Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign launched a new ad focused on “Project 2025” Thursday, taking direct aim at former President Donald Trump and “his MAGA loyalists’ dangerous plan” that, it claims, will control Americans’ lives.
Developed by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation and at least two dozen allies of Trump, Project 2025 is an outline of far-right policy proposals created as a blueprint for the next Republican president. The group has wound down its policy work amid criticism but Democrats have continued to make it a key campaign issue.
The Harris campaign’s new 30-second spot, which was shared first with NBC News, is aimed at Black Americans in key battleground states in hopes of making inroads with a demo Democrats need to win over to be successful in November.
“Trump’s Project 2025 agenda will give him unchecked political power with no guardrails,” a narrator says at the start of the ad, adding that, if implemented, the plan would take Black America “backwards” by stripping voting rights protections, eliminating the Department of Education and monitoring women’s pregnancies, among other issues. Displaying various images of Trump, followed by raised Black fists and other stock images, the ad shifts to how Harris offers an alternative.
In a press release, the campaign said the ad will air at upcoming high-viewership sporting events, including Saturday’s college football matchup between Michigan and Texas and the NFL season opener for the Atlanta Falcons and Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday. The ad will also appear, the memo notes, on prominent daytime TV shows that over-index with Black Americans, like “Sherri” and “The Jennifer Hudson Show.”
“Donald Trump’s Project 2025 makes one thing clear to Black America: He doesn’t give a damn about us,” said Harris-Walz Principal Deputy Campaign Manager Quentin Fulks in a statement. “This campaign is going to make Trump defend his indefensible Project 2025 and ensure the key coalitions this campaign needs to win in November know exactly how his extreme agenda will take their communities backwards.”
Though Trump has publicly disavowed the playbook of conservative priorities on several occasions, including saying he has “no idea what it’s about” in an interview this week with podcaster and MIT researcher Lex Fridman, that hasn’t stopped Democrats from directly linking Trump and the project in their messaging. In July, President Joe Biden, then the Democratic nominee, posted on X of Trump that the project “was written for him—by those closest to him.” A large, bound copy of the 900-plus-page Project 2025 proposal was also a prominent prop at Harris’ nominating convention last month.
Many of the authors of the project, as well as the conservative groups that backed it, have strong ties to Trump, including some who worked for him as president. At least 28 of the project’s 38 primary authors worked in the Trump administration, according to a CBS News review of the project.
The Trump campaign, meanwhile, has in recent months tried to redirect attention to the former president’s own “Agenda 47,” a list of “20 core promises” coming directly from the former president.
Despite the Trump campaign’s best efforts to shift focus away from Project 2025, the plan continues to be a sticking point for many young people, particularly content creators, who have been talking about the plan on social media platforms, like TikTok, months before it received widespread attention this summer. Some creators see the plan as a guide to less government oversight, while others say it’s an authoritarian takeover of America. About half of Gen Z voters, another critical group in this year’s election, say they plan to vote for Harris in November, while just one-third say they’ll vote for Trump, according to the results of a new NBC News Stay Tuned Gen Z Poll, powered by SurveyMonkey.
Harris’ campaign says that Project 2025 will also be a major focus in her highly anticipated debate against Trump on Sept. 10.
“In next week’s debate, the dangers of Trump’s Project 2025 agenda will be on full display, but this campaign won’t waste a minute tying Trump to an extreme agenda that is increasingly toxic and unpopular with the voters who will decide this election,” Fulks said.
