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One of the more interesting phenomena of the 2024 campaign cycle was the sudden unsavory notoriety of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a preparatory initiative for Trump’s second term as reflected in a 922-page policy blueprint organized by executive-branch department. The document was radically reactionary enough that once Democrats began pointing to it and yelling “Unclean!” it became a public sensation and then a real problem for the Trump-Vance campaign. Trump himself denied he had ever read the Project 2025 report, which was credible since he famously reads very little. But he also denied he knew its authors, which was not credible at all since several of them — notably former OMB director Russ Vought, who wrote the key section on the White House — were known associates of long standing. After the election, of course, Trump appointed quite a few people (including Vought) directly or indirectly involved in Project 2025 to key positions in the Cabinet or the White House. More importantly, Trump 2.0’s blitzkrieg of early policy edicts bore a distinct resemblance to Project 2025 recommendations; at the end of January, CNN calculated that 36 of his first 53 executive orders were right in line with the blueprint.

So despite its momentary inconvenience during the campaign season, smothered by lies, Project 2025 can be deemed a success story for the moment. Some wonks put an agenda together, a presidential nominee bought it (then denied buying it) and after taking office then quickly began imposing it on the nation.

It was probably inevitable, then, that in the period of soul-searching and factional wrangling in which Democrats have been mired since last November, it would occur to somebody to emulate the opposition and launch a Project 2029 on behalf of a theoretical Democratic nominee. As the New York Times’Shane Goldmacher reported on June 30 in what appeared to be a carefully planned exclusive unveiling, it’s now well underway:

[Andrei] Cherny, the co-founder of a nearly two-decade-old liberal policy journal, is organizing a group of Democratic thinkers to recreate what Mr. Trump’s allies did when he was voted out of office: draft a ready-made agenda for the next Democratic presidential nominee. …

They plan to roll out an agenda over the next two years, in quarterly installments, through Mr. Cherny’s publication, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The goal is to turn it into a book — just like Project 2025 — and to rally leading Democratic presidential candidates behind those ideas during the 2028 primary season.

Goldmacher identifies a number of names in connection with Project 2029, beginning with Cherny and Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden, and more:

Ms. Tanden is part of a sizable advisory board for Project 2029 that includes Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former president of the New America Foundation; the economist Justin Wolfers; Felicia Wong, until recently the president of the progressive Roosevelt Institute; and Jim Kessler, a founder of the centrist group Third Way.

But he then makes this curious assessment:

Mr. Cherny, now the president of the journal he helped create, called the assemblage “the Avengers of public policy, or the Justice League, depending on your personal persuasion: the best thinkers from across the spectrum.” The group plans to hold public conferences to hammer out their differences on topics including the economy, national security, government reform and education.

Some would-be allies are skeptical that such an ideologically diverse and divergent set of policy minds could craft anything close to a coherent agenda, let alone a politically winning one.

I’m sure there are issues on which these folk would disagree, but it’s unclear they represent an “across-the-spectrum” sample of Democratic thinkers. Cherny once worked alongside me at the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (whose mission was closely paralleled and then succeeded by Kessler’s Third Way) after being a prodigious speechwriter for Al Gore while still at Harvard. Tanden, Slaughter, and Sullivan were all fixtures in the Clinton-Obama orbit; Wong is best known as a channeler of the thinking of Joe Biden. There’s not a democratic socialist, a labor-movement fixture, or a “progressive populist” in the lot. Mike Tomasky, who is involved in the effort as editor of Democracy,is probably a bit more ideologically heterodox but doesn’t really represent “the left” either.

Goldmacher is hazy about the timeline for Project 2029. The Heritage Foundation began its work on Project 2025 in 2022 and released its recommendations in the spring of 2023, when Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis (at that point running to Trump’s right) were the overwhelming GOP front-runners for 2024. I guess it could have been mildly problematic for the authors had Nikki Haley or Chris Christie won the GOP nomination, though that was never much of a realistic prospect. In the case of Project 2029, the wide-open nature of the Democratic nomination contest at this early date makes it a bit trickier. Would Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez want an agenda from the likes of these Establishment-kissed authorities? Would Ro Khanna? And for that matter, would candidates closer ideologically to the Project 2029 advisers need such outside help? In his mind, Gavin Newsom has probably been running for president for decades. I’m sure he could work out an agenda. And Kamala Harris, were she to run again, has her own vast policy network.

Perhaps we’ll learn more soon. It’s entirely possible that the whole left-of-center political world will utter a collective “Ew, no thanks!” at the very idea of borrowing such a tainted brand from Team Trump. But personally, what this feels a lot like is the process by which the DLC and its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, put together an agenda that Bill Clinton heavily relied on to establish himself as a “different kind of Democrat” in running for president in 1992. It’s possible the real idea behind Project 2029 is to work toward some fleshed-out proposals that a yet-to-be-identified centrist candidate customizes for herself or himself in launching a 2028 bid. If so, they should hope future would-be presidents who need this sort of help are paying attention.

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