There is vanishingly little doubt that Project 2025 has become one of the most unpopular political programs or ideas in recent history.
The question is increasingly how much voters intend to hang that millstone around Donald Trump’s neck.
A new NBC News poll Sunday is the latest to show that Project 2025, a detailed policy plan put together by a Heritage Foundation team that featured many high-profile Trump administration officials but that Trump has sought to disown, is historically unpopular. Just 4 percent viewed it favorably, while 57 percent had a negative view.
Project 2025 is a lengthy series of proposals, many of them coming from the far right, which seek to be a road map for a second Trump term. It aims to consolidate power in the executive branch, rid the government of disloyal civil servants, push the conservative movement back to the hard right on gay rights and abortion, and launch a mass-deportation operation aimed at undocumented immigrants, among scores of other proposals.
The most recent poll follows a New York Times/Siena College poll from earlier this month that showed, of people who had heard of Project 2025, voters disliked it 65 percent to 13 percent. A YouGov poll from after the Sept. 10 debate showed American adults disliked it 52-11.
All of these polls underscore the scale of the albatross Project 2025 has become:
Independents disliked it 53-6 in the YouGov poll and 65-12 in the Times/Siena poll.
Even Republicans were only about evenly split in the YouGov and Times/Siena polls.
These three polls show that only between 1 and 4 percent had strongly positive views of it. The percentage who had strongly negative views outpaced those numbers 50-1 in the NBC poll, 20-1 in the YouGov poll and 18-1 in the Times/Siena poll.
It is — to put it mildly — very bad when something is not just hugely unpopular but is that much more animating to its opponents.
There is basically no upside to Project 2025 at this point, and huge potential downside.
To put this in perspective: Project 2025 in the NBC News poll is less popular than socialism (18 percent positive to 55 percent negative). Its numbers are not that far off from where Vladimir Putin’s were last decade (13 percent positive vs. mid-70s negative, per Gallup). And perhaps the last major proposal to cost a party dearly at the ballot box — Obamacare — at its low point was still generally viewed positively by more than 30 percent of Americans.
If there’s a recent policy proposal that rivals what we’re seeing from Project 2025, it might be Republicans’ attempted replacement of Obamacare last decade. It generally polled in the mid-teens, with a majority opposed. And strong opposition often far-outpaced strong support. (Republicans ultimately failed to pass it.)
Which brings us to the but. That Obamacare replacement plan was easy to attach to Republicans, as was Obamacare to Democrats. These were official proposals of the two parties. Project 2025 occupies more of a gray area; it clearly has significant ties to Trump, but it’s not his campaign’s official platform.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has sought to treat the issue as if it were official campaign literature, which it isn’t. Trump, meanwhile, has tried to pretend he has no idea what the project is about or who is behind it, despite his many established ties to the project’s leaders and praise for their work.
The Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Hannah Knowles reported last month that Trump in 2022 shared an airplane with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts on the way to an event at which Trump said Heritage would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
(For a flavor of precisely what Americans object to from Project 2025, see this poll last month from YouGov and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. They strongly disliked stripping LGBTQ people of protections, firing and replacing nonpolitical officials viewed as disloyal, and restricting access to contraception.)
So how much voters attach this to Trump is the huge, unresolved question here. For now, they seem to attach it somewhat — in ways that have to be scary for the Trump campaign but not necessarily a crisis.
The Times/Siena poll showed 7 in 10 people who had heard of Project 2025 thought Trump would try to enact “most” (41 percent) or “some” (30 percent) of its proposals. The YouGov poll showed Americans said 46-27 that Trump or his advisers were involved in creating it (his past advisers certainly were), and they said by a similar margin that Trump supports its proposals.
But some of Project 2025’s proposals are much more unpopular than others, meaning there could be a big political difference between believing Trump favors “most” and just “some” of them. The people who believe he favors most of them are disproportionately left-leaning (though even 15 percent of Republicans said Trump supported “most” of them).
Similarly, the YouGov poll showed 29 percent of adults believed he “completely” supports its proposals, while 18 percent said he only supports them “somewhat.”
Throw in the number of Americans who don’t know much or anything about Project 2025 yet, and there is a large universe of voters who have yet to be convinced in ways that could affect their votes.
But that’s also an opening for Democrats, who are obviously going to continue linking this to Trump extensively, including at a hearing this week.
And what’s become abundantly clear is that the creation of Project 2025 was a huge blunder by Trump supporters that Trump now has to contend with.