Plus, polls on vaccines, the child tax credit and which party is more “weird.”
Project 2025 could be an albatross for Trump
There’s been some infighting among conservatives lately over a package of sweeping conservative policy proposals known as “Project 2025.” Conservative groups developed the plan as a sort of wish list for if former President Donald Trump gets reelected, and it contains policies widely considered to align with his vision for governance. But the former president’s campaign has disavowed the project and recently went so far as to say its “demise would be greatly welcomed,” while Trump urged his supporters to boo it at a campaign rally.
That’s likely because a growing majority of Americans are hearing about the controversial proposal, and a significant share also disapprove of it and closely associate it with Trump, despite his concerted attempts to distance himself from it.
Two different YouGov polls conducted for the University of Massachusetts Department of Political Science and The Economist in the last two weeks each found that between 70 and 80 percent of Americans had heard about Project 2025. YouGov/The Economist found that 47 percent thought Trump at least somewhat supports the plan, similar to the 45 percent who said it “accurately describes what Trump stands for” in a mid-July survey by Navigator Research, a progressive-aligned polling outfit. Recent Navigator surveys also compared attitudes toward the project in late June versus mid-July, and they found that the project had become both more familiar and less popular among Americans across the political spectrum.
Unfavorable views of the project rose the most among Democrats, for whom the plan’s net favorability dropped by a whopping 36 percentage points, but it also became less popular among the smaller share of Republicans who had heard of the project: Net favorability for Project 2025 dropped 9 points among those who identified as MAGA supporters and 17 points among other Republicans.
When it comes to what specific policies within Project 2025 Americans dislike, the University of Massachusetts poll found that a majority of respondents disagreed with policies like “firing thousands of federal employees and replacing them with appointees loyal to the president” (-56 percent net support) or “reducing federal civil rights protections for lesbian, gay, and transgender people” (-29 percent net support). A YouGov poll in early July found similarly low support for policies like withdrawing federal approval for the abortion pill mifepristone (-26 percent net support) — though other proposals were somewhat more popular, like deploying the military to help with arrests along the U.S.- Mexico border (+11 percent net support) or outlawing pornography (an even split).
Democrats are hoping to take full advantage of the plan’s unpopularity. Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is taking steps to brand Trump’s policies as part of Project 2025 — sometimes inaccurately. This strategy could dovetail with the campaign’s efforts to refocus the presidential race around issues that may favor Harris, like abortion rights and fears about Trump’s autocratic tendencies. So, heading into the upcoming Democratic National Convention, Democrats may keep talking as much about Republican policy proposals as their own.
SourceX: abcNEWS
Recent Comments