The Harris-Walz campaign is launching a battleground-state push to tie former President Donald Trump to Project 2025 ahead of his first debate on Tuesday with Vice President Kamala Harris, Scripps News has learned. This follows a weekend of actions where officials say tens of thousands of volunteers reached out to more than 1 million voters.
The new blitz comes as the campaign contrasts what it views as Harris’ “New Way Forward” with Trump’s “extreme Project 2025 agenda,” referencing the 922-page plan from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, designed for the “next conservative president.” Top campaign surrogates will join local officials in 18 events across the country, including key swing states such as Virginia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia.
According to the planned roadmap of stops obtained by Scripps News, the events will reflect issues central to the campaign, such as reproductive freedoms and labor rights. They will cater to voting coalitions central to their electoral strategy: young voters, union workers, small-business leaders, Hispanic voters, and moderates.
The campaign includes events in Pennsylvania with Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, in Virginia with New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and that state’s Latino Caucus founder, with local farmers and small-business leaders in Madison, Wisconsin, with union leaders in Phoenix and Lansing, Michigan, with students and Gen Z voters in Las Vegas, with a reproductive health expert in Portland, Maine, with Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson, a member of the “Tennessee Three,” in Savannah, and in Florida with co-chairs of the state’s “Republicans for Harris.”
The push continues the campaign’s effort to focus pre-debate discussions on what officials frame as Harris’ work supporting the middle class and warnings over Trump’s plans to amass what they believe is unchecked power.
Democrats have heavily emphasized Project 2025 and sought to link Trump to it, warning of its proposed policies limiting abortion, cutting social safety net programs, and terminating tens of thousands of government workers.
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Over the weekend, the Harris-Walz campaign held a weekend of action centered on Project 2025 with more than 2,000 events, according to organizers.
“With hundreds of offices and thousands of staff across the battlegrounds, we are able to harness all the buzz around the debate and break through to hard-to-reach voters on Project 2025,” Harris-Walz battleground states director Dan Kanninen said ahead of the weekend push.
Public opinion research has shown voters hold a mostly negative view of the project, while significant numbers still don’t know anything about it. In an Economist/YouGov poll of Americans from early August, nearly half said they had an unfavorable view of Project 2025, and 39% didn’t know enough about it to answer.
More than a third of respondents in swing states surveyed by Emerson College Polling/The Hill last month said Project 2025 made them less likely to support Trump, a number that rose among independents. However, more respondents in each state said the project didn’t make a difference to their vote or they weren’t familiar with it.
Trump has repeatedly denied ties to the plan and those behind it, though its authors include former Trump administration officials, and the document overlaps with several of his policy proposals.
The former president spent the weekend escalating his rhetoric around issues central to his campaign pitch, such as immigration and alleged political corruption. At a rally with supporters in Wisconsin, Trump suggested achieving the mass deportations he’s proposed would be a “bloody story.” In a post on his Truth Social app, he escalated his previous calls to jail his political enemies, suggesting those responsible for alleged election fraud would be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include long-term prison sentences so that this depravity of justice does not happen again.”
Numerous courts and state officials have rejected Trump’s claims of election cheating as baseless.
But heading into the first debate with Harris at the top of the ticket, the country remains evenly split between the candidates. A poll released Sunday by The New York Times and Siena College found Trump and Harris neck-and-neck, with the former president narrowly leading the vice president 48-47. Trump and Harris were exactly even or within the margin of error in all the swing states expected to decide the election.
Harris has spent the last several days in Pittsburgh preparing for the debate, where she has publicly projected confidence about facing Trump. While stepping out to visit a local spice store, she told reporters what she wants to get across to Trump: “It’s time to turn the page on the divisiveness. It’s time to bring our country together. Chart a new way forward.”
She will face off against Trump for the first time at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia at 9 p.m. ET on Tuesday.
Following the debate, with less than 60 days until Election Day, Vice President Harris, Gov. Tim Walz, and campaign surrogates are expected to barnstorm battleground states and continue highlighting Project 2025 and its links to Trump. Harris will kick off the “New Way Forward” tour with rallies in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, while Walz will visit Michigan and Wisconsin.
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