How ‘Project 2025’ became the Biden campaign’s favorite target

President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is intensifying its attacks on Project 2025, the unofficial conservative umbrella group working to staff and prep Donald Trump’s potential upcoming administration.

Over the last several weeks, the Biden campaign and allies have begun frequently referencing the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” by name in interviews and social media. They’ve gotten at least some traction on TikTok, where the campaign’s page has promoted videos of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discussing the group and some user videos mentioning the topic have attracted significant likes.

On Thursday, ahead of Biden’s State of the Union address, the campaign pushed out a flurry of press releases using the term “Project 2025” in an effort to detail what a second Trump presidency would consist of on topics like abortion, taxes, Social Security and Medicare. While it’s rooted in a specific conservative effort, it’s increasingly being used as a shorthand for policies backed by figures on the right across the board.

“You’ll certainly see more storytelling about what the impacts of the Trump agenda and Project 2025 will be,” a senior Biden campaign advisor told Semafor. “You’ll see that online, I’m sure it’ll come up in some paid, I’m sure it’ll come up in earned: We’re going to be talking about this.”

The campaign told Semafor that content referencing the conservative policy effort quickly rose to the top percentage of video views on its new TikTok account, adding that 90% of viewers found these posts through the app’s “For You” page. The campaign said it’s also continuing its outreach and work with influencers, including briefing them on Trump’s 2025 agenda in an effort to get their messaging out on the topic.

“Across the board, a lot of voters who have tuned out for this election are starting to tune in and it’s important for us to be making sure that they are fully aware of the stakes,” the campaign advisor told Semafor.

Both the Trump campaign and the Heritage Foundation have stressed that they do not speak for each other. Democrats hope to tie them together in the public’s mind and leave it to Trump and other Republicans to untangle them.

Project 2025’s policy papers have floated ideas like reviving the Comstock Act to ban sending abortion pills by mail, bringing back a failed effort to implement a citizenship question on the census, and other initiatives aimed at drastically reshaping the executive branch. The Biden campaign hopes to frame its work as “a concerted effort from Trump and his allies to really use the levers of government against his enemies,” as the advisor put it, using “an endless menu of terrifying options.”

The new “Project 2025” blitz fills one obvious need for the Biden campaign: It gives them a way to talk about policy contrasts against an opponent who — especially on issues like abortion — has typically avoided taking detailed positions.

More broadly, it gives them an easy route for framing topics where they feel they have the upper hand. For their Democratic base, it confirms what they already suspect about a second Trump presidency. For a certain group of independent voters who are repelled by party politics, it offers the kind of shadowy, string-pulling villain that often figures prominently in online discussion.

In some ways, it’s a continuation of a strategy Democrats used in the midterms. After Senate Republican leaders deliberately did not offer a policy platform, choosing instead to focus their message on Biden’s struggles, Democrats spent months hyping up an individual plan by Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla. that included items like requiring Congress to regularly renew Social Security. Even after Mitch McConnell publicly denounced Scott’s ideas, Democrats were all too happy to use it as a stand-in for Republicans in ads and speeches around the country.

“Project 2025 is setting out to deliver the reform our broken federal government needs. It is unsurprising that Joe Biden would run away from his disastrous record and attack fellow citizens advocating to restore good governance and Constitutional order in the wake of the soon outgoing Biden regime,” a Project 2025 spokesperson said in a statement.

Project 2025 includes many Trump loyalists, but the Trump campaign has kept it — and other conservative groups putting together plans for another Trump presidency — at arm’s length. In a joint statement sent by Trump campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita in November (following a number of news articles detailing Trump’s plans for another term), the campaign argued that “none of these groups or individuals speak for” Trump or the campaign.

• Project 2025 recently tapped over 100 coalition partners for its advisory board, Semafor reported: The milestone will allow them to focus more on the last pillar in its project, which focuses on developing a 180-day playbook of regulations and executive orders that Trump could implement upon taking office.
• Even as Trump’s campaign has tried to distance itself from group’s like Project 2025, many of the project’s proposals are based on Trump’s past comments, The New York Times reported back in November: “One challenge for the Trump team is that the most incendiary rhetoric and proposals have come from Mr. Trump’s own mouth,” the article pointed out.