Democrats say Project 2025 is extreme. Turns out that Americans are on board with its policy recommendations.

The Harris campaign and the liberal establishment have worked feverishly in recent months to mischaracterize the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 as regressive, weird, and authoritarian.

This attack campaign, which has involved falsely ascribing various unpopular proposals like suspending democracy and banning no-fault divorce to the conservative initiative, has proven largely effective at rendering the Project 2025 brand radioactive ahead of the election.

'They know that that the American people want a return to normal.'

Even President Donald Trump — whose platform echoes many of the project's proposed policy recommendations — has disavowed it, stating, "Some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal."

Heritage recently had the polling outfit Echelon Insights ask thousands of Americans in swing states what they thought about some of the actual policy proposals contained in Project 2025's "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise."

The resultant polling data provided to Blaze News is quite telling.

It turns out that many of Project 2025's policy proposals are neither fringe nor unpopular, contrary to what many have been led to believe. Rather, the data suggests they find resonance with majorities across states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio.

"This is why we did the poll," a Heritage spokesman told Blaze News. "We knew that these policies were popular with the American people."

What is Project 2025?

Hundreds of conservative groups, policy wonks, and scholars got to work in 2022 drafting a plan on how the next president could effectively "take down the Deep State and return the government to the people."

Through this collaborative effort, which came to be known as Project 2025, conservatives arrived at a host of policy recommendations that might aid in this pursuit, including:

• increasing oversight of the Department of Justice and FBI;
• eliminating the Department of Education;
• unfettering American energy production as a means to reduce prices and boost the economy;
• ousting those obstructionist partisans in the federal bureaucracy who may again attempt to prevent the duly elected president from realizing his mandate;
• securing the border and ousting illegal aliens; and
• banning men from participating in women's sports.

These and numerous other policy recommendations were fleshed out in detail and published in the book, "Mandate for Leadership."

A Heritage spokesman emphasized to Blaze News that the policy book "really is candidate-agnostic."

"The book was published in April 2023, before the primary, and the project was started before that. The book had 400 authors, the group has over 110 organization, and it's really a full menu of the conservative movement," added the spokesman.

"It's a menu of policies we hope that the next president takes," continued the spokesman. "We did this for Trump in 2016, and he took a lot of them. We did this for Bush — didn't take as many of them. And a lot of people don't know this, but we did this for Reagan in 1981."

In his foreword to the book, Heritage president Kevin Roberts noted, "Conservatives should be confident that we can rescue our kids, reclaim our culture, revive our economy, and defeat the anti-American Left — at home and abroad. We did it before and will do it again."

Roberts underscored that ultimately, the aim should be to: "Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children"; "dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people"; "defend our nation's sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats"; and "secure our God-given individual rights to live freely."

Roberts recently told Jill Savage, co-host of "Blaze News Tonight," that the left is "terrified" of the assistance Project 2025 could provide a future commander in chief, "not just because of how cohesive it is, Jill, but for another very important reason: They know that that the American people want a return to normal."

"They want a return to common sense policy, and when they look at Project 2025, ... most Americans go to that website and realize, 'Gosh, we agree with that,'" added Roberts.

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An effective attack campaign

Leftists have worked hard in recent months to denigrate, discredit, and ultimately neutralize the conservative initiative.

Before President Joe Biden was pressured into abandoning his re-election bid, his campaign advanced the claims that Project 2025 "would strip away our freedoms"; turn the FBI and DOJ into "enforcement arms of the White House"; "force states to report women's miscarriages and abortions to Trump's Federal Government"; and "enable discrimination against LGBTQ+ Americans."

According to the Heritage spokesman, the Biden campaign "took the unknown brand of 2025, lied about it, created their own policies, and then just shoved them out there — policies that are not popular with the American people but almost every single one of which are not actually in the project."

In a similar bout of projection, GLAAD — the radical homosexual activist group that supports sex changes for kids — branded Project 2025 as an affront to so-called progress.

"Project 2025 is an assault on every America," said GLAAD CEO Sarah Kate Ellis, who was recently busted for allegedly blowing organizational funds on her lavish lifestyle and possibly violating IRS rules in the process. "It would create an America where the freedoms that are hallmark to our Democracy are replaced with authoritarianism and the progress we have made for LGBTQ people, people of color, women, and other marginalized communities is stripped away."

Leftists and establishmentarians in the American media have also done their best to smear the conservative initiative.

The Washington Post advanced the suggestion that the initiative is tantamount to "an authoritarian 'revolution.'"

The New Republic claimed Project 2025's policy book lays "out a Christian nationalist vision of the United States, one in which married heterosexuality is the only valid form of sexual expression and identity; all pregnancies would be carried to term, even if that requires coercion or death; and transgender and gender-nonconforming people do not exist."

The New Republic further added:

This playbook, the groups and donors behind it, the installation of ideologically motivated staff across government agencies, and the theory that the Constitution permits the executive to rule absolutely, is more than guidance for a new conservative presidential administration. It is also one of the right’s most open admissions that they aim to install an authoritarian ruler and roll out a twenty-first-century American fascism.

The leftist blog Mother Jones asserted last year, "Project 2025 is an out-in-the-open scheme to steer the US toward far-right autocracy."

It appears many Americans' first and only exposure to Project 2025 was through the media's attack campaign.

A YouGov poll conducted last month indicated that a great many Americans had never heard of Project 2025. Those who had tended to be Democrats.

The Economist conducted a survey earlier this month, finding that 15% of respondents said they had a favorable opinion of Project 2025, 46% signaled disfavor, and 39% said they didn't know. Whereas 50% of likely Harris voters said they had heard a lot about the project, only 16% of likely Trump supporters said the same.

Popular policies and values

Echelon Insights polled Americans in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, asking them what they thought about various Project 2025 policy recommendations. The pollsters discovered that respondents were largely on board with what has otherwise been presented as fringe and "authoritarian."

Respondents were asked, for instance, whether they supported "eliminating the Department of Education, moving control and funding of education from DC bureaucrats to parents and state and local governments."

49% of respondents said they supported axing the department. 41% signaled opposition. 10% said they were unsure.

The sample sizes across the eight states ranged from 301 to 377, altogether amounting to a sample of 2,638 likely voters in what Echelon Insights called the "Senate and swing states." Among the respondents, 38% said they considered themselves to be Republican; 35% answered, "Democrat"; and 22% answered, "Independent."

Respondents were asked whether they supported increasing accountability and oversight of the FBI and DOJ in the interest of "deweaponizing the federal government."

Overall, 62% said they strongly or somewhat favor this policy recommendation. Only 25% signaled opposition. Support for the initiative was especially strong in Pennsylvania, where 70% of respondents were on board.

Majorities in each of the eight states supported building a wall to secure the U.S. border. Overall, 62% supported the endeavor.

Super-majorities in every one of the eight states supported the proposition that businesses need to verify their employees are legal American residents. Opposition never exceeded 17%.

When Heritage asked respondents whether they supported "fully enforcing immigration laws, including deporting individuals who have violated these laws," 79% of respondents said they strongly or somewhat favored the proposal. 16% signaled opposition.

Other Project 2025 policy recommendations similarly were met with overwhelming support:

• 70% of respondents supported sending American troops and equipment to the southern border to confront the drug cartels and secure the border. Only 24% said they were strongly or somewhat opposed.
• 73% of respondents — including 81% in Montana — supported cutting illegal aliens off all government payments. 20% signaled opposition.
• 69% of respondents indicated they favored the proposed requirement that Congress approve any major federal regulations before they could take effect. 19% signaled opposition.
• 62% of respondents said they supported expanding "oil and gas drilling on federal lands to increase fossil fuel production and reduce energy prices."
• 81% supported cutting the growth of government spending annually to reduce inflation. 12% signaled opposition.

Although responses to questions regarding reductions on business regulations and axing federal DEI programs were closer splits, the Project 2025 propositions still had the edge.

When it came time to see whether the values advocated by Project 2025 resonated with Americans in swing states, Heritage again found itself tallying significant support.

The poll revealed that 73% of respondents opposed men in women's sports; 67% believed teachers should have to tell parents if their child wants to change their "name, gender, or pronouns"; and 65% agreed federal agencies should be "held more accountable to the democratically elected President and Congress."

Although respondents revealed themselves more often than not to be on board with Project 2025's raft of policy proposals, when asked whether they supported the initiative by name based on what they know, they initially offered an answer reflected in previous polls. Only 14% of respondents said they strongly or somewhat supported Project 2025. 47% said they opposed it. 39% said they were unsure.

However, upon being provided with a short description of what Project 2025 is — a description the New Republic and CNN might be loathe to print — respondents changed their tune:

Project 2025 is an initiative not affiliated with any candidate that makes a set of policy recommendations to the next presidential administration. These recommendations include action to secure the border, unleashing domestic energy production, reducing inflation, and defending America against global threat.

Overall, 52% said they supported Project 2025. 36% signal opposition. Only 12% remained unsure.

Whereas prior to respondents reading the definition, support for the conservative initiative was lowest in Arizona (11%), afterward, it saw spike to the second-highest (54%) amongst the eight states.

These results may indicate that Project 2025's detractors trafficking in accusations of weirdness are themselves the extremists.

Following this survey-based narrative corrective, a Heritage spokesman indicated that the conservative organization is now planning to spend $1 million highlighting the polices Kamala Harris has supported "that are very, very extreme."

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