Democrats tie 'Project 2025' and back-to-school together in online ads and organzing push

As students return to campus this fall, Democrats are working to engage both students and parents online and in person — and to keep “Project 2025” at the forefront of the campaign, with a new digital ad campaign that will target battleground voters using common back-to-school search terms.

Searches for phrases including “back-to-school,” “classroom supplies,” and “school preparation” will serve users advertisements directing them to a newly created Democratic National Committee site highlighting provisions of Project 2025 concerning public education, including a call to shutter the Department of Education. 

The 925-page policy plan, titled “Mandate for Leadership,” refers to the Department of Education as a “one-stop shop for the woke education cartel.” Project 2025, a plan for a second Donald Trump term led by the Heritage Foundation, has become a major focal point of the Democratic campaign against Trump, leading the former president to repeatedly disavow the effort, though he has close ties to many of the people involved and praised the group’s plans at a 2022 dinner.

“This department is an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm. For the sake of American children, Congress should shutter it and return control of education to the states,” the document reads.

“Public education is a cornerstone of America’s democracy, but Trump and Vance threaten to take us backwards with a Project 2025 agenda that is as extreme as it is unpopular,” said DNC chair Jaime Harrison. 

The Project 2025 book also prescribes curbing taxpayer-funded education programs, including Head Start, and decreasing the amount of federal funds allocated towards assisting students in low-income neighborhoods. 

The new ad campaign will go live on Thursday in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. 

The Democratic online campaign will coincide with an in-person back-to-school push by the Harris-Walz campaign, which launched last week an effort to engage voters across 150 campuses in the battleground states.

Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., the first Gen Z member of Congress, is a face of the campaign, participating at launch events at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Bennett College, a Historically Black College and University in Greensboro, and Arizona State University, the largest campus by student enrollment in the country, among others. Frost, echoing messaging from the Democratic convention and other campaign efforts, said, “Trump’s Project 2025 agenda is to drag young people into the past.”

“The only way we will win is by organizing everywhere and it’s up to us to turn the energy we’re seeing into action to win in November,” Frost continued. “I am confident that we will see record youth turnout this November.”

The Harris-Walz team has said it has 150 organizers dedicated to youth and campus engagement at institutions across key battleground states, with a focus on state schools, community colleges and minority serving institutions.

A new NBC News Stay Tuned Gen Z poll found that half of registered voters under 30 say they’ll vote for Harris in November, while one-third say they’ll vote for former President Donald Trump — a better margin for Democrats than many polls showed earlier in 2024, but not quite as big as the margins by which Trump lost young voters in 2020.

60% of voters under 2020 voted for President Biden in 2020, according to NBC News exit polling data.