House Democrats have adopted an aggressive strategy to tie Project 2025 to House Republicans in the final stages of this year's election campaign, hoping the controversial conservative document will help them retake control of the House in the November election.
The Democratic Party Project 2025At every opportunity — in leadership conferences, floor debates, committee hearings and private hallway conversations — Republicans are already taking a page out of the right-wing policy playbook and warning that they will return to the same tactics next year if voters allow Republicans to retain control of the House.
“They're trying to make these things a reality,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.).
The Democratic Party is also taking that message to various places.
Closed-door strategy sessions on Capitol Hill have brought in outside experts to brief lawmakers on various policies included in Project 2025. The mentoring campaign is aimed at helping Democrats make sense of the lengthy document, which is about 900 pages long, and educating lawmakers on its most controversial elements.
The purpose is to get that information to constituents when lawmakers return home for town hall meetings and other district events.
“Some of our members want to know about certain areas, so to me, education is very important in the Latino community. Tell us where you can find information about education, and they can help you and walk you directly through the nuts and bolts of their plan,” said Rep. Nanette Barragan (D-Calif.), chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
The education sessions are being spearheaded by the Democratic Project 2025 task force, launched in June by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), who has said conservative policies aimed at filling federal agencies with conservative sympathizers pose a real threat to the foundations of American democracy.
The latest meeting on Thursday focused on immigration, with Project 2025 aiming to crack down on border crossings, ease deportation procedures for illegal immigrants and impose new limits on legal immigration.
The Task Force also examined the policy platforms of Republican candidates challenging Democratic incumbents to see how those platforms aligned with Project 2025.
“It's all been very helpful to our members. They've been holding town hall meetings, they've been doing virtual calls,” said Barragan, who will be participating in a Hispanic history event in his district this weekend.
“We will definitely be talking about aspects of Project 2025 that relate to immigration,” she said.
Launched in 2022 by the conservative Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 is a comprehensive blueprint of conservative policy priorities designed to shape the policy course of the next Republican president. Among its recommendations are rolling back abortion access nationwide, abolishing the Departments of Education and Commerce, delegitimizing same-sex marriage and ending government efforts to combat climate change.
It also seeks to curb what many Republicans see as the weaponization of government against conservatives by making it easier to fire existing federal employees and replace them with an “army” of handpicked Republican supporters.
During a presidential debate this month, Vice President Harris called Project 2025 a “dangerous plan” that Trump “intends to implement if re-elected.”
Trump has denied having any involvement with the project and doubled down on that claim during the debate.
“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump countered.
“It's out there. I haven't read it. I don't want to read it. I'm not going to read it,” he continued. “It's a group of people who got together and came up with some ideas. Some of them were good, some of them were bad, but that's irrelevant.”
But Democrats don't buy that argument, and they want to make sure voters don't either. They're quick to point out that the conservative coalition behind the plan includes a group led by former Trump administration officials, some of whom are expected to rejoin Trump's campaign if he's reelected. That list also includes Russell Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump administration, and Stephen Miller, a former Trump speechwriter and senior adviser.
“I think in battleground states, people are concerned about the radicalness and the extremeness of this agenda and whether some of these people will be part of a Trump administration,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif. “Even if Trump didn't write this agenda, would he be hiring these types of people?”
Republicans, meanwhile, have largely rejected the idea that Project 2025 will be a drag on GOP candidates in November. They say Democrats have launched a desperate campaign to divert attention from Biden administration policies that could be unpopular in some battleground states.
“When Democrats realized that the American people hated their open borders, pro-crime, pro-inflation policies, they concocted a false attack based on material House Republicans have never read,” said Will Reinert, national spokesman for the Republican National Committee, the House Republicans' campaign arm. “This desperate lie is the clearest sign yet that House Democrats believe their chances of retaking their majority are diminishing.”
But the Democratic Party Public Opinion PollThis suggests that voters are not only aware of Project 2025 but also widely opposed to its contents — and, in the final stages of the election campaign, they are taking every opportunity to highlight the document.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York and Rep. Pete Aguilar of California, the Democratic caucus chairman, both linked Project 2025 to President Trump and lower-ranking Republican candidates during press conferences this week.
DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, has also been active in the opposition, with his office putting together a memo highlighting similarities between the policies promoted by Project 2025 and provisions being pushed by House Republicans as part of the current debate over government spending.
“We've laid out in detail what the appropriations bill will include, and it mirrors what President Trump's Project 2025 will include,” she said. “This is a huge transformation in how we serve the American people.”
The comparison will give Democrats ammunition in their final push before Election Day.
“I see a direct connection to Project 2025, and we're already implementing parts of it,” Barragan said, sounding pleasantly surprised that a little-known policy document was resonating outside Washington.
“In these battleground states, we have people who are actually coming together as activists saying, 'I've heard about Project 2025, and it sounds terrible,'” she said.
“If someone who isn't a Washington politician can talk about Project 2025 and the two or three bad things about it, that's a success because people are getting it.”
