Dems’ new swing state ad blitz wants voters to 'hear every single day' about Project 2025

28 August 2024

Editor's note: A previous version of this story erroneously stated that a key feature of Project 2025 included "ramping up Immigration and Customs Enforcement to have a beefy force of several hundred thousand agents to round up, detain and deport undocumented immigrants." This statement has hence been removed. AlterNet regrets the error.

Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign has been pushed to be more policy-oriented. Now, a major new blitz of ads in battleground states is aimed at educating voters about the most extreme policies that could become reality if her opponent wins in November.

According to the Hill, Harris is now running an ad in several major battleground states tying former President Donald Trump to the far-right Heritage Foundation's controversial Project 2025 initiative. The ad refers to the document as "a 922-page blueprint to make Donald Trump the most powerful president ever," and says it would give Trump "unchecked power to seek vengeance" against his political enemies.

"Donald Trump may try to deny it, but those are Donald Trump's plans," a voiceover says in the ad. "He'll take control. We'll pay the price."

Between Labor Day and November 5, the Harris campaign said it hopes to make sure voters in swing states "hear every single day about the existential danger Trump’s Project 2025 agenda poses to American democracy, freedom, and the middle class." The ads are part of the campaign's previously announced $370 million ad spend on both broadcast television and on digital platforms (like YouTube, Spotify and other services).

Democrats' Project 2025 ad blitz will primarily target voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, whose electoral votes will likely decide the victor of the November election. However, the Hill reported that the ad will also air in Palm Beach County — a strong Democratic area that also happens to house Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate.

This could suggest that the Harris campaign is hoping to flip Florida despite the Sunshine State reelecting Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) by decisive margins just two years ago. Trump's campaign is also spending money on ads in Palm Beach County, which a Democratic consultant argued earlier this week was a signal that Democrats could be in "landslide territory."

People magazine described Project 2025 as "a far-right, Christian nationalist vision for America that would corrode the separation of church and state, replace nonpartisan government employees with Trump loyalists and bolster the president's authority over independent agencies" in a comprehensive write-up earlier this year. Trump has publicly sought to distance himself from it in multiple posts on his Truth Social platform and on the campaign stump, though Democrats spent a bulk of their nominating convention last week calling attention to "Trump's Project 2025" in an effort to more closely tie him to it.

The Heritage Foundation has somewhat undermined Trump's efforts to claim ignorance of the initiative and the people behind it. Various fundraising emails and posts on its website have boasted about the group's close ties to Trump's first administration. Even Trump himself was seen addressing a Heritage gathering in 2022 and lauding them as a "great group" that is "going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do."

Among the more controversial policies in the document include abolishing the Department of Education and implementing a national anti-abortion coordinator to assemble a database tracking pregnancies. But a key portion of the plan is to staff federal agencies with tens of thousands of MAGA loyalists who will replace experienced career civil servants in key decision-making roles.

That portion of Project 2025 relies on Trump passing an executive order known as Schedule F, which would remove various employment protections and allow for a president to have as many as 54,000 direct political appointees compared to the previous limit of roughly 5,000. Trump passed Schedule F during his lame-duck period, but President Joe Biden promptly rescinded it shortly after taking office.

Click here to read the Hill's full report.

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