Harris campaign to launch a big 'weekend of action' around Trump and Project 2025 ahead of the debate

Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is planning to launch a weekend of action focused on what it calls the dangers of a potential second Trump presidency and Project 2025, a conservative governing agenda that Harris has repeatedly criticized on the campaign trail and plans to bring up during the presidential debate on Tuesday, according to campaign officials who shared the plans first with NBC News. 

As part of the effort, which Harris’ aides said was the campaign’s biggest weekend of action to date, the campaign will have more than 2,000 events that it expects will reach more than 1 million voters. Volunteers, who plan to work more than 20,000 shifts, and key campaign surrogates will talk to voters “about Trump’s extreme plan to ban abortion nationwide, cut Social Security and Medicare, and spike taxes by $3,900 each year for middle-class families,” according to officials.

The efforts are also aimed at appealing to swing voters who may be drawn in by the recent endorsements of Harris by former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Jimmy McCain, the youngest son of the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

“With hundreds of offices and thousands of staff across the battlegrounds, we are able to harness all the buzz around the debate and break through to hard-to-reach voters on Project 2025,” said Dan Kanninen, the Harris campaign battleground states director, in a statement provided to NBC News. “We are speaking to those Americans who are turned off by Trump’s extremism and making sure they know there’s a home for them in Vice President Harris’ campaign.”

“Gaining Representative Cheney’s and First Lieutenant McCain’s support this week was a powerful signal to swing voters,” he added. “This weekend, we are building on that momentum and taking our message directly to the voters who will decide this election in our largest ever campaign mobilization.”

The Harris campaign also plans to host virtual and in-person “Project 2025 message trainings” in battleground states. According to the campaign, to date, it has held more than 60 such training sessions to help volunteers talk about Project 2025 with their friends and neighbors. The weekend of action will also feature canvass launches, phone banks and cookouts.

The move by the Harris campaign comes just days before the first presidential debate between Harris and former President Donald Trump, scheduled for Tuesday in Philadelphia. Harris plans to bring up Project 2025 on the debate stage as she makes her case that she is more qualified and better suited to be president than Trump, according to a campaign official.

The Harris campaign also launched a new ad focused on “Project 2025” Thursday, taking aim at the far-right policy proposals created as a blueprint for the next Republican president and developed by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation and at least two dozen Trump allies.

Meanwhile, Trump has tried to put some distance between himself and Project 2025, which includes a 900-plus page policy road map and personnel database gathered by the Heritage Foundation. But many of Trump’s key allies have been directly involved in producing the project whose website bills it as a “governing agenda” that would “pave the way for an effective conservative Administration.”

On the campaign trail, Harris has often criticized Project 2025 and tied it to Trump. In New Hampshire on Wednesday, Harris said Trump would sign a national abortion ban and create a “national anti-abortion coordinator” who would force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions as part of the project. And, as she has done in the past, Harris said of Project 2025, “Can you believe they put that thing in writing?”