No. of Recommendations: 1
Albaby, are you still of the mind that bringing up Trump's ties to Project 2025 is not worth making an issue in the campaign?
Yep. It's a waste of time.
Most of what's in Project 2025 is just a restatement of policies that Trump has already advocated. As you point out, he has a record. So don't waste resources trying to make Project 2025 a thing so that you can criticize Trump for Schedule F - just criticize Trump for Schedule F. It was his policy. The fact that Heritage included it in Project 2025 doesn't add anything.
You tie a candidate to a more extreme external thing when they don't have a record - or if their record isn't useful for your oppo strategy. So you tie a moderate Republican to the Koch Brothers or Donald Trump or whomever; you tie a moderate Democrat to AOC or Nancy Pelosi or whomever. You don't do it as part of the campaign against the extreme candidate with a record.
I'm not sure it would change my mind if Trump were actually involved in Project 2025 (I think it would still be kind of pointless); but since he wasn't, it's even more of a waste of resources that could better be applied elsewhere, because it's marginally harder to convince people of things that are false than true. He has no idea what's in it, and almost had no idea it was even being put together. When an Administration loses an election, there are literally thousands and thousands of people that were political appointees in that Administration that are now out of a job - so the fact that a few percent of those former staffers ended up either working for Heritage or got paid to write a piece of their "Mandate" is utterly unremarkable. There's no way that Heritage's "Mandate" is actually Trump's blueprint for a second term; they publish this thing every time they think a Republican might win the WH, but it hasn't been important or influential for decades - pretty much since Reagan.
