The presidential campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is launching a new advertising blitz in key battlegrounds targeting former President Donald Trump and the controversial Project 2025.
The ad, called “Control,” is part of a $370 million ad buy reserving airtime from Labor Day through Election Day. The new ad will target battleground states, including Georgia and North Carolina, as well as the Palm Beach market in Florida where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort is located.
The ad spotlights Project 2025, a more than 900-page blueprint for the next Republican President created by the conservative Heritage Foundation and its allies, many of whom have direct ties to Trump. Democrats say the plan would give Trump unchecked power if he is elected to another term in the White House.
The blueprint is sweeping, and includes plans to gut several federal agencies, such as the Department of Education, and to increase executive authority by transitioning more bureaucratic federal government jobs to political appointee roles. It also includes plans for sweeping tax cuts Democrats say would harm the middle class and lower-income people to the benefit of the ultrarich.
The ad begins with the voice of a stern sounding narrator over ominous footage of Trump speaking in various places. “Donald Trump’s back, and he’s out for control,” the narrator says.
It then pivots to Trump in a June interview saying, “I would have every right to go after them,” referring to his political enemies.
The narrator then asserts simply, “complete control,” over more images of Trump, followed by the former President declaring that he would “wield that power very aggressively” in a separate address in 2023.
The narrator then shifts focus to Project 2025, created by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The ad includes footage of Trump speaking in April 2022 at a Heritage Foundation event, praising the group for establishing “detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
The line is meant to counter Trump’s claim that he does not support Project 2025. While Trump himself did not have direct involvement, many of the blueprint’s architects hail from Trump world, and the 2022 remarks from the Heritage Foundation event have resurfaced, contradicting Trump’s claim that he wasn’t aware of the plan.
The ad goes on to list a series of things Project 2025 would do, saying it would “make Donald Trump the most powerful President ever.” It also says Project 2025 would overhaul the Department of Justice, “giving Trump the unchecked power to seek vengeance.”
While that claim is extrapolated from the blueprint’s details, Project 2025 does include plans to significantly increase the number of political appointees, a move that would ensure employees work at Trump’s behest rather than as career civil servants.
The ad also calls out Project 2025 for its plan to eliminate the Department of Education and to defund K-12 schools. The defunding claim isn’t found directly in the Project 2025 document, but it does include calls for reorganizing the federal Title 1 program, which supports schools in low-income communities. The blueprint would have states take over funding for the program, with initial federal block grants provided without conditions on how the money is used.
The spot also highlights threats to Medicare and Social Security in Project 2025. The plan doesn’t suggest eliminating Social Security, but does include proposed changes to Medicare, including making Medicare Advantage the default choice for seniors. Medicare Advantage is private insurance that offers Medicare, and critics say it could cause patients to face prior authorization for health care services, which could then be denied. Base Medicare does not include such prior authorization requirements.
The ad contains a claim taken out of context, saying Project 2025 would require “the government to monitor women’s pregnancies.” While the blueprint includes restrictions on abortion and abortifacients, and for required monitoring of abortion complications, it does not call for monitoring entire pregnancies, or healthy pregnancies. The reference in the ad cites page 455 of Project 2025 as video displays an image of the document with the words “CDC should require monitoring” highlighted on screen. It leaves out the rest of the sentence, which ties that monitoring directly to “complications due to abortion.”
The conclusion of the ad shifts back to the theme of control.
“Well, revenge does take time. I will say that. And sometimes revenge can be justified,” Trump says in another clip. A narrator then ends the ad with a warning.
“He’ll take control. We’ll pay the price.”
The ads will air on select local broadcast channels in battleground states ahead of the planned presidential debate on Sept. 10 on ABC.
The Harris campaign said in a memo that content related to Project 2025 has garnered 11 million impressions across the campaign’s social media accounts. It has been one of the five best performing topics on social media since Harris campaign accounts began posting about it.
“Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda is a threat to every value that Americans hold dear. From cutting Social Security and Medicare to defunding the Department of Education, banning abortion nationwide, and using the power of the presidency to seek vengeance against his political rivals, there are no limits to the extreme steps Donald Trump will take if he wins,” Harris-Walz Principal Deputy Campaign Manager Quentin Fulks said in a prepared statement.
“While Vice President Harris and Governor Walz are barnstorming the battlegrounds ahead of the debates presenting a vision on how to bring America forward, our campaign is going to take every opportunity to lay out in stark contrast Donald Trump’s dark and extreme vision for this country.”
In addition to battleground ad buys, the campaign is also investing eight figures into national TV placements to air in markets across the nation to help the campaign “maximize paths to 270 by reaching beyond the core battlegrounds,” according to the Harris campaign memo.
