Nearly all voters who are familiar with Project 2025, a conservative policy road map that Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party have used to criticize former President Donald Trump, view the plan in a negative light, a new NBC News poll shows.
About 57% of registered voters report feeling negatively about Project 2025, with 51% saying they see the proposal “very” negatively and another 7% saying they view it “somewhat” negatively. Just 4% of voters reported viewing the conservative policy plan positively.
Among independents, 52% report feeling negatively about the plan, while 85% of Democrats say the same. About 33% of Republicans say they also view the plan negatively, with just 7% saying they have a positive view of the plan, which Trump has criticized since Democrats ramped up efforts to tie him and Project 2025 together.
Voters who identify as “MAGA Republicans” reported viewing Project 2025 in a slightly more positive light, with 28% saying they held a negative view of the proposal and another 9% saying they view the plan positively.
It was the least popular of all the subjects tested in the September NBC News poll — a battery that included socialism, capitalism, both presidential and vice presidential candidates, the Republican and Democratic parties, Taylor Swift and Elon Musk.
Democrats have made efforts to tie Trump to Project 2025, a conservative policy roadmap from the Heritage Foundation aimed at laying the groundwork for a future Republican administration. The plan is mentioned by name in Harris campaign ads, and by Democrats on the stump.
The conservative playbook is affiliated with a handful of top former Trump administration officials — like former Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson — and backed by pro-Trump conservative organizations like Turning Point USA and America First Legal.
But the former president, who praised the group’s prep work in a speech in April 2022, has worked to distance himself from the policy plan since early July. Vice President Kamala Harris and other top Democrats have referred to the 900-page document, which was partly drafted by former Trump aides, as “Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda,” with party leaders forming the “Stop Project 2025 Task Force.” Multiple speakers at the Democratic National Convention this summer lugged a textbook-sized copy of the plan onstage as they denounced it in speeches, and Harris name-checked it in her convention speech, too.
The Trump campaign said in a July statement that it “welcomed” reports of the group’s “demise.” In the debate with Harris earlier this month, the former president presented a more mixed view of Project 2025’s proposals, which he said included “some good, some bad,” but continued to say he had no affiliation with the plan.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump said in a Truth Social post in July. “I have no idea who is behind it.”
The national NBC News poll was conducted Sept. 13-17 of 1,000 registered voters — 870 of whom were reached via cellphone — and it has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
