Every night this week at the Democratic National Convention, certain speakers have brought a comically sized book to the podium, opened the tome to a certain page, and begun to tell a certain story.
It usually begins with a narrated video, always builds into an animated explanation of obscure policy, and crescendos with a cry to elect Kamala Harris.
Storytime ends and the DNC moves into its primetime programming, but not before the speaker makes a promise: the book will return tomorrow night.
The book is Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” — the conservative blueprint for the next Republican administration — and while the DNC has tried to strike a decidedly different tone from Joe Biden’s doom and gloom of another Donald Trump presidency, Democrats are still using Project 2025 to draw major contrasts with Republicans.
With that in mind, the messaging has been limited but deliberate. It’s mostly isolated to one speech per night, with one theme per night, packaging specific policy ideas together to make the case that Republicans have a radical plan for America. But, as evidenced by a surprise segment on Wednesday night with Saturday Night Live star Kenan Thompson, Democrats are looking for all sorts of ways to put Project 2025 front and center.
The Project 2025 talk culminated Wednesday night with Tim Walz mentioning the blueprint in his high-energy address.
“Take Donald Trump and JD Vance,” Walz said. “Their Project 2025 will make things much, much harder for people who are just trying to live their lives.”
He noted that Trump and Vance “spend a lot of time pretending they know nothing about this, but look, I coached high school football long enough to know — and trust me on this — when somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re going to use it.”
The real authors of Project 2025 seem to be lost in the Democratic rhetoric.
So far, the words “Heritage Foundation” haven’t graced a speaker’s lips. Instead, the noun of choice is of the third-person plural variety: they.
Democrats have made a concerted effort to paint Project 2025 as a policy effort of Republicans writ large, while also managing to make it about Trump too.
“They went ahead and wrote down all the extreme things that Donald Trump wants to do in the next four years,” Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow said on the first night of the DNC. “And then they just tweeted it out, putting it out on the internet for everybody to read.”
McMorrow gained prominence in 2022 after a rousing rebuttal of a GOP colleague in Michigan earned her a phone call from Biden. The DNC picked her to lead off the four Democrats who would deliver the brunt of the convention’s concerted messaging on Project 2025.
McMorrow made a big show on Monday of the blueprint itself, hauling a two-feet tall edition of the “Mandate for Leadership” book onto the stage and slamming it on the lectern.
This, she said, is Project 2025.
She went on to describe a favorite policy of Democrats found in the book: the plan to dismantle “the administrative state.”
She said if Project 2025 were implemented, it would mean chaos for thousands of permanent government employees. She also claimed that a new Trump administration would weaponize the Justice Department and would vastly expand presidential powers. (McMorrow cited page numbers but read from a teleprompter. DNC officials didn’t clarify if the prop book has words.)
Pennsylvania State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta stepped up to the plate on Tuesday, focusing on how Project 2025 would affect the middle class.
“It is a radical plan to drag us backwards, bankrupt the middle class, and raise prices on American families like yours and mine,” Kenyatta said. “Under Project 2025, a family making just $75,000, with just two kids, would pay $1,800 more in federal taxes.”
That claim — that families would pay $1,800 more in taxes — was one of the few lines that wasn’t supported by a page citation. But throughout the week, speakers have sprinkled page numbers next to spiffy policy summaries.
Notably, Kenan Thompson did semi-scripted video interviews with a collection of Americans, toting the massive Project 2025 book and breaking the news to them on how Project 2025 would affect their lives — once again, calling out the page numbers where Americans could read about the policies themselves.
When he interviewed “Becky,” a woman married to another woman, Thompson had “some bad news for you.”
“On page 584, Project 2025 calls for the elimination of protections for LGBTQ+ Americans,” Thompson said. “So, yeah, right back to the Stone Age.”
When he interviewed “Nirvana,” who’s diabetic, Thompson let her know that, if Trump is elected, she may be paying more than the $35 a month she’s currently paying for her insulin.
“On page 465, Project 2025 calls for millions of people like yourselves to pay more for prescription drugs like insulin,” Thompson said.
And on and on he went.
But Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who spoke before Thompson on Wednesday, bundled a trifecta of hot-button topics to hit Republicans for Project 2025, including abortion, limiting contraception and access to in vitro fertilization.
“These Project 2025 people, like Trump and Vance, are not just weird; they’re dangerous,” Polis said.
Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado will bat cleanup on the convention’s closing day, according to a source familiar with convention scheduling. His speech will focus on national security, the source said.
Democrats are having a field day — a field week, really — with Project 2025. Internal polling previously seen by NOTUS shows Project 2025 is a political winner for Democrats. And unlike other issues, Democratic operatives have told NOTUS they see no downside to attacking the blueprint. Even abortion, a proven winner for the party, hasn’t been moving races as much as Project 2025.
“Donald Trump can’t run away from his extreme Project 2025 agenda and our convention will ensure every American knows the truth: Project 2025 is the Trump-Vance playbook for an extreme and dangerous presidency that rips away freedoms and gives Trump limitless, unchecked power,” convention spokesperson Emily Soong said in a statement. “Every night of convention programming will feature speakers and fact check videos that underscore exactly how disastrous Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda would be for our freedoms, our families, and our future.”
While the storytime speakers are the main vehicle for Democrats to attack Project 2025, other speakers — like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz — have still name-dropped the plan.
Reps. James Clyburn of South Carolina and Jasmine Crockett of Texas used the topic to make a similar contrast between Trump and Harris, with their jabs even sharing a similar structure.
“While Trump falsely pleads ignorance of Project 2025 — which, in my opinion, is Jim Crow 2.0 — Kamala has been offering the American people enlightened proposals and visionary leadership,” Clyburn said.
Crockett wasn’t too different. “While Donald Trump wants to put our 1787 Constitution through his Project 2025 paper shredder and make every day January 6, Kamala Harris is fighting to fulfill the promise of America,” she said.
Off stage, Project 2025 seems ever present at the DNC. A giant digital banner displayed “STOP PROJECT 2025” has been up since Monday. A DemPalooza session on the official DNC schedule was titled “Project 2025: Organizing Your Friends and Family.” It was the only Monday session exclusively sponsored by Team Harris-Walz. And among the delegates, operatives and politicians roaming Chicago, Project 2025 is a favorite topic.
It’s discussed “all day, every day,” David Brand, a strategist at the convention, told NOTUS. “It’s a defining issue.”
And there’s a reason Democrats are trying to make it a defining issue. Within the past five months, the BidenHQ and KamalaHQ social media accounts have posted more than 515 times about Project 2025, garnering over 205 million impressions, according to campaign officials.
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Ben T.N. Mause is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.