PJT 2029
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NYT
Sound Familiar? Democrats Lay Groundwork for a ‘Project 2029’
The plan to write a policy agenda for the next Democratic president is at the center of a raging debate within the party: whether its biggest problem is its ideas or its difficulty in selling them.
Messaging against Project 2025 was displayed at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last August.Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
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Published June 30, 2025Updated July 7, 2025
As he looks back at the defeat of former Vice President Kamala Harris last fall, the thing that keeps bothering Andrei Cherny, a onetime Democratic speechwriter and state party leader, is that he didn’t know what Ms. Harris would have done as president if she had won.
The way he saw it, President Trump ran on his own ideas, but Ms. Harris only ran against Mr. Trump’s. “The oldest truism in politics is you can’t beat something with nothing,” Mr. Cherny said.
Now Mr. 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’re calling it Project 2029.
The title is an unsubtle play on Project 2025, the independently produced right-wing agenda that Mr. Trump spent much of last year’s campaign distancing himself from, and much of his first few months back in power executing.
The fact that Democrats turned Project 2025 into a cudgel against Mr. Trump during the campaign has not deterred Mr. Cherny and the other Democrats working with him from borrowing the tactic. 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.
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Andrei Cherny, a onetime Democratic speechwriter and state party leader, is organizing a group of Democratic thinkers to draft a ready-made agenda for the next Democratic nominee.Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
The undertaking, which has not previously been reported, strikes at the heart of a raging debate consuming Democratic lawmakers, strategists and policymakers: whether the root of the party’s problems is its ideas or its difficulty in persuading people to embrace them.
The surprise success of Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, in the New York mayoral primary only added fuel to that debate. Did he succeed because of the audacity of his ideas — “freeze the rent,” “free buses” and “free child care” — or because of the clarity and simplicity of those phrases? Was it his relentless focus on affordability? And would it have worked if he weren’t as charismatic and savvy at social media as he proved to be?
Many strategists see the party’s issue as more style than substance, arguing that Democrats need to do a better job at packaging and delivering their plans to voters, rather than crafting new proposals entirely.
“We didn’t lack policies,” said Celinda Lake, a prominent Democratic pollster. “But we lacked a functioning narrative to communicate those policies.”
Ms. Lake complained that Democrats presented voters with “agencies and acronyms and statistics” rather than with a clear story about “what we’re going to fight for.” An innovative refundable tax rebate, in other words, would not suddenly unlock the Electoral College.
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Celinda Lake has joined other strategists in arguing that the Democratic Party needs to do a better job at packaging and delivering its plans to voters.Credit...Kimberly White/Getty Images for Common Sense Media
But others believe the party has been losing ground nationally because its ideas are stale, uninspiring and unresponsive to the demands of today’s voters.
Neera Tanden, who served in the White House in the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations and now leads the Center for American Progress, said that for years, Democrats have failed to appreciate the role that Mr. Trump’s policies have played in his success.
“Liberals underestimate the power of Trump’s ideas, and that we need better ideas to take on both Trumpism and the G.O.P.,” she said. “We get wrapped up in his personality. But he puts forward an idea like ‘No tax on tips,’ and that’s an important signifier that he is championing working-class people.”
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 chief executive of New America; 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.
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Neera Tanden, who served in the White House in the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations and now leads the Center for American Progress, is part of the Project 2029 advisory board.Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times
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.
“Developing policies by checking every coalitional box is how we got in this mess in the first place,” said Adam Jentleson, who has spent recent months preparing to open a new think tank called Searchlight. “There is no way to propose the kind of policies the Democratic Party needs to adopt without pissing off some part of the interest-group Borg. And if you’re too afraid to do that, you don’t have what it takes to steer the party in the right direction.”
Mr. Cherny’s little-known Democracy quarterly has quietly helped to shape some Democratic administrations. Six of Mr. Biden’s cabinet-level appointees at one point published essays in the journal. Years before she won her seat in the Senate, Elizabeth Warren outlined in its pages her plans for what eventually became the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Now, a robust fight is underway among Democratic intellectuals about how to define the party into the future.
One of the most visible fissures is between a populist wing that wants to cast corporations and billionaires as villains (see the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour anchored by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont) and advocates of the so-called abundance agenda, named for the book with that title by Ezra Klein, a columnist for The New York Times, and Derek Thompson, who recently announced his departure from The Atlantic.
Supporters of the abundance approach seek to work with corporations — “There will be no green transition without corporate ingenuity,” Mr. Klein wrote in a recent column — and cut through regulation to solve problems and achieve progressive outcomes more quickly. The party’s long-term success, the argument goes, will be determined most by showing that liberalism works.
The populist wing, at its simplest, seeks to redistribute power and wealth to the working class and away from economic and corporate elites, and to mobilize voters through that fight.
Nick Gourevitch, a Democratic pollster, said that policies matter, but so does the context in which they are presented to voters.
He said it was imperative for Democrats to tell voters that they think the existing system stinks, not just to propose ideas. Saying that the tax system was “rigged” to favor the rich, he said, made Democratic proposals to make corporations and the wealthy “pay their fair share” nine percentage points more popular, in one recent poll he helped conduct.
“People think that our various systems and laws are broken,” he said. “If you acknowledge that the system needs to be fixed to work better, then you start in a better place. It is more about convincing people we are for what is popular, and communicating that to them, than it is about wrapping it up with a new type of tax credit.”
Some party strategists privately expressed concern about the decision to brand Project 2029 after a document that Democrats pilloried in 2024.
The Biden and Harris campaigns made Project 2025 a central boogeyman in the 2024 race, trying to yoke Mr. Trump to its most hard-line provisions, including reshaping the federal government, curbing abortion rights and climate protections and drastically reducing immigration. A New York Times and Siena College poll in September showed that only 15 percent of likely voters said they supported the policies in Project 2025, while 63 percent opposed. An NBC News survey showed Project 2025 was less popular than socialism.
Mr. Trump repeatedly disavowed the policy road map, which had been spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, though it was drafted by many of his allies and he aligned with many of its specifics. Russel T. Vought, a key Project 2025 architect, now leads the White House budget office.
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People gathered in March to protest Project 2025 in front of the Heritage Foundation in Washington.Credit...Bonnie Cash/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, as well as of the Democracy journal, said Project 2025’s political toxicity wouldn’t mean that Project 2029 “is fated to be unpopular.”
“Our ideas aren’t radical or extreme," he said.
Instead, he said he hoped to refresh the view of the Democratic Party among the less well off.
“Liberalism has not done its best job of connecting with working-class people,” he said. “We want what we put out to shape the conversation in the primary season.”
Of course, Democratic candidates did engage in a spirited policy fight during the party’s last open primary, in 2019. But many in the party now point to that period as having dragged the party sharply to the left, even though Mr. Biden, who ignored the progressive wing during much of the period, ultimately won the nomination. Indeed, some of Ms. Harris’s comments that year — including about using taxpayer funds to provide transgender surgical care to federal prisoners — were used against her last year with devastating effect.
Marc J. Dunkelman, a fellow at the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy at Brown University who is involved in Project 2029, said the effort’s most important goal was to devise ways to connect to voters who have lost faith in the political system.
“We need to grapple with the fact that people think government isn’t working, and they’re right,” he said. “Whether we like it or not, the Democratic Party is the party of government, and government doesn’t work. If you want people to vote for us, you have to demonstrate you have a plan to make things work.”
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
A version of this article appears in print on July 4, 2025, Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Democrats Lay Groundwork for a ‘Project 2029’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: U.S. Politics, Democratic Party
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Project 2029 is a project by politically liberal thinkers in the United States to draft an agenda for a hoped-for Democratic Party president to use upon taking office in January 2029. Named after the similar but politically conservative Project 2025, it is organized by Andrei Cherny and intends to produce a book from articles published over a two-year span in the journal Democracy. Continued in Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
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Join Project 2029! We're taking action with a visionary plan for human flourishing. Build coalitions, demand policy reform, and create a hopeful future. See how you can take action towards a future built for all of us today!
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The Project 2029 Vision We're building a plan of action for a future that is strong, kind, and focused on human flourishing.
Wikipedia
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Project 2029 - Wikipedia
Project 2029 is a project by politically liberal thinkers in the United States to draft an agenda for a hoped-for Democratic Party president to use upon taking office in January 2029.
The American Prospect
Epstein Confidant Larry Summers Guiding CAP's 'Project 2029'
Nov 14, 2025Summers was overseeing the economic policy plank of the Center for American Progress's effort. Emails released this week show him in regular contact with Jeffrey Epstein.
New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › 2025 › 06 › 30 › us › politics › democrats-project-2029.html
Democrats Lay Groundwork for a 'Project 2029' - The New York Times
Jun 30, 2025A version of this article appears in print on July 4, 2025, Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Democrats Lay Groundwork for a 'Project 2029'.
Fox News
Democrats launch Project 2029 agenda amid mixed opinions from ...
Jul 4, 2025The New York Times revealed the mixed opinions amongst Democratic strategists over Project 2029, which aims to create a cohesive agenda for future Democratic presidential candidates.
MSN
Democrats' 'Project 2029' Looks A Whole Lot Like Their 2024 - MSN
Following the Democratic Party's losses in the 2024 election, some party members are borrowing from the Republican playbook by introducing an all-in-one package of Democratic policies called ...
Civil Deadline
https://civildeadline.com › dems-announce-project-2029
Dems Announce Project 2029 - Civil Deadline
Jul 2, 2025The Project 2029 board, however, is already raising eyebrows. Its members include figures closely tied to past Democratic administrations, many of whom carry political baggage. Among them: Neera Tanden, head of the Center for American Progress and former Biden advisor, who faced intense bipartisan backlash during her 2021 nomination to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Her nomination ...
itsmyview.com
https://itsmyview.com › project-2029-a-new-vision-for-democrats
Project 2029: A New Vision for Democrats - It's My View
Feb 21, 2025Project 2029 Project 2029 emerges as a thoughtful initiative aimed at redefining the Democratic Party's blueprint for the upcoming decade. In light of the rapidly evolving political landscape, characterized by shifts in public sentiment and emerging challenges, it is crucial for Democrats to engage in forward-thinking planning. The current political environment presents both obstacles and ...
WHNT News 19
Progressive Coalition Project 2029 Releases First Major Policy Brief ...
Jul 2, 2025Project 2029 is a progressive coalition developing comprehensive policy responses to ensure democratic governance, government accountability and equal access to justice for all Americans.
- Search Assist
Project 2029 is a grassroots initiative aimed at reclaiming democracy in the United States, focusing on creating a more equitable and just governance system. It seeks to address the challenges posed by authoritarian movements and promote citizen-led solutions for a better future. raceforward.org
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Overview of Project 2029
Project 2029 is a grassroots initiative aimed at reclaiming democracy in the United States. It is a citizen-led effort that is not affiliated with any political party or political action group. The project focuses on addressing the needs and concerns of working-class Americans.
Goals of Project 2029
Key Objectives
- Abolish Private Prisons: A significant goal is to eliminate private prisons and reform sentencing practices.
- Empower Working People: The project emphasizes listening to the voices of working-class individuals to shape policies that reflect their needs.
- Promote Equity and Justice: It aims to transform public administration into a force for equity and justice, countering authoritarian threats to democracy.
Importance of Community Involvement
Project 2029 encourages participation from various community members, including activists, teachers, and small business owners. This collective effort seeks to create a bold, progressive vision for the future, contrasting with the more authoritarian approaches seen in recent political movements.
Conclusion
Project 2029 represents a call to action for citizens to engage in the democratic process and advocate for meaningful change. It seeks to build a more inclusive and responsive government that prioritizes the needs of all Americans.
raceforward.org
project2029.me
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