Subject: Re: Project 2025
Generally true, but not true when it is an external thing that can somewhat credibly summarize your opponent's policies and is unpopular.

Once again, Project 2025 isn't unpopular. Most voters don't know anything about it. Most voters won't know anything about it. The only ones that will are people that avidly consume left-leaning media.

There's a real break here between what's in the interest of media producers - especially the 24-hour news and opinion channels - and the interests of campaigns. News media channels have tons and tons of time, and not a lot of content. It's hard to fill the five hours of talking head/opinion shows from 6:00-11:00 every weeknight. Especially since viewers don't want you to go over things that are "old news." Campaigns, on the other hand, have the opposite problem - they have to pay gobs of money for time by the 30-second chunk, and rarely lack for content to attack their opponents with.

So media channels have all the time in the world, and all the incentive, to spend gobs and gobs of time on Project 2025. It's a new (to them) thing, and it's a thousand pages long - you can always crack it open and find some new depredation to put to your five-guest panel or write a column about. But in a campaign, you can't waste your bandwidth like that. Don't attack a book - attack your opponents.

Now Biden has never authorized or had people put together any such mandate about anything like that but the GOP continued to tie that blatantly false claim around Biden's neck. Why do you think that is? It worked.

Yes! Exactly! Do that, Democrats! The GOP didn't go out and find some third-party policy paper advocating for eliminating gas stoves (and there are plenty). They found something from the Administration itself and used that as the basis for their smears, rather than spending their time trying to build up some tenuous connection between Biden and some external think tank.

Trump's Agenda 47 is just sitting there. He's literally turning to camera and saying directly on video all the major things from Project 2025. I can see why MSNBC wants to spend hours and hours talking about Project 2025 instead of Agenda 47 - but it would be political malpractice for the campaigns to do that.

During his first term, Trump didn't care (or was too lazy) to worry about things like selecting circuit court or appellate court judges. He wasn't going to go through the resumes of a dozen (or even just 3 or 4) people for each open position. He pretty much outsourced that to Heritage. Similarly, when it comes to a 2nd administration. Trump isn't going to be interested in appointing a 2nd undersecretary to the Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Education. He is going to outsource selections like those to Heritage.

But that's wrong. And it's wishful thinking. Don't you see that? In his first term, he was completely new to governance and needed to reach out to the then-existing power structure - so he ended up filling his Administration with a lot of establishment Republicans, the sort that hang out in Heritage. And there's no doubt that he now regards that AS THE WORST MISTAKE HE MADE. He ended up spending a lot of his term fighting with those guys; he spent even more time in that term and the subsequent years purging them all from the party. He is not going to outsource anything to a think-tank establishment - it's going to be much, much worse.

Make Project 2025 unpopular and whenever Trump or the GOP try to pass any bills that can be remotely tied back to Project 2025 and Democratic Senators and Representatives can go on TV and talk about how Bill XYZ is Trump trying to push his radical Project 2025 agenda.

There's a quick and easy way to demonstrate why that would be a waste of time - it just takes a single-word substitution:

Make MAGA unpopular and whenever Trump or the GOP try to pass any bills that can be remotely tied back to MAGA and Democratic Senators and Representatives can go on TV and talk about how Bill XYZ is Trump trying to push his radical MAGA agenda.

See how that doesn't add anything? You've already got a label for Trump's agenda - and it has the advantage of being one that he actually is involved in. You don't gain anything by switching out "Project 2025" for "MAGA," and you actually just make it worse. Because to return to the main point, most people have no idea what Project 2025 is.