Americans Widely Oppose ‘Project 2025’ According to New Poll
Right-wing playbook remains an albatross for the Trump campaign
The policies associated with the right-wing Project 2025 are deeply unpopular among Americans, according to a new national University of Massachusetts Amherst poll.
Organized by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank in Washington DC, interest in Project 2025 has exploded in recent weeks, as wider news coverage of it has surged.
Coming in at more than 900 pages, Project 2025 is intended to be a blueprint for a new Republican president like Donald Trump to completely reshape the federal government and American life very profoundly, in a short period of time.
This would include sweeping new powers for the presidency, further restrictions on abortion rights as well as initiatives to curtail the rights of LGBTQ Americans, roll back civil rights and environmental protection, as well as abandon any efforts to address global climate change.
Although Trump repeatedly has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, evidence mounts that many of his closest and most-senior advisors are deeply involved in the work.
According to the poll, conducted July 29-August 1, more than half (53 percent) of Americans – and two-thirds of Democrats – indicated that they had read, seen or heard at least something about Project 2025 – and they don’t particularly care for it.
“Project 2025 looks like an electoral liability, so it is no surprise that the Democratic Party has sought to link it with former President Trump and the GOP and why Trump seeks to move away from any and all association with the unpopular 900-page playbook,” Tatishe Nteta, provost professor of political science at UMass Amherst and director of the poll, said in a statement. “Large majorities of Americans oppose the key pillars of Project 2025, such as the replacement of career government officials with political appointees (68 percent opposed), restricting a woman’s right to contraception (72 percent opposed) and eliminating the Department of Education (64 percent opposed). While our politics are usually divided by class, generational, racial, gender and partisan identities, among these groups we find strong opposition to many of the policies associated with Project 2025. Even former Trump voters exhibit opposition to many of these policies, a bad omen for the Republican Party and Trump campaign.”
Democrats are succeeding in making the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 a major issue in the campaign and tying it to Trump, said Jesse Rhodes, professor of political science at UMass Amherst and co-director of the poll.
“Remarkably, more than half of Americans report hearing about the report, even though such reports – issued by the Heritage Foundation since the 1980s – are usually incredibly obscure. And for the most part, Americans don’t like what they are hearing,” Rhodes said. “It’s no wonder Trump is trying to distance himself from Project 2025, but unfortunately for him, because dozens of his former administration officials worked on the report this is going to be hard to do. Project 2025 looks like an albatross that Trump will find hard to get rid of.”
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