel initiative in order to damage the Trump-Vance ticket and other GOP candidates, especially in battleground states, according to four people with knowledge of these operations.
In the words of one source familiar with Team Harris’ efforts on the matter, Democratic leaders are working to “smother” Republican candidates “with their own vision for the country,” and will be spending significant time and money — on targeted ads and other messaging and fundraising blitzes — to further solidify Project 2025 in the consciousness of the American electorate.
Recent public polling underscores why the Democratic Party is so enthusiastic about tying Republicans to Project 2025: The data suggests that many of the policy priorities outlined in its agenda are deeply unpopular.
Furthermore, according to a person familiar with the matter and another Democrat briefed on it, there are reams of internal polling among Democratic organizations showing how much Project 2025 has been breaking through the media ecosystems, even to many median voters. Numerous Democratic Party sources, including some lawmakers on Capitol Hill, independently tell Rolling Stone that they were stunned that Project 2025 actually broke through to a surprising number of normal, non-extremely-online Americans, and can’t believe how often they have been asked about it by constituents and other so-called “normies.”
Indeed, there is some public data, such as from YouGov earlier this summer, pointing to how information on Project 2025 had started to emerge from closed-off partisan bubbles. “Overall, 20 percent of U.S. adult citizens say they’ve heard a lot about Project 2025, while 39 percent have heard a little and 42 percent have heard nothing at all,” the YouGov report reads. “Most Independents with an opinion about Project 2025 dislike it (7 percent favorable, 38 percent unfavorable), while Republicans are more positive (26 percent favorable, 12 percent unfavorable).”
This all explains why Trump and his senior staff have — falsely — claimed that he has nothing to do with the conservative project, to the point that he got his supporters to boo Project 2025 during a campaign stop. Trump and his ilk realize how much attention the project is receiving from voters and how woefully unpopular many of the outlined policy prescriptions are to the average citizen. In recent weeks, as Rolling Stone previously reported, Trump had privately vented to political advisers that Project 2025, specifically the abortion-related components of it, risked tanking his electoral chances ahead of November.
The former Trump administration staffer, Paul Dans, who headed up Project 2025 within the Heritage Foundation recently resigned after trying to claim that Trump had no ties to it. Last week, Trump’s campaign co-chiefs Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita gloated in a statement: “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.”
Project 2025 has not shuttered. Even if it had, its large policy book has long since been published, its Trumpy personnel database has already been built, and the numerous conservative organizations — including the Heritage Foundation — that formed Project 2025 still exist and are still doing the work (some of which is blessed by Trump himself) to lay the foundation for a potential second Trump term.
“Trump can try to distance himself from this, but 70 to 80 percent of the people who wrote the book are going to be in his second administration — the cabinet, under secretaries, assistant secretaries, the senior advisers. They’re all going to be the foot soldiers in a second Trump administration!” one of Project 2025’s contributors previously said. “You can’t look at this constellation of organizations and people without seeing that they’re all his people.”
Recent polling from Navigator — a consortium of liberal pollsters, organizations, and operatives — found that some of Project 2025’s abortion-related proposals test off-the-charts poorly. Nearly 80 percent of registered voters oppose allowing the government to monitor people’s pregnancies to potentially prosecute them if they miscarry, 73 percent say it would be harmful to allow employers to deny workers access to birth control, 70 percent say a national abortion ban would be harmful, and 71 percent say it would be harmful to ban in-vitro fertilization nationwide.
But it’s not just abortion.
Other Project 2025 proposals also test through the floor, when posed to likely voters and focus groups. The Navigator poll found 82 percent of voters say it would be harmful to remove the Affordable Care Act’s protections for Americans with preexisting conditions, 79 percent oppose banning 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 loyalists, and 68 percent of voters oppose making it easier to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.
“Our campaign will ensure Americans understand how harmful Trump’s Project 2025 is to their lives, including cutting billions in education funding, monitoring women’s pregnancies, raising prescription drug prices on seniors, and gutting our government of nonpartisan officials to install Trump loyalists as dangerous as they are unpopular,” James Singer, a Harris 2024 spokesperson, said Monday.
Similarly, the Democratic National Committee’s national press secretary, Emilia Rowland, says, “Trump and Vance’s Project 2025 agenda should terrify every American: banning abortion nationwide, threatening doctors with jail time, restricting access to contraception, and even monitoring women’s pregnancies,” adding that in November, “voters will remind Trump and Vance that they have no place in our doctor’s offices.”
The Navigator findings are backed up by new polling from University of Massachusetts Amherst gauging respondents’ opinions on Project 2025 policy priorities. The UMass poll results, provided exclusively to Rolling Stone, found that 68 percent of Americans oppose the idea of firing thousands of federal employees and replacing them with political appointees loyal to the president, 64 oppose eliminating the Department of Education, and 72 percent oppose restricting women’s access to contraception.
The poll additionally found that 56 percent of Americans oppose cutting funding for renewable energy research and investment, and only 23 percent who support doing so. And a majority of respondents said they oppose reducing federal protections for LGBTQ+ Americans, compared to 22 percent who support doing so.
According to the UMass poll, 53 percent of Americans have read, seen, or heard about Project 2025.
“Our results suggest that Trump’s move away from Project 2025, while straining credulity, makes sense if Trump intends to return to the White House,” says Tatishe Nteta, the UMass Poll director. “While our politics are usually divided by class, generational, racial, gender, and partisan identities, among these groups we find almost universal opposition to many of the policies associated with Project 2025.”
Nteta continues, rather ominously for the American right’s 2024 ambitions: “Even former Trump voters exhibit opposition to many of these policies, a bad omen for the Republican Party and Trump campaign.”