NOTUS reports:

There’s a good reason Donald Trump and his campaign are so desperate to distance themselves from the classified-sounding “Project 2025”: The Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration is politically radioactive.

A Democratic operative who has seen private polling on how a number of issues could move the 2024 presidential election — like health care, the economy and immigration — told NOTUS that, improbably, no issue was benefiting Democrats more than Project 2025. And, predictably, Democrats are capitalizing on the unpopular plan.

Democratic lawmakers and campaign operatives are trying to attach Trump and Republicans to Project 2025 at every opportunity, which, it turns out, hasn’t been too hard. According to Rep. Jared Huffman, the founder of the “Stop Project 2025 Task Force,” one of the reasons they’ve had such success connecting Trump to Heritage’s plan is because voters intuitively believe the former president would institute many of these proposals if he gets another chance in the White House.

“There’s no believability gap here,” Huffman told NOTUS. “People have seen enough of Donald Trump in his first presidency and of JD Vance and all of these extremists to know that they’re not kidding. This is not some hypothetical think tank document; this is actually their blueprint. It’s just not hard to convince people that’s the case.”

Huffman also said he’d seen polling on how effective the Democratic attacks on Project 2025 have been — and he suggested there was a simple reason the attacks were landing. “The heart of why Project 2025 is having such a profound impact is that it’s true. It’s just true,” he said.

The asymmetry of what Democrats have had to do to connect Republicans to Project 2025 — which isn’t much — compared to the lengths Trump and other GOP lawmakers have had to go to distance themselves from it is one of the reasons this has been such a political winner for Democrats. [Continue reading…]