Project 2025 Wrap Up. Objectively a Horror Story; Subjectively Not So Much

Your participation is what matters

Aug 27, 2024

Further down on this page you’ll find links to each of the two dozen stories I’ve penned on Project 2025. I read the whole damned thing and shared my observations over the past month. It’s not perfect, and not all-inclusive, but there should be enough there for readers to conclude that these are a very bad set of proposals.

Having said this, let me put Project 2025 in perspective. As Jim Miller said in his piece on the dark history of this reactionary manual, “What is most amazing about this deeply unpopular project is that in it, the Republicans started to tell the truth out loud.“

For those of us who think our democratic republic is worth continuing, albeit with improvements, we now have the strategic stuff from the right that was mostly unsaid in one place. Future “common sense” proposals from the right and associated centrists can be measured against these writings to demonstrate real intent.

The Heritage Foundation and many other think tanks funded by the nation’s ultra-wealthy have been cranking out wish lists for years. What makes Project 2025 different is that thought was put into how an administration could accomplish its prescriptions, its (associated) effort to pre-screen candidates for political appointments, and its comprehensive nature. The memos are drafted, legislation is penciled out, and PR campaigns anticipated.

Project 2025’s value as a political organizing/mobilizing tool isn’t as essential for liberals as some people would think. The sound bite is that this “Brand” is bad for the country. The specifics are important to the people who would be adversely affected.

As far as impacting ballot box decisions is concerned, recognize that discussions about this document appeal to logical thought processes.

Here’s Gil Duran from Framelab, pointing out what really matters to many voters:

The truth is that politics is far from logical or rational. Emotion, identity and the unconscious brain play outsized roles in determining the outcome of elections. A good politician must take these factors into account.
But hey, don't just take our word for it. Take it from the Times Opinion page's own chosen pollster, Republican Frank Luntz (the guy who advised Republicans to refer to global warming as "climate change" because it sounded less threatening):
Eighty percent of our life is emotion, and only 20 percent is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think. I can change how you think, but how you feel is something deeper and stronger, and it's something that's inside you. How you think is on the outside, how you feel is on the inside, so that's what I need to understand.
So, yes, joy is a strategy. But let's not forget: The major theme of the campaign is freedom, and the moral value freedom is certainly a time-tested political strategy, though one that has more often been used by Republicans.

Trumplicans, by and large, know they’ve lost the battle over the right wing game plan. I’d venture that some have even figured out that their candidate is showing signs of mental decline.

We’re now seeing increasing evidence that the right is reenergizing its focus on voter suppression. There’s a constant drumbeat of propaganda across the media landscape of Republicans making claims about non-American citizens voting.

Last week, Reform California (Carl DeMaio’s device for siphoning up money and emails to aid his causes) claimed Sacramento politicians are poised to flood the state’s voter rolls with “unverified registrations” in advance of this year’s election.

One of Donald Trump’s oft-repeated lies is that a million fraudulent votes were cast in California. (CNN has fact checked this at least twice.)

As usual, DeMaio’s grift is wrong on just about all the facts, especially the 2024 part, since the bill (SB299) wouldn’t go into effect until 2030, provided the technology exists and is secure.

The idea behind allegations of voter fraud is to lead impressionable voters to believe the electoral system can’t be trusted. This sort of propaganda is common, coming from sources wishing to establish authoritarian rule.

A historian and commentator Heather Cox Richardson said this week:

And yet, pushing the idea that Trump cannot lose in a fair election seems to have been a key part of his strategy for 2024. The lie that there was widespread voter fraud in 2020 led to a wave of new state laws to suppress the vote. MAGA lawmakers defended these laws on the grounds that they must respond to voter fraud. The nonprofit law and public policy Brennan Center for Justice recorded that in 2021 alone, from January 1 through December 7, at least 19 states passed 34 laws that restricted access to voting.
In May 2024 the Brennan Center reported that in at least 28 states, voters this year will face new restrictions that were not in place in the 2020 presidential election. Varying by state, these laws do things like shorten the time for requesting an absentee ballot, make it a crime to deliver another voter’s mail-in ballot, require proof of citizenship from voters who share the same name as noncitizens, and so on.
As MAGA Republicans and their plans—especially their assault on reproductive healthcare and the policies outlined in Project 2025—become increasingly unpopular, Republican-dominated states are ramping up their effort to keep the people they assume will oppose them from voting.

In Texas, Gov. Abbott is bragging about purging more than a million voter registrations over the past three years. As is true with many things coming from the Lone Star State, this allegation is whopper, made to inflate the Governor’s status as a strong man.

Most of these “purges” were the usual churn in voter registrations caused by people changing addresses. Thousands of southeastern Texas residents, for instance, were displaced by natural disasters in recent years.

Texas has made other moves designed to discourage people from registering and voting.

From Sunday’s New York Times:

A Latino civil rights group is asking the Department of Justice to open an investigation into a series of raids conducted on Latino voting activists and political operatives as part of a sprawling voter fraud inquiry by the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organizations, said that many of those targeted were Democratic leaders and election volunteers, and that some were older residents in their 70s and 80s. Gabriel Rosales, the director of the group’s Texas chapter, said that officers conducting the raids took cellphones, computers and documents. He called the raids “alarming” and said they were an effort to suppress Latino voters.

There is a nationwide effort to disrupt the electoral process. States like Arkansas are trying to keep voter initiatives off the ballot using questionable means. In Georgia, election denialists are being appointed to oversee elections. Other states are seeing organized efforts to challenge individual registrations, often using laws enacted during the Jim Crow era.

From the Brennan Center:

In recent years, various groups have organized out of an unfounded belief that ineligible voters are swaying election results. These groups are encouraging their members to file mass voter challenges. In Georgia, for example, activists filed hundreds of thousands of challenges in 2021 and tens of thousands more in 2022. Michigan and Texas also saw mass challenges in 2022. In states including California, Colorado, North Carolina, and Oregon, activists have been going door to door to collect statements from residents, with the goal of filing challenges. Some of these roving challengers have exhibited aggressive behavior while demanding personal information.
Mass challengers often rely on software tools like EagleAI NETwork to easily pull data from various sources, such as the National Change of Address Registry, “Google scrapes,” business records, and property tax records. The National Change of Address Registry, standing alone, is an unreliable basis for flagging ineligible voters because it can sweep in common name duplicates, temporary relocations, and households where some but not all the residents have moved. EagleAI appears to combine change-of-address data with other sources, like the Voter Reference Foundation (VoteREF), that are far less reliable than the information states can access through the Electronic Registration Information Center, an interstate voting data partnership. A court recently described the mass challenges filed by one such organization, True the Vote, as “utterly lack[ing] reliability” and “verg[ing] on recklessness.”
Not only are mass challenges often based on unreliable data, but they run the risk of inundating election offices just before the election, interfering with their other administrative tasks and potentially causing inaccurate purges. Indeed, there is some evidence that election deniers are deliberately aggregating challenges and timing them for the last minute.

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Just about every speech at the Democratic National Convention ended with words to the effect of winning this election won’t be easy. The overall strategy Dems are looking at involves winning with margins large enough to make accusations of fraud irrelevant.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I, as an individual, can do in this year’s election. I’m already in the collection phase for a decade-long effort at publishing voter guides – this year’s edition may include mentions of specific candidates worthy of reader donations.

The best thing that any of us can do is to be engaged with the process. Pick something or someone out that appeals to you and make it your cause. Supporting the Harris/Walz ticket does NOT mean you have to support Todd Gloria for Mayor or vice versa. The mere fact that you are participating in some aspect of the electoral process is what counts the most.

A no-voice disabled guy like myself can’t volunteer to knock on doors or answer phones, but I can be in public showing my support. My Kamala Harris football jersey-style tee is in the mail, and you can bet I’ll wear it while shopping.

Oh, and thank you for reading these posts.--Doug Porter

Check your voter registration at https://iwillvote.com or https://www.sdvote.com/content/rov/en/voter-info-lookup.html

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All the posts on Project 2025:

Also:

The Deep History of the Radical Right’s (No Longer) Stealth Plan for America by Jim Miller at The Jumping Off Place is a must read.

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Tuesday’s Other News to Think About

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The Biden-Harris administration is fighting to lower rents by Lisa Needham at Public Notice

Trump does not care if the rent is too damn high - It isn’t idle speculation that a future Trump administration wouldn’t continue litigation against RealPage. Overall, his administration was wildly uninterested in pursuing price-fixing cases, bringing the lowest amount of criminal antitrust prosecutions in nearly 50 years.
The Trump administration also contributed to the circumstances that led up to RealPage’s current ability to maintain a monopoly. In 2017, RealPage proposed a merger with its largest competitor, and the DOJ initially flagged it and asked for additional documentation. However, the DOJ’s investigation was oddly limited to evaluating whether the merger would unfairly affect competitors with similar software. As ProPublica noted in 2022, DOJ merger guidelines state that mergers are normally evaluated based on their impact on customers, but the DOJ didn’t talk to any tenant advocates or renters.
The concerns of DOJ staff about the merger were overruled by Trump appointees, and the merger went through. Today, RealPage has roughly an 80 percent market share, with access to data on over 16 million rental units across the country.

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Companies Stronger Than Governments by Hamilton Nolan at How Things Work

Global corporations are like organisms, programmed to grow and dominate. National governments are, to them, only stumbling blocks. All regulation that constrains profits is something to be evaded or destroyed. This basic orientation will never change. It takes little imagination to understand how dangerous this is. Not only do we need state power to be aligned with labor; we need to pray that the combination of state power and organized labor is adequate to counterbalance the power of global capital. That is very much an open question.
When you see grocery chains fighting in court for the right to do megamergers, or Uber trying to use the power of big date to evade European laws, or Tesla stubbornly refusing to acquiesce to Sweden’s long established labor system, these are all manifestations of the battle that will never end—the battle of global companies to break free of all constraint, to maximize profits, to dominate. This is their nature. They will never stop doing this any more than a tiger will stop pacing in its cage. They will always try to escape the cage and eat you. Always.
If you allow them to seduce you with statements about public-private partnerships and job creation and building a strong economy together, you will surely end up in the cage yourself.

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"Proving them wrong": After raising minimum wage, California has more fast-food jobs than ever via Salon

Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the state’s fast-food minimum wage increase into law, which meant that employees at fast-food restaurants in the state went from making $15.50 per hour to $20 per hour. While the decision was lauded by many labor activists as part of broader efforts to improve working conditions and address wage disparities, some economists and fast-food industry members expressed concern over how the law would impact restaurants’ operating costs, which could result in reduced hours for workers or even job cuts.
However, according to new state and federal employment data, California’s fast-food industry has added jobs every month this year — including 11,000 new jobs since the wage increase officially went into effect in April. For instance, in May of 2023, there were 742,600 fast-food workers in the state; a year later, there were 743,300 workers.

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