The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 plan severely jeopardizes former President Donald Trump's election prospects, and the plan to overhaul the federal government has turned out to be an "unmitigated polling disaster" with voters, wrote Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng for Rolling Stone.
Democrats, they said, are preparing to press the advantage by "smothering" the GOP with attack messaging on it.
Project 2025, conceived as an 800-page plan for Republican governance and personnel hiring, calls for replacing the entire federal civil service with an army of MAGA loyalists, imposing Christian nationalism, erasing racial equality programs, and wiping out everything from Social Security and Medicare to military families' benefits to investment in public transportation to even the National Weather Service.
Voters have caught on to what's in the proposal, wrote Perez and Suebsaeng. And they hate it.
According to Democratic strategists, they wrote, "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."
New polling from Navigator, they wrote, shows that nearly 8 in 10 voters oppose allowing the government to monitor pregnancies for the purpose of potentially prosecuting them if they miscarry. Furthermore, "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" — all of which Project 2025 supports.
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Numbers are similar for the plan's proposal to kill the Affordable Care Act, abolish the Department of Education, or replace the civil service with loyalists to the president.
Tatishe Nteta, who conducted another poll on the subject for UMass Amherst, finds a majority of voters, 53 percent, have heard of Project 2025 — and that “Even former Trump voters exhibit opposition to many of these policies, a bad omen for the Republican Party and Trump campaign.”
Trump himself appears to realize how toxic Project 2025 is; in recent weeks he has proclaimed he has no involvement in it and attacked the plan as "extreme," and his campaign officials had a hand in forcing out Paul Dans, a key figure who worked on crafting the project at the Heritage Foundation. But Trump will likely have to rely on it if he wins the election anyway, according to some experts, simply because it's the only entity to have compiled a database of potential hires for a new Trump administration.
