Project 2025: The Heritage Foundation’s right-wing extremist blueprint for a second Trump presidency lurked in the shadows for many months, but in recent weeks the 900-page report is getting some well-deserved attention from Democrats, the media and celebrities. Project 2025, backed by over 80 far-right groups and hundreds of millions of dollars, lays out a detailed plan to overhaul the federal government, attacking the very foundations of democracy should Trump win in November.
Among a long list of alarming policy proposals, the plan calls for immediately firing thousands of qualified civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists; further eroding reproductive rights; deploying the National Guard to crack down on protests; using the military for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, and weaponizing the Departmennt of Justice to prosecute Trump’s political opponents and pardoning Jan. 6 insurrectionists. The plan also calls for closing down the Department of Education, increasing drug prices for seniors, privatization of student loans and shutting down energy and environment-related offices and rules that would eviscerate government’s ability to combat climate change and pollution.
As Project 2025 received more negative attention, Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from the plan, despite the fact that more than 140 of his former White House advisers worked on and wrote many of the proposals. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Bryan Bennett, senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, who examines the results of a public opinion poll he conducted for Navigator Research. This project found that a majority of Americans believe that Trump supports the Project 2025 agenda,and are fearful that a Republican election victory in November would endanger people across the country.
BRIAN BENNETT: In the survey, we basically, you know, introduced Project 2025 at the time that we did the survey, which was in late June. It did not have very high awareness. Only 23 percent of Americans said that they had heard a lot or some about it. So, we had to kind of introduce what are some of the policies that are in it and then try to connect those with how people might think about them in terms of the threats that they would face in their day-to-day lives.
What we did in the survey was we tested 19 different policies. Several of them were kind of in the reproductive rights space. Some of them were in the economic and healthcare space. Some of them were in a huge part of Project 2025, efforts by that would be taken on by the Trump administration to gut the federal bureaucracy and eliminate federal civil servants and replace them with Trump loyalists.
So we tested all of these policies and I think some of the top line findings for me, no policy of the 19 tested were popular. All of them were opposed by at least 60 percnt of Americans and many of them more in the high 70s or or 80s, close to 80 or even 90 percent on some of the policies.
Notably, I think among independents the shares often were much higher, on the opposition. And we also, in the survey kind of constructed two different asks. We asked if the supporter would oppose this policy and would this policy hurt the country a lot? And those shares apply to both things. So for example allowing the government to monitor people’s pregnancies to potentially prosecute them if they miscarry. Seventy-eight percent overall said that they think that that would hurt the country, including 85 percent of independents. And, 72 percent of Republicans even who do not identify with the MAGA movement.
So, just astronomical numbers of opposition and belief that it would hurt the country. And it was about a little over 80 percent who were opposed to that.
But kind of going down the list — and I won’t go through every single one because that would take a while — but, you know, 84 percent think that allowing employers to stop paying hourly workers overtime would hurt the country. Eighty-two percent say the same for removing healthcare protections for people with pre-existing conditions. And 79 percent say the same of eliminating Head Start, which would end preschool education for the children of low-income families. So overwhelming opposition to a lot of the policies. And when we did the survey, kinda the first thing we did was we exposed respondents to the policies that are in the survey, and then we kind of did a re-ask of “Do you support or oppose Project 2025?”
So before we actually showed people the policies, only only 31 percent supported; 49 percent were opposed after we showed the policies, that net opposition increased from 18 points to 39. There’s only 24 percent support. The support dropped seven points and this opposition grew to 63 percent, which rose 14 points. So just even without even doing any messaging at all, just letting people know what’s in the plan, that was what really turned people off.
One of the things that we really found here was the two predominant arguments that really kind of stood out with overall, with all Americans, but particularly with independents were characterizing Project 2025 as an unprecedented extreme Republican plan that would fundamentally alter the American government, making Trump even more dangerous in a second term by granting him presidential powers like no president has ever had before and as an extreme Republican plan to roll back and eliminate Americans’ constitutionally protected rights and freedoms. And so all of that kind of in combination is how we kind of got to our messaging recommendations.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Bryan, just finally, do you think voters’ knowledge of Project 2025 has the capacity to be a game changer in how people vote this November?
BRIAN BENNETT: That’s a great question, and I’m not gonna pretend like I know the answer to that. What I will say is that it carries significant upside potential to be a drag on Donald Trump. We’ve had Donald Trump in the political ecosystem and atmosphere for, you know, almost a decade. And so trying to find a new attack or a new thing that he’s done that outrageous people can be kind of difficult and exhausting because I think a lot of people would say it’s baked in.
I think with something like this — particularly as it is a more forward-looking agenda for what the country should look like and what a second Trump term actually represents — I’m not sure I can say what impact it will have on the election, but I certainly don’t think it’s a downside for progressives to try to make it an issue that is very well known and make it crystal clear what the stakes of the election are. Because as people engage more and we get closer to the election, I think this kind of information is the information a lot of voters are gonna wanna have in order to make their choice.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Bryan Bennett (18:19) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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