Why Project 2025 is getting so much attention at the DNC

Jon Lieber, Eurasia Group's head of research and managing director for the firm's coverage of United States political and policy developments, shares his perspective on US politics from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

What we're watching in US Politics: Project 2025 is getting a lot of attention at the DNC, and you're probably going to hear a lot more about it even after the convention in Chicago ends.

You may have heard a lot about Trump’s Project 2025 in this election cycle, and you're probably going to hear a lot more about it in the coming weeks. And one of the reasons these kinds of Democratic activists have spent a lot of time educating the public through paid media and also some sessions they are holding inside about what's in the 2025 platform. And the point they want to make is that the Project 2025, which is a project of The Heritage Foundation, designed to be sort of a governing guide for President Trump and anybody filling out the executive branch agencies in a second Trump term, is also the Trump agenda. Trump himself has, of course, distanced himself from Project 2025, but there's all kinds of overlap between former Trump administration officials and people who are writing this thing, people who are likely to serve in a second Trump administration. Why are the Democrats spending so much time talking about this? Because it's not that popular. The individual items in 2025 don't poll that well, and it's actually become a major liability for President Trump. So much so that the person at the Heritage Foundation who ran the project actually stepped down from his job because it had become such a liability for the Trump campaign, which is not exactly what The Heritage Foundation donors were hoping for when they launched this project. So stay tuned for a lot more on Project 2025. It's going to be a message every night here at the Democratic National Convention, and there's going to be a lot of fodder for attack ads to draw a policy contrast with former President Trump