The Harris-Walz campaign is launching a campaign in swing states to connect former President Donald Trump with Project 2025 before he begins his first debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday, Scripps News has learned. This follows a weekend of outreach in which tens of thousands of volunteers reached out to more than a million voters, according to authorities.
The new blitzkrieg comes as the campaign is pitching what it sees as Harris’ “new path forward” against Trump’s “extreme Project 2025 agenda,” a 922-page plan from the Heritage Foundation, a right-leaning think tank, designed for the “next conservative president.” Campaign leaders will join local politicians at 18 events across the country, including in key swing states such as Virginia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia.
According to the planned schedule of venues obtained by Scripps News, the events will reflect core campaign issues such as reproductive freedoms and workers’ rights. They will appeal to coalitions of voters central to her electoral strategy: young voters, union members, small business owners, Hispanic voters and moderates.
The campaign includes events in Pennsylvania with Maryland Governor Wes Moore; in Virginia with New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and the founder of that state’s Latino Caucus; with local farmers and small business leaders in Madison, Wisconsin; with union leaders in Phoenix and Lansing, Michigan; with students and Gen Z voters in Las Vegas; with a reproductive health expert in Portland, Maine; with Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson, a member of the Tennessee Three, in Savannah; and in Florida with the state’s co-chairs of Republicans for Harris.
This campaign continues the campaign’s effort to focus pre-debate discussions on what politicians portray as Harris’ work to support the middle class and on warnings about Trump’s plans to amass what they see as unchecked power.
Democrats have emphasized Project 2025 heavily and sought to link it to Trump, warning against its proposed measures to restrict abortion, cut social security programs and lay off tens of thousands of government employees.
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Over the weekend, the Harris-Walz campaign hosted a weekend of action around Project 2025 with more than 2,000 events, according to organizers.
“With hundreds of offices and thousands of staff in the battleground states, we are able to capitalize on all the excitement surrounding the debate and reach hard-to-reach voters with Project 2025,” said Dan Kanninen, Harris-Walz’s battleground states director, ahead of the weekend campaign.
Opinion polls have shown that voters overwhelmingly view the project negatively, while a significant number still know nothing about it. In an Economist/YouGov poll of Americans in early August, nearly half said they had an unfavorable opinion of Project 2025, and 39% did not know enough about it to answer the question.
More than a third of respondents in swing states surveyed by Emerson College Polling/The Hill last month said Project 2025 had made them less likely to support Trump, and that number increased among independents. However, in every state, more respondents said the project had no influence on their voting decision or that they were unaware of it.
Trump has repeatedly denied any connection to the plan and its backers. However, its authors include former Trump administration officials and the document overlaps with several of his policy proposals.
The former president spent the weekend ramping up his rhetoric on key issues in his campaign, such as immigration and alleged political corruption. At a rally with supporters in Wisconsin, Trump said his proposed mass deportations would be a “bloody affair.” In a post on his Truth Social app, he escalated his previous calls to jail his political opponents, suggesting that those responsible for alleged voter fraud would be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, including lengthy prison sentences, so that this corruption of justice is not repeated.”
Numerous courts and state officials have dismissed Trump’s allegations of election fraud as unfounded.
But ahead of the first debate with Harris at the top of the ticket, the country remains divided between the two candidates. A poll released Sunday by The New York Times and Siena College found Trump and Harris neck and neck, with the former president narrowly ahead of the vice president, 48 to 47. Trump and Harris were exactly tied or within the margin of error in all of the swing states expected to decide the election.
Harris has spent the last few days in Pittsburgh preparing for the debate, where she publicly exuded confidence to face Trump. Visiting a local spice shop, she told reporters what she wants Trump to understand: “It’s time to put the division behind us. It’s time to bring our country together. To find a new way forward.”
She will face Trump for the first time on Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
After the debate, less than 60 days before Election Day, Vice President Harris, Governor Tim Walz and their campaign representatives are expected to visit swing states and continue to highlight Project 2025 and its ties to Trump. Harris will begin the “New Way Forward” tour with rallies in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, while Walz will visit Michigan and Wisconsin.
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