Kamala Harris‘ campaign is highlighting the preventable deaths of two women who would be alive if not for Georgia’s abortion ban. This week reporting from ProPublica proved out the warning that abortion bans could be deadly, by bringing forward the names and faces of two Georgia women, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, who died in 2022 but would be alive today if not for the state’s ban.

“Amber’s mom shared with me that the word over and over again in her mind is ‘preventable,'” Harris said Thursday evening at a Michigan campaign forum hosted by Oprah Winfrey. Thurman’s mother and two sisters were in the audience. “This story is a story that is sadly not the only story of what has been happening since these bans have taken place.”

“There is a word: preventable. And there is another word: predictable.”

Amber Thurman and Candi Miller both died after medication-induced abortions failed to expel all the fetal tissue, resulting in fatal infections, ProPublica reported. They were among the first women to die from what could be called a modern back-alley abortion: abortions that have been pushed underground and exiled from the safety of expert medical supervision. 

In the days since ProPublica broke the news of these preventable deaths, anti-abortion activists have sought to blame the women. “Abortion killed Amber Thurman,” anti-abortion activist Lila Rose posted on X, shifting blame from the ban to the procedure and, implicitly, Thurman herself. The stories are complicated for advocates fighting to keep abortion medication on the market, as their stories highlight the rare times in which medication abortions require emergency follow-up care. (Such episodes are at the center of a current lawsuit to take one of the drugs, mifepristone, off the market.) But from the beginning to the end of their tragic stories, it’s clear that both women died for one reason: Georgia’s strict abortion ban. 

It’s a story the Harris campaign is continuing to tell, with a Friday rally in Atlanta, where she delivered a warning: “If [Trump] is elected again, I am certain, he will sign a national abortion ban.” And with it, more people will die. “There is a word, preventable, and there is another word, predictable,” Harris said. “And the reality is, for every story we hear of the suffering under Trump abortion bans, there are so many of the stories we’re not hearing.”

On the debate stage last week, Trump would not rule out signing a national abortion ban. And his allies who crafted Project 2025 have laid out how to ban abortion, including those conducted with medication, nationwide. It’s a message her campaign has sounded from the start, as it leans on the health crisis caused by the overturning of Roe to motivate voters. But it’s also the sad truth.

The two women’s stories are eerily reminiscent of ones from over 50 years ago, when women died either from obtaining illegal abortions from doctors or others ill equipped to perform them, or from torturous attempts to induce one at home. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe two years ago, physicians, historians, and politicians warned that women would die. We now know that it took less than two months before at least one did.

“I fear that their situations are not unique,” Dr. Daniel Grossman, the director of a research group on reproductive health at the University of California, San Francisco, posted on X. “I think it’s very likely that other women and pregnant people have died due to their care being denied or delayed or due to being too scared to seek care—all because of the bans on abortion.” As evidence, Grossman cited a new study in which patients and providers reported on the near-death scenarios they have encountered under post-Roe abortion bans, cases very similar to those of Thurman and Miller. In 86 narratives, the report describes patients whose pregnancies, miscarriages, and post-abortion complications threatened their life. And yet doctors refused to treat them. 

Soon after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Georgia instituted a six-week ban. Like other draconian laws that popped up around the country that summer, its language was medically vague but legally punitive. Doctors and hospitals were left to guess what procedures were actually prohibited and when exactly exceptions for the life of the mother kicked in. If a prosecutor and jury second-guessed their decision, possible prison sentences loomed over their decisions. Almost immediately, in Thurman’s case, doctors chose a path that led to her death.

Hospitals’ refusal to treat women suffering complications jeopardize women from all walks of life.

Thurman was a healthy 28-year-old single mother of a six-year-old when she learned she was pregnant with twins. Thurman wanted a surgical abortion, but as ProPublica reported, Georgia’s six-week ban had just taken effect. Thurman drove to North Carolina for the procedure, but after traffic caused her to miss her appointment, she was offered a medication abortion instead. As happens in rare instances, not all of the fetal tissue was expelled, leading to sepsis. If Thurman were in North Carolina, she could have returned to the clinic and received a dilation and curettage, a common procedure that would have saved her life. But she was stuck in Georgia. Again, the state failed her. When Thurman was admitted to an ER in Georgia, it was clear that she needed a D&C to clear away the tissue that was poisoning her. But the hospital delayed surgery for 20 hours. By then, it was too late. A statewide maternal mortality review committee, which operates on a two-year lag and is only now examining post-Roe cases, deemed her death preventable.

In the fall of 2022, Candi Miller discovered she was pregnant. Because the 41-year-old mother of three had diabetes, hypertension, and lupus, doctors warned that another pregnancy might kill her. But Georgia’s abortion ban made no exceptions for people whose chronic conditions made pregnancy a deadly proposition. Abandoned by her state, Miller ordered abortion pills online and took them at home. As with Thurman, her body did not expel all the tissue, spawning an infection. She suffered for days until her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her three year old daughter by her side.

She hadn’t sought out a doctor, her family said, “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.” Tragically, as Thurman’s death suggests, it’s not clear that it would have helped if she had.

“It is exactly like what it was before it was made, open, available and legal,” says Leslie Reagan, a historian at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the author of the book When Abortion Was a Crime. Reagan recalls reading coroner reports of women just like Miller, only decades earlier, who died because they were afraid of being arrested or prosecuted if they went to the hospital.

If Roe were still in place, Miller could have sought a surgical abortion or taken the pills under supervision of a doctor, who could have intervened when she needed further care. But that’s not how it works in Georgia anymore. Again, the same panel, which finally reviewed her case last month, immediately deemed her death preventable. ProPublica reported that the panel is reviewing additional deaths involving abortions after the ban was passed.

History seems to be repeating itself. Both Thurman and Miller were Black, and both died of sepsis. 

When doctors and historians warned that people would die from post-Dobbs abortion bans, they weren’t being hyperbolic, they were looking at the facts. In one study, economists found that maternal death rates for nonwhite women plummeted after states began legalizing the procedure in the late 1960s and early 1970s, leading up to Roe in January 1973. ​​Legal abortion reduced non-white abortion-related mortality by 30-60 percent.

“These are two black women,” says Reagan, noting that before Roe, Black women were far more likely to die trying to obtain an abortion. “This just, again, accentuates and replicates the past. And you know, frankly, the people passing these laws do not care about that.”

Further, deaths due to abortion-related infection were the most common fatal complication. “Over 1960 to 1980, legal abortion has been suggested as a major contributor to the decline in maternal deaths, primarily from abortion-related sepsis,” according to the report. In an account quoted in the study, an obstetrician from the period recalls that “complications of illegal abortion were so common that a septic ward was set aside for the infections. Surgery for hemorrhage was a common night duty.”

But for all the historical echoes, there are key differences. Rather than an abortion from an unqualified doctor or an attempt to induce an abortion by harming themselves, both Thurman and Miller took safe medication greenlit by the Food and Drug Administration. Both had the rare occurrence of failure to expel all fetal tissue, resulting in the need for medical attention.

While it’s clear that poor women and women of color will bear the brunt of the new wave of abortion-related fatalities, hospitals’ refusal to treat women suffering complications from abortion and miscarriage jeopardize women from all walks of life. Just ask Amanda Zurawski, a white woman from Texas who faced the imminent loss of her pregnancy but was told to go home and wait for the onset of sepsis. She ended up fighting for her life in the ICU. Indeed, it appears that under today’s abortion bans, doctors and hospitals are forcing women into septic shock and, in some cases, even delaying care once sepsis has already arrived.

Poor women and women of color will bear the brunt of new abortion-related fatalities.

This is not an accident. In fact, the lawsuit against mifepristone launched by the hard right Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom was premised on the idea that doctors should be able to refuse to treat patients in the exact position as Thurman and Miller. Their lawyers argued that the doctors’ personal opposition to abortion meant they should never have to save a woman’s life if she was suffering complications from taking mifepristone, even if the fetus was not living. As the group’s attorney, Erin Hawley, said during oral arguments before the Supreme Court, an anti-abortion doctor’s conscience is harmed by “completing an elective abortion,” meaning “removing an embryo, a fetus, whether or not they’re alive, as well as placental tissue.”

It was a shocking courtroom moment, but also a revealing one. The Alliance Defending Freedom doesn’t just represent doctors—it has also been instrumental in crafting and defending state abortion bans. They are not only willing to let women die, but it is in keeping with their beliefs. The lawmakers who wrote laws like Georgia’s—and refused to amend them despite warnings—seem similarly inclined to allow preventable deaths. Louisiana is about to limit access to misoprostol, a drug that is part of the medication abortion regimen but is also a life-saving anti-hemorrhage drug used in postpartum care, by categorizing it as a controlled substance. Again, people could die.

Just as the pre-Roe era saw unnecessary death, so now are we. And it’s easy to see, from the vague yet strict laws to the fear instilled in both doctors and patients, that it’s all by design. 

In Atlanta, Harris presented a stark choice. She would restore Roe, he would usher in more bans. “He brags about overturning Roe v Wade,” Harris said of Trump on Friday. “He says he is proud. Proud that women are dying?”

Former President Donald Trump has been very clear about his intentions if he returns to power: He will take revenge on everyone who, he believes, stood in his way during the 2024 election. “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences,” he posted on Truth Social on Saturday. “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials.” 

Trump’s threats to prosecute perceived enemies are nothing new. His road to the White House in 2016 was paved with chants of “Lock her up!” But in 2024, Trump now has a blueprint for taking control of the Department of Justice and directing politically-motivated prosecutions—particularly of local election officials.

“This is authoritarian fantasy wish fulfillment reduced to paper.”

It’s all there in Project 2025’s agenda. In a little-noticed section of the Mandate for Leadership, the 922-page right-wing policy tome, a close Trump ally has laid out how Trump could do just as his post threatened. This two-page segment explains how the DOJ would go after local election administrators who make decisions Trump and his appointees disagree with.

According to experts, the factual premises of the section are mistaken, outlandish, and contradictory to current law. But the message it sends is crystal clear: if an election administration official makes it easier to vote in a way that the Trump DOJ does not like, it will investigate and possibly prosecute that official for criminal wrongdoing.

In the lead-up to November, lawsuits already abound over voting rules and regulations. What forms of ID are needed to register? Do mail-in ballot envelopes need to have hand-written dates on them? Is a county or state doing enough to keep voter rolls accurate? Such decisions can change the outcome of close elections by either enfranchising or disqualifying thousands of voters. Trump and the Republican Party oppose laws and policies that make it easier to vote, and advocate for additional hurdles that make it harder for people to register and cast a ballot. They do this under the guise of thwarting fraud, but in reality their policies make it harder for Democratic constituencies, including people of color, to vote.

While the GOP and its allies have long taken local officials to court over these debates, Project 2025 imagines a dystopian escalation: that the Department of Justice could mount a raid, an investigation, and even a criminal prosecution if it doesn’t like voting policies put in place by a local official. 

The proposal is tucked into the chapter on overhauling the Department of Justice, authored by Gene Hamilton, a former Trump official in the department who is likely to return in a second administration. In it, Hamilton envisions the criminal section at DOJ investigating “the appropriateness or lawfulness of state election guidance.”

“They want to criminalize election administration and disagreements over election administration,” Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School and a former Obama Justice Department official, said after reviewing the section.

To allow the federal government to threaten prosecutions over the minutiae of local election administration, Project 2025 perversely cites 1871’s Ku Klux Klan Act, a law passed in the wake of the Civil War to protect the rights of formerly enslaved citizens—including their right to vote. Today, one of the law’s uses is to protect the right to vote from race-based discrimination. Notably, Trump himself faces charges under the statute for his attempt to nullify millions of votes and overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“It’s an incredibly un-American effort to scare election officials.”

According to Project 2025, a second Trump administration would take this law that was meant to go after conspiracies that deprive people of rights and weaponize it in furtherance of the administration’s own plots to deprive people of their right to vote. “They’re asking for a world in which every disagreement about what is legally authorized is investigated for criminal prosecution under the Klan Act,” says Levitt. “That is, charitably, nuts.”

The one example Hamilton provides of an election administration decision that would warrant such a prosecution is chilling. In 2020, Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s elections chief, authorized counties to give provisional ballots to voters whose mail ballots had been disqualified for minor issues.

“We want eligible voters to be able to cast one ballot,” Boockvar says, explaining the decision. “If the first ballot that they tried to cast can’t be cast because they had the wrong date, then that gets tossed. And then they can vote by provisional ballot. There’s no violation of any laws. This is just another way to protect that an American citizen who’s eligible to vote can cast their ballot.”

Indeed, Boockvar’s move helped eligible voters vote. No one was hurt, no one’s rights were taken away, and no fraudulent votes were cast. There was certainly no conspiracy to deprive anyone of their rights. And yet, this is the scenario that Project 2025 calls out, not only as illegal, but as criminal. “That they’ve chosen this example shows not just ‘We’re coming after you for crimes’,” says Levitt, but “’We’re coming after you for things that are not crimes.'”

In fact, in just the past few days, two courts in Pennsylvania came to the conclusion that voters should have access to provisional ballots in such situations. If upheld, the decisions will likely help Democrats in the critical swing state, where the party’s voters are significantly more likely to vote by mail than Republicans.

It’s “part of a trend to make voting more confusing… trying to have a chilling effect.”

If the political motivation for a criminal probe such as the one that Hamilton suggests is clear, the legal one is pure fiction. “This is beyond the pale for any prosecutor,” says Levitt. “It’s difficult to convey how extreme this particular example that they’ve chosen is. And that’s the scariest part of the vibe. This is authoritarian fantasy wish fulfillment reduced to paper.”

“It’s an incredibly un-American effort to scare election officials,” adds Boockvar.

The proposal to investigate and prosecute election officials over administrative disputes—and to do it, no less, under a law meant to protect people’s rights—is almost ludicrous. And yet, with the right personnel under the direction of a Trump White House, such legal action is not inconceivable. 

In Texas, Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, recently authorized raids on the homes of Democrats and civil rights advocates in the Latino community. He has also used the power of his office to sue Democratic counties working to make it easier to vote. Last week, he sued Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, for sending registration forms to residents. A few days later, Paxton sued Travis County, where Austin is located, for hiring a contractor to encourage people to register to vote. This wasn’t a nefarious crime but, as one county commissioner put it, a “nice thing to do.” Paxton’s moves come on the heels of legislation passed last year that allows the Texas secretary of state to take over local election administration in Harris County, which is home to Houston and is the state’s largest Democratic stronghold. Trump has floated Paxton as a contender for attorney general if he wins in November.

“Look at what’s happening on the ground in terms of civic activists being harassed in Texas, or voter rolls being purged in loosey-goosey ways,” warns Alex Ault, policy counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

To Ault, its all “part of a trend to make voting more confusing, make people afraid to be active in promoting and defending their right to vote, and trying to have a chilling effect.”

Project 2025 lays out an authoritarian plan to wield the law in order to intimidate election officials and stop people from voting. That is surely not lost on Hamilton, who may get a chance to help implement the proposal if Trump returns to power—nor on the former president calling for prosecutions of anyone who stands in his way.

Former President Donald Trump has been very clear about his intentions if he returns to power: He will take revenge on everyone who, he believes, stood in his way during the 2024 election. “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences,” he posted on Truth Social on Saturday. “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials.” 

Trump’s threats to prosecute perceived enemies are nothing new. His road to the White House in 2016 was paved with chants of “Lock her up!” But in 2024, Trump now has a blueprint for taking control of the Department of Justice and directing politically-motivated prosecutions—particularly of local election officials.

“This is authoritarian fantasy wish fulfillment reduced to paper.”

It’s all there in Project 2025’s agenda. In a little-noticed section of the Mandate for Leadership, the 922-page right-wing policy tome, a close Trump ally has laid out how Trump could do just as his post threatened. This two-page segment explains how the DOJ would go after local election administrators who make decisions Trump and his appointees disagree with.

According to experts, the factual premises of the section are mistaken, outlandish, and contradictory to current law. But the message it sends is crystal clear: if an election administration official makes it easier to vote in a way that the Trump DOJ does not like, it will investigate and possibly prosecute that official for criminal wrongdoing.

In the lead-up to November, lawsuits already abound over voting rules and regulations. What forms of ID are needed to register? Do mail-in ballot envelopes need to have hand-written dates on them? Is a county or state doing enough to keep voter rolls accurate? Such decisions can change the outcome of close elections by either enfranchising or disqualifying thousands of voters. Trump and the Republican Party oppose laws and policies that make it easier to vote, and advocate for additional hurdles that make it harder for people to register and cast a ballot. They do this under the guise of thwarting fraud, but in reality their policies make it harder for Democratic constituencies, including people of color, to vote.

While the GOP and its allies have long taken local officials to court over these debates, Project 2025 imagines a dystopian escalation: that the Department of Justice could mount a raid, an investigation, and even a criminal prosecution if it doesn’t like voting policies put in place by a local official. 

The proposal is tucked into the chapter on overhauling the Department of Justice, authored by Gene Hamilton, a former Trump official in the department who is likely to return in a second administration. In it, Hamilton envisions the criminal section at DOJ investigating “the appropriateness or lawfulness of state election guidance.”

“They want to criminalize election administration and disagreements over election administration,” Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School and a former Obama Justice Department official, said after reviewing the section.

To allow the federal government to threaten prosecutions over the minutiae of local election administration, Project 2025 perversely cites 1871’s Ku Klux Klan Act, a law passed in the wake of the Civil War to protect the rights of formerly enslaved citizens—including their right to vote. Today, one of the law’s uses is to protect the right to vote from race-based discrimination. Notably, Trump himself faces charges under the statute for his attempt to nullify millions of votes and overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“It’s an incredibly un-American effort to scare election officials.”

According to Project 2025, a second Trump administration would take this law that was meant to go after conspiracies that deprive people of rights and weaponize it in furtherance of the administration’s own plots to deprive people of their right to vote. “They’re asking for a world in which every disagreement about what is legally authorized is investigated for criminal prosecution under the Klan Act,” says Levitt. “That is, charitably, nuts.”

The one example Hamilton provides of an election administration decision that would warrant such a prosecution is chilling. In 2020, Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s elections chief, authorized counties to give provisional ballots to voters whose mail ballots had been disqualified for minor issues.

“We want eligible voters to be able to cast one ballot,” Boockvar says, explaining the decision. “If the first ballot that they tried to cast can’t be cast because they had the wrong date, then that gets tossed. And then they can vote by provisional ballot. There’s no violation of any laws. This is just another way to protect that an American citizen who’s eligible to vote can cast their ballot.”

Indeed, Boockvar’s move helped eligible voters vote. No one was hurt, no one’s rights were taken away, and no fraudulent votes were cast. There was certainly no conspiracy to deprive anyone of their rights. And yet, this is the scenario that Project 2025 calls out, not only as illegal, but as criminal. “That they’ve chosen this example shows not just ‘We’re coming after you for crimes’,” says Levitt, but “’We’re coming after you for things that are not crimes.'”

In fact, in just the past few days, two courts in Pennsylvania came to the conclusion that voters should have access to provisional ballots in such situations. If upheld, the decisions will likely help Democrats in the critical swing state, where the party’s voters are significantly more likely to vote by mail than Republicans.

It’s “part of a trend to make voting more confusing… trying to have a chilling effect.”

If the political motivation for a criminal probe such as the one that Hamilton suggests is clear, the legal one is pure fiction. “This is beyond the pale for any prosecutor,” says Levitt. “It’s difficult to convey how extreme this particular example that they’ve chosen is. And that’s the scariest part of the vibe. This is authoritarian fantasy wish fulfillment reduced to paper.”

“It’s an incredibly un-American effort to scare election officials,” adds Boockvar.

The proposal to investigate and prosecute election officials over administrative disputes—and to do it, no less, under a law meant to protect people’s rights—is almost ludicrous. And yet, with the right personnel under the direction of a Trump White House, such legal action is not inconceivable. 

In Texas, Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, recently authorized raids on the homes of Democrats and civil rights advocates in the Latino community. He has also used the power of his office to sue Democratic counties working to make it easier to vote. Last week, he sued Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, for sending registration forms to residents. A few days later, Paxton sued Travis County, where Austin is located, for hiring a contractor to encourage people to register to vote. This wasn’t a nefarious crime but, as one county commissioner put it, a “nice thing to do.” Paxton’s moves come on the heels of legislation passed last year that allows the Texas secretary of state to take over local election administration in Harris County, which is home to Houston and is the state’s largest Democratic stronghold. Trump has floated Paxton as a contender for attorney general if he wins in November.

“Look at what’s happening on the ground in terms of civic activists being harassed in Texas, or voter rolls being purged in loosey-goosey ways,” warns Alex Ault, policy counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

To Ault, its all “part of a trend to make voting more confusing, make people afraid to be active in promoting and defending their right to vote, and trying to have a chilling effect.”

Project 2025 lays out an authoritarian plan to wield the law in order to intimidate election officials and stop people from voting. That is surely not lost on Hamilton, who may get a chance to help implement the proposal if Trump returns to power—nor on the former president calling for prosecutions of anyone who stands in his way.

A familiar script echoed throughout the United Center arena on Monday night: “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate but equally important groups. The police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.” 

It was an obvious nod to the long-running television show, Law & Order, and the crowd at the Democratic National Convention laughed in recognition. It was also clear why the campaign created this video: Kamala Harris’ history as a prosecutor is a tantalizing contrast to former president Donald Trump, who has been found guilty on 34 felony charges. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” Harris recently said at a rally. “I know Donald Trump’s type.”

It’s a 180-degree turn from her 2020 presidential bid when her prosecutorial role was something of a liability. Amid a national reckoning about murders of Black men at the hands of police, a common refrain from some on the left was “Kamala is a cop.” While that critique wasn’t the only thing that hamstrung her campaign, it was something she felt the need to address with a thorough criminal justice reform plan, one that she hasn’t re-circulated this time around.

“It’s not a winning strategy, and it’s not the sure-fire sort of like zinger that Democrats think it is.”

Two things have changed in four years. First, public safety concerns have surged. Though crime has receded from its most recent peak from 2020-2021, fear-mongering about it is a tried-and-true tactic. Republicans have spent $130 million in the first five months of 2024 on ads focused on crime and immigration. Second, and more importantly, the law finally caught up with Trump. In May, a jury of his peers found him guilty on 34 felony counts for the hush money he paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels while he was trying to win the 2016 campaign. Another judge ruled him liable for sexual assault. Yet another judge found him liable for fraud in his New York business dealings. The Harris campaign’s mission is to quell public safety concerns and remind voters of Trump’s record in the most damning way possible.

At the same time, the campaign has a small window of time to introduce Harris to voters. Her background as a prosecutor is an appealing vehicle for imbuing Harris with a key set of traits: being tough, standing up to bullies, caring about people, and caring about the rule of law. To quickly define both candidates, a quippy prosecutor-versus-felon message has emerged.

But criminal justice reformers are raising questions about the effectiveness of this dichotomy, and its morality.

“It’s not a winning strategy, and it’s not the sure-fire sort of like zinger that Democrats think it is,” says Insha Rahman, the director of Vera Action, which advocates for criminal justice reform. “Calling Trump a convicted felon doesn’t really stick on him because he doesn’t fit the trope of what a convicted felon is, because it is a dog whistle—it is linking race and criminality.”

Rahman was at the convention to give a talk on the right way to approach both Harris’ past as a prosecutor and Trump’s current status as an unrepentant fraudster. Mother Jones sat down with her—literally, on the floor outside a conference room—to discuss the most effective way campaigns can run on public safety. After a scheduling conflict, Rahman’s panel had been canceled, but she didn’t seem to take offense. “The fact that the Democratic Party is willing to have these conversations here in the belly of the beast, to me, feels like we should be optimistic.”

In Rahman’s telling, both political parties still adhere to the tough-on-crime political playbook from the 1980s. Over the past two years, Vera Action has been pushing the Democratic Party to throw out this blueprint. Not just because it’s the right thing to do when it comes to dismantling racist stereotypes, but also because, Rahman believes, it’s the best way to win an election. 

For two years now, Rahman and Vera Action have poured significant resources into polling around effective criminal justice messaging. They have landed on what they believe is the strongest message for either party—shifting the focus from crime to safety and justice. “You actually need to own this issue, own safety, because it is a winning issue for you, and talk about it with the values that voters care about, which is safety and justice,” she tells Democrats. “The reaction we get when we talk to politicians is, ‘I don’t believe that’s right. How could that possibly be right?’ The incredulity is palpable.”

“Public safety is going to be one of the big issues in this election cycle. So showing how she is equipped to handle public safety concerns is really validating, especially as a contrast to Donald Trump.”

The party has shown an interest in her work. Vera Action has presented its findings to party officials in over 200 briefings, according to Rahman. Her message for the Democrats now is to rewrite the prosecutor-versus-felon frame. “If Kamala Harris says ‘I’m for the people, and here’s what I stand for, which is safety and justice,’ and contrasts that with ‘Donald Trump is only out for himself,’ that is actually the most winning statement,” she says. “It’s a way that Kamala Harris can use the prosecutor background to actually lean in and say what she stands for, and create a values contrast against Trump.” 

Rahman’s panel may have been canceled but her message seems to be catching on. The effort to push this version of Harris’ record comes through in the videos sprinkled throughout the convention’s televised programming. In a segment on Monday, the campaign shared an anecdote about Harris standing up to a bully in kindergarten, connecting a drive to “stand up to the bully” and “stand up for what is right” and “her calling” to be a prosecutor. 

Each evening in Chicago, speakers have added nuance to the portrayal of Harris as a prosecutor. On Wednesday night, Lateefah Simon, a congressional candidate in California who worked with Harris when she was the San Francisco district attorney, portrayed Harris as a compassionate prosecutor. “She wanted to get to the root cause of a broken criminal justice system,” Simon said. 

Simon was followed by Harris’ brother-in-law, Tony West, the top lawyer at Uber and one of Harris’ longtime political advisors. West portrayed Harris as dedicated to the people unjustly swept up into the criminal justice system with the story of an innocent woman who would have spent a weekend in jail if Harris hadn’t called the judge on a Friday afternoon to get her out. “She wondered, does this woman work weekends? Would she lose her job? Does she have young kids at home?” West said. “That’s what it means to stand for the people.”

On the final night of the convention, four members of the Exonerated Five, formerly called the “Central Park Five,” addressed the convention. They were imprisoned for a heinous crime they did not commit. Famously, Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for their execution, and has never apologized. Their presence clearly aligned the unfair dragnet of the criminal justice system on Black men with Trump, not Harris.

Pollster Roshni Nedungadi believes the campaign’s treatment of Harris’ background is effective. “What we’ve been doing is testing pieces of her accomplishments, and particularly what she’s been able to accomplish as district attorney and attorney general in California,” says Nedungadi, founding partner of HIT Strategies, which focuses on polling young voters, women, and people of color. “Just introducing small pieces of information about her bio increases her favorability by almost 50 percent.” Introducing voters to Harris’ Back on Track program, which she initiated in California to reduce recidivism, increased her favorability among voters of color by 52 percent, a HIT Strategies poll found.

“Public safety is going to be one of the big issues in this election cycle,” Nedunghadi continued. “So showing how she is equipped to handle public safety concerns is really validating, especially as a contrast to Donald Trump.”

Rahman notes that the most progress comes from Harris herself. “It’s actually rare, when VP Harris is on the campaign trail, to just reduce Donald Trump to a convicted felon,” she says. Notably, in Harris’ remarks on Thursday night, the word felon was absent, and her message echoed Rahman’s exhortations for a contrast in values. But the campaign and its surrogates are frequently using the word “felon” to brand Trump.

“The term ‘felon’ doesn’t really get at the nuance of what people are upset about,” says Joshua Hoe, a formerly incarcerated host of the Decarceration Nation podcast and policy manager at Dream.org. To Hoe, what angers people is that Trump “doesn’t take responsibility for anything that he does. He’s been more or less flouting that he violates the rules and the laws for years and years and never has any consequences while everyone else does. That’s why a very large number of people are actually upset.”

At a Thursday panel session exploring how Democrats can reach “unseen Black men,” a convention-goer asked the event’s host how to convince former “felons” to participate in elections.

Mondale Robinson, the founder of the Black Male Voter Project and the mayor of Enfield, North Carolina, offered a gentle correction: not felons, but “justice-impacted individuals.”

He went on to criticize Democrats’ embrace of framing the 2024 election around policing. The phrasing, he said, is an attempt to calm white voters’ fears about crime without “considering the harm that it’s going to do” to Black Americans, who are five times more likely to end up in state prisons than their white counterparts. It is a strategy, he says, that further alienates an untapped voting bloc of millions of Black people and others impacted by unjust policing.

“We need to take a break from these same media consultants we’ve been using forever, and switch up and rethink what it means to talk to voters that we’ve never talked to before,” Robinson said.

Other criminal justice reform activists share his concerns. Sheena Meade, CEO of the Clean Slate Initiative, said she was so “shocked” by the incessant use of the word “felon” as a stand-alone pejorative that she tore up the speech she planned to give at an NAACP event in Chicago and wrote a new one.

“We have to stop perpetuating this harmful rhetoric that draws on decades of fear-mongering and dehumanizes people with a record,” she said. “This kind of language impacts 72 million people, mostly adults, in the US—including me.”

To be sure, Trump is a felon. There are 34 guilty charges to prove it—and he is accused of the far more serious crime of trying to steal the 2020 election, among other infractions. But, as champions of restorative justice and prison reform, these advocates suggest that Democrats focus on Trump’s refusal to take accountability for his crimes, rather than the commission of them.

The advocates maintain they aren’t trying to sink the Harris campaign. People can support a presidential candidate and still want them to do better.

“Honest dialog about messaging should not be seen as an attack on the party, or the party’s candidates,” said Hoe, “but should be seen as an attempt to better ensure its messaging lives up to its ideals.”

The day after President Joe Biden ended his presidential campaign on July 21, Vice President Kamala Harris arrived in Delaware to greet her new campaign staff. She had worked the phones the previous day, and with Biden’s endorsement, was already the presumptive nominee. The campaign would remain intact—there was no time to build a new one from scratch. But there would be tweaks. One was already audible when she strode to the podium to Beyoncé’s 2016 anthem “Freedom.” The megastar had given Harris the go-ahead to use it as the campaign’s new theme song just hours before. 

Harris closed her remarks to staff with a question. “Do we believe in freedom?” she said. “Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America?” The audience clapped and Beyoncé’s chorus returned. Freedom, freedom I can’t move. Freedom cut me loose.

It was the start of a rapid rebranding of the Democratic campaign just over three months before the election on November 5. That message shift has taken center stage in Chicago. Whereas Biden’s campaign had settled on a message of protecting American democracy against the threat of Donald Trump’s return, the Harris campaign has chosen to elevate the word freedom. In some ways they are synonyms, their venn diagram circles overlapping. But as a campaign slogan, the shift is key to understanding Harris’ pitch to voters. Americans are about to hear the word a lot. If she wins, it may prove a very savvy decision.

The abortion rights movement increasingly rebranded its work as a fight for freedom. The term “pro-choice” receded and phrases like “reproductive freedom” took its place.

On Tuesday afternoon, in one of the conventions’ massive conference rooms, a couple dozen delegates attended a training session on how to most effectively speak to voters about abortion and reproductive health. “We are reclaiming the word freedom and we are running on freedom,” Gabby Richards, Planned Parenthood’s director of federal advocacy communications, explained to the crowd. A slide displayed on two large screens read: “Message Imperative #1: Focus on Freedom.” “This issue is not just about whether or not someone has the ability to access abortion. It’s about whether or not someone has the ability and the freedom to decide when, if, and how they become a parent.”

The Supreme Court’s decision two years ago in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to take away the right to abortion set the stage for a campaign focused on the idea of liberation. The abortion rights movement increasingly rebranded its work as a fight for freedom. The term “pro-choice” receded and phrases like “reproductive freedom” took its place. “Pre-Dobbs decision, we had been testing a lot of frames around reproductive justice, and while freedom was a strong frame, it was not really the strongest,” explains Roshni Nedungadi, founding partner of HIT Strategies, a polling and research firm focused on young voters, voters of color, and women voters. “But post-Dobbs, we’ve seen really just an increase in people leaning into this idea that they should have the freedom to make choices for themselves and the freedom to live their lives to the fullest extent possible, and that is really resonating with a huge swath of the public. I think it’s really smart of the campaign to start using this phrase.” (Nedungadi’s partner at HIT Strategies, Terrance Woodbury, joined the Harris campaign earlier this month.)

The idea of freedom is flexible, and the frame extends beyond abortion, contraception, and in vitro fertilization. Harris had been playing with the idea of freedom in her speeches when she was still running for vice president and campaigning for Joe Biden, a key difference between her speeches on the campaign trail and his. In the Harris campaign’s first video, a few days after her pep talk to the staff in Delaware, Harris was already leaning further into the new messaging. “We choose freedom,” she says in the video, cuing the chorus to Beyonce’s song. “The freedom not just to get by, but get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body.”

By the third night in Chicago, freedom was the central theme. Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania gave a version of the 2022 stump speech he used to defeat a MAGA Republican: “It’s not freedom to tell our children what books they’re allowed to read,” he said in his reprisal Wednesday night. “It sure as hell isn’t freedom to say he can go vote but he gets to pick the winner.”  

“Protecting democracy, that frame doesn’t work as well for young people and for communities of color who feel that democracy has never done anything for them,” says Nedungadi.

Shapiro’s framing of freedom as both part of our everyday lives and integral to our elections is key to understanding how this rebrand is suddenly working for Democrats. Biden spent years warning about the threat Trump posed to democracy. “Whether we keep our republic is now in your hands,” Biden said in his Oval Office address about ending his campaign. All this is true, but as a campaign message it’s proved inaccessible to many voters—the same voters whose lack of support was dragging down Biden’s campaign. 

“Protecting democracy, that frame doesn’t work as well for young people and for communities of color who feel that democracy has never done anything for them,” says Nedungadi. “Every time we are in focus groups with those folks, and we try to talk about defending democracy, restoring democracy, we hear back from them with no prompting: But what has democracy done for me? This system isn’t working for me. They point to the Electoral College and the idea that Hillary Clinton can win the popular vote but not be President of the United States. And they say, What do you mean defend democracy? It’s clearly broken.” 

Biden’s focus on democracy had also proved hard to grasp. The work of connecting democracy to abortion was like writing a term paper, whereas freedom easily connects them. It also failed to inspire. As the voters in Nedungadi’s focus groups pointed out, it was a message of backward preservation rather than progress. “I’ve been excited about giving folks something to hope for,” says Nourbese Flint, president of All* Above All Action Fund, which works toward both abortion rights and political power for communities of color. “The conversation around freedom, the conversation around our futures, is something that I welcome because it does give people something to fight for rather than against.”

Polling now shows the Harris campaign surging, largely by pulling these same voters back into supporting the Democratic nominee. The campaign also hopes that the word freedom has more cross-party appeal. It’s language that has been associated with Republicans, most recently during George W. Bush’s administration. In the wake of 9/11, Bush described freedom as under attack, and it became both a rallying cry and an expression of partisan support for Bush. If you called them freedom fries, you were definitely a Republican.

In a recent New York Times report, Democratic officials stressed that the campaign was reclaiming appeals to liberty. And there is a taste of that in the campaign’s rhetoric, embodied most specifically in the mantras now associated with Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz. “There’s a golden rule,” he says on the stump, “mind your own damn business!” He calls out Republicans for sending the government into private spaces like the bedroom and the doctor’s office. This is what political theorists call negative liberty, the idea that freedom exists in the absence of restriction. 

But Walz is actually an ambassador of a much more expansive view of freedom, or positive liberty. The idea that freedom is found in the preconditions to opportunity. In his address to the convention Wednesday night, Walz not only asked the government to leave people alone but also praised a vision of America in which neighbors look out for each other and housing and health care are rights—that’s not an absence of government but a major role for it. It’s a political tradition with a long history. In 1941, Roosevelt combined these two sides of the liberty coin when he called for freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

The Harris-Walz campaign is calling for many more freedoms. So many, in fact, that in the final months of the campaign the word could lose all sense of meaning. In a video that aired on the third night, voters spoke directly to the camera about what freedom means to them, from “choice” to “the ability to laugh with friends.” By the end of the video, the narrative thread about freedom had been buried in platitudes. The final freedom was “the freedom to work together.”

There are also a few freedoms that are conspicuously absent. The uncommitted delegates urging an end to the war in Gaza and a large portion of the Democratic base would appreciate freedom from bombing, war, and genocide included on the list. 

The freedom argument is “a way for Americans to identify with the scope of things that the Harris campaign wants to do” and “a larger context for us to think about what’s really at stake in the election,” says Guy Cecil, a Democratic strategist. “So freedom involves saving democracy. Freedom involves protecting reproductive rights. Freedom involves making sure the Project 2025 agenda against LGBTQ people isn’t enacted.”

In a tally of phrases uttered in Chicago this week, Project 2025 is near the top of the list. There have been multiple panels explaining it, training people how to talk about it, and speeches warning against it. On Wednesday, Saturday Night Live star Kenan Thompson essentially performed a sketch outlining how it would strip away everything from the right to abortion care to the Department of Education. In Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation and Trump’s allies handed Democrats the perfect foil. Instead of near-abstract concepts about descending into authoritarianism or fascism, as a conversation around democracy necessitates, the Harris campaign can simply compare the freedoms she wants to augment with the ones Project 2025 seeks to claw back.

“They gave us, frankly, a gift,” says Cecil. “They should be in-kinding Project 2025 as a campaign contribution, because I think it’s the starkest contrast that anyone can make between what vision of America we want and what vision of America they want to shove down our throats.” 

The mood in Chicago is confident, even electric. The vibe is of a party that has not only found a better candidate but with her a better message. The test of both is what comes next.

The day after President Joe Biden ended his presidential campaign on July 21, Vice President Kamala Harris arrived in Delaware to greet her new campaign staff. She had worked the phones the previous day, and with Biden’s endorsement, was already the presumptive nominee. The campaign would remain intact—there was no time to build a new one from scratch. But there would be tweaks. One was already audible when she strode to the podium to Beyoncé’s 2016 anthem “Freedom.” The megastar had given Harris the go-ahead to use it as the campaign’s new theme song just hours before. 

Harris closed her remarks to staff with a question. “Do we believe in freedom?” she said. “Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America?” The audience clapped and Beyoncé’s chorus returned. Freedom, freedom I can’t move. Freedom cut me loose.

It was the start of a rapid rebranding of the Democratic campaign just over three months before the election on November 5. That message shift has taken center stage in Chicago. Whereas Biden’s campaign had settled on a message of protecting American democracy against the threat of Donald Trump’s return, the Harris campaign has chosen to elevate the word freedom. In some ways they are synonyms, their venn diagram circles overlapping. But as a campaign slogan, the shift is key to understanding Harris’ pitch to voters. Americans are about to hear the word a lot. If she wins, it may prove a very savvy decision.

The abortion rights movement increasingly rebranded its work as a fight for freedom. The term “pro-choice” receded and phrases like “reproductive freedom” took its place.

On Tuesday afternoon, in one of the conventions’ massive conference rooms, a couple dozen delegates attended a training session on how to most effectively speak to voters about abortion and reproductive health. “We are reclaiming the word freedom and we are running on freedom,” Gabby Richards, Planned Parenthood’s director of federal advocacy communications, explained to the crowd. A slide displayed on two large screens read: “Message Imperative #1: Focus on Freedom.” “This issue is not just about whether or not someone has the ability to access abortion. It’s about whether or not someone has the ability and the freedom to decide when, if, and how they become a parent.”

The Supreme Court’s decision two years ago in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to take away the right to abortion set the stage for a campaign focused on the idea of liberation. The abortion rights movement increasingly rebranded its work as a fight for freedom. The term “pro-choice” receded and phrases like “reproductive freedom” took its place. “Pre-Dobbs decision, we had been testing a lot of frames around reproductive justice, and while freedom was a strong frame, it was not really the strongest,” explains Roshni Nedungadi, founding partner of HIT Strategies, a polling and research firm focused on young voters, voters of color, and women voters. “But post-Dobbs, we’ve seen really just an increase in people leaning into this idea that they should have the freedom to make choices for themselves and the freedom to live their lives to the fullest extent possible, and that is really resonating with a huge swath of the public. I think it’s really smart of the campaign to start using this phrase.” (Nedungadi’s partner at HIT Strategies, Terrance Woodbury, joined the Harris campaign earlier this month.)

The idea of freedom is flexible, and the frame extends beyond abortion, contraception, and in vitro fertilization. Harris had been playing with the idea of freedom in her speeches when she was still running for vice president and campaigning for Joe Biden, a key difference between her speeches on the campaign trail and his. In the Harris campaign’s first video, a few days after her pep talk to the staff in Delaware, Harris was already leaning further into the new messaging. “We choose freedom,” she says in the video, cuing the chorus to Beyonce’s song. “The freedom not just to get by, but get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body.”

By the third night in Chicago, freedom was the central theme. Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania gave a version of the 2022 stump speech he used to defeat a MAGA Republican: “It’s not freedom to tell our children what books they’re allowed to read,” he said in his reprisal Wednesday night. “It sure as hell isn’t freedom to say he can go vote but he gets to pick the winner.”  

“Protecting democracy, that frame doesn’t work as well for young people and for communities of color who feel that democracy has never done anything for them,” says Nedungadi.

Shapiro’s framing of freedom as both part of our everyday lives and integral to our elections is key to understanding how this rebrand is suddenly working for Democrats. Biden spent years warning about the threat Trump posed to democracy. “Whether we keep our republic is now in your hands,” Biden said in his Oval Office address about ending his campaign. All this is true, but as a campaign message it’s proved inaccessible to many voters—the same voters whose lack of support was dragging down Biden’s campaign. 

“Protecting democracy, that frame doesn’t work as well for young people and for communities of color who feel that democracy has never done anything for them,” says Nedungadi. “Every time we are in focus groups with those folks, and we try to talk about defending democracy, restoring democracy, we hear back from them with no prompting: But what has democracy done for me? This system isn’t working for me. They point to the Electoral College and the idea that Hillary Clinton can win the popular vote but not be President of the United States. And they say, What do you mean defend democracy? It’s clearly broken.” 

Biden’s focus on democracy had also proved hard to grasp. The work of connecting democracy to abortion was like writing a term paper, whereas freedom easily connects them. It also failed to inspire. As the voters in Nedungadi’s focus groups pointed out, it was a message of backward preservation rather than progress. “I’ve been excited about giving folks something to hope for,” says Nourbese Flint, president of All* Above All Action Fund, which works toward both abortion rights and political power for communities of color. “The conversation around freedom, the conversation around our futures, is something that I welcome because it does give people something to fight for rather than against.”

Polling now shows the Harris campaign surging, largely by pulling these same voters back into supporting the Democratic nominee. The campaign also hopes that the word freedom has more cross-party appeal. It’s language that has been associated with Republicans, most recently during George W. Bush’s administration. In the wake of 9/11, Bush described freedom as under attack, and it became both a rallying cry and an expression of partisan support for Bush. If you called them freedom fries, you were definitely a Republican.

In a recent New York Times report, Democratic officials stressed that the campaign was reclaiming appeals to liberty. And there is a taste of that in the campaign’s rhetoric, embodied most specifically in the mantras now associated with Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz. “There’s a golden rule,” he says on the stump, “mind your own damn business!” He calls out Republicans for sending the government into private spaces like the bedroom and the doctor’s office. This is what political theorists call negative liberty, the idea that freedom exists in the absence of restriction. 

But Walz is actually an ambassador of a much more expansive view of freedom, or positive liberty. The idea that freedom is found in the preconditions to opportunity. In his address to the convention Wednesday night, Walz not only asked the government to leave people alone but also praised a vision of America in which neighbors look out for each other and housing and health care are rights—that’s not an absence of government but a major role for it. It’s a political tradition with a long history. In 1941, Roosevelt combined these two sides of the liberty coin when he called for freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

The Harris-Walz campaign is calling for many more freedoms. So many, in fact, that in the final months of the campaign the word could lose all sense of meaning. In a video that aired on the third night, voters spoke directly to the camera about what freedom means to them, from “choice” to “the ability to laugh with friends.” By the end of the video, the narrative thread about freedom had been buried in platitudes. The final freedom was “the freedom to work together.”

There are also a few freedoms that are conspicuously absent. The uncommitted delegates urging an end to the war in Gaza and a large portion of the Democratic base would appreciate freedom from bombing, war, and genocide included on the list. 

The freedom argument is “a way for Americans to identify with the scope of things that the Harris campaign wants to do” and “a larger context for us to think about what’s really at stake in the election,” says Guy Cecil, a Democratic strategist. “So freedom involves saving democracy. Freedom involves protecting reproductive rights. Freedom involves making sure the Project 2025 agenda against LGBTQ people isn’t enacted.”

In a tally of phrases uttered in Chicago this week, Project 2025 is near the top of the list. There have been multiple panels explaining it, training people how to talk about it, and speeches warning against it. On Wednesday, Saturday Night Live star Kenan Thompson essentially performed a sketch outlining how it would strip away everything from the right to abortion care to the Department of Education. In Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation and Trump’s allies handed Democrats the perfect foil. Instead of near-abstract concepts about descending into authoritarianism or fascism, as a conversation around democracy necessitates, the Harris campaign can simply compare the freedoms she wants to augment with the ones Project 2025 seeks to claw back.

“They gave us, frankly, a gift,” says Cecil. “They should be in-kinding Project 2025 as a campaign contribution, because I think it’s the starkest contrast that anyone can make between what vision of America we want and what vision of America they want to shove down our throats.” 

The mood in Chicago is confident, even electric. The vibe is of a party that has not only found a better candidate but with her a better message. The test of both is what comes next.

America loves a sports metaphor. On the third night of the Democratic National Convention Wednesday, Vice Presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz showed up by his preferred title, coach, to give a pep talk to American voters.

“I haven’t given a lot of big speeches like this,” Walz said bashfully. “But I have given a lot of pep talks. So let me finish with this, team. It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal. But we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field And boy do we have the right team.”

The crowd chanted “Coach! Coach!”

A month ago, few Americans knew who Walz was. The governor of Minnesota had a low national profile until he began making the rounds on TV, presenting himself to the American people and, in so-doing, auditioning for the suddenly- open position of Democratic vice presidential nominee. Walz changed the race when he called the Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the MAGA movement “weird.” It was a disarming attack, stripping Trump of his power and turning the dour former president it with something like a joke.

In selecting Walz, Harris chose a savvy communicator. But she also chose a foil to the weirdness on the other side of the ticket. In Walz, Harris found the opposite of Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Both men are veterans. Neither spent their formative years in a coastal city. But the policies they stand for and the temperament they display are starkly different.

It’s Minnesota nice, but as policy. As governor, one of Walz’s signature achievements was a law providing free breakfast and lunch in school.

Vance, with his book Hillbilly Elegy, claimed to understand what some Republicans call real America. Walz, a gunowner whose resume includes football coach and teacher (as well as congressman and governor) from a tiny town in Nebraska, is a foil to the stereotype of Republicans as real Americans. On Wednesday, Walz used his speech to claim a truer affiliation with rural America than Vance has. “I grew up in Butte, Nebraska, in a town of 400 people,” Walz said. “I had 24 kids in my high school class. And none of them went to Yale.” Vance went to Yale Law.

Walz’s brand as a rural kid is his entree into progressive politics. In a small town, he went on, “you learn how to take care of each other.” It’s Minnesota nice, but as policy. As governor, one of Walz’s signature achievements was a law providing free breakfast and lunch in school. “So while other states were banning books from our schools, we were banishing hunger from ours,” he said.

Walz’s speech highlighted his record in Minnesota, parts of which Harris would seek to replicate as president. “We protected reproductive freedom,” he said. “Even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.”

Walz also shared his own connection to the current battle over reproductive choice. He and his wife, Gwen Walz, used IVF to start their family. “If you’ve never experienced the hell that is infertility, I guarantee you know someone who has,” Walz said. “I’m letting you in on how we started a family because this is a big part about what this election is about.”

Walz’s job Wednesday was to introduce himself to American voters, to convey the goals of a Harris administration, and to knock down the opposition. In his final pep talk of the night, the former coach did just that.

“We’ve gonna leave it all on the field,” he said in his finale. “That’s how we’ll build a country where workers come first, health care and housing are human rights, and the government stays the hell out of your bedroom.”

America loves a sports metaphor. On the third night of the Democratic National Convention Wednesday, Vice Presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz showed up by his preferred title, coach, to give a pep talk to American voters.

“I haven’t given a lot of big speeches like this,” Walz said bashfully. “But I have given a lot of pep talks. So let me finish with this, team. It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal. But we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field And boy do we have the right team.”

The crowd chanted “Coach! Coach!”

A month ago, few Americans knew who Walz was. The governor of Minnesota had a low national profile until he began making the rounds on TV, presenting himself to the American people and, in so-doing, auditioning for the suddenly- open position of Democratic vice presidential nominee. Walz changed the race when he called the Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the MAGA movement “weird.” It was a disarming attack, stripping Trump of his power and turning the dour former president it with something like a joke.

In selecting Walz, Harris chose a savvy communicator. But she also chose a foil to the weirdness on the other side of the ticket. In Walz, Harris found the opposite of Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Both men are veterans. Neither spent their formative years in a coastal city. But the policies they stand for and the temperament they display are starkly different.

It’s Minnesota nice, but as policy. As governor, one of Walz’s signature achievements was a law providing free breakfast and lunch in school.

Vance, with his book Hillbilly Elegy, claimed to understand what some Republicans call real America. Walz, a gunowner whose resume includes football coach and teacher (as well as congressman and governor) from a tiny town in Nebraska, is a foil to the stereotype of Republicans as real Americans. On Wednesday, Walz used his speech to claim a truer affiliation with rural America than Vance has. “I grew up in Butte, Nebraska, in a town of 400 people,” Walz said. “I had 24 kids in my high school class. And none of them went to Yale.” Vance went to Yale Law.

Walz’s brand as a rural kid is his entree into progressive politics. In a small town, he went on, “you learn how to take care of each other.” It’s Minnesota nice, but as policy. As governor, one of Walz’s signature achievements was a law providing free breakfast and lunch in school. “So while other states were banning books from our schools, we were banishing hunger from ours,” he said.

Walz’s speech highlighted his record in Minnesota, parts of which Harris would seek to replicate as president. “We protected reproductive freedom,” he said. “Even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.”

Walz also shared his own connection to the current battle over reproductive choice. He and his wife, Gwen Walz, used IVF to start their family. “If you’ve never experienced the hell that is infertility, I guarantee you know someone who has,” Walz said. “I’m letting you in on how we started a family because this is a big part about what this election is about.”

Walz’s job Wednesday was to introduce himself to American voters, to convey the goals of a Harris administration, and to knock down the opposition. In his final pep talk of the night, the former coach did just that.

“We’ve gonna leave it all on the field,” he said in his finale. “That’s how we’ll build a country where workers come first, health care and housing are human rights, and the government stays the hell out of your bedroom.”

In 1944, the Democratic Party held its convention in Chicago, where it nominated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to a fourth term in office. Angie Gialloreto remembers it.

Eighty years on, a lot has changed—including White House term limits. But Democrats are back in Chicago, and Angie, who has been a Pittsburgh-area party official for more than six decades, is there as the convention’s oldest delegate. She’s 95 now, and says she’s most excited about young people getting their start in politics, like she did as a 15 year old growing up in Pennsylvania.

Mother Jones caught up with Gialloreto and spoke with her about the changes she’s lived and witnessed in Democratic politics, and her hopes for the future. Our conversation included Ellie Goluboff-Schragger, a 20-year-old University of Pennsylvania student who is the state’s youngest delegate.

“Young people should have a voice, and daggonit, they better have the opportunity.”

We sat down with the oldest and one of the youngest delegates at the Democratic National Convention. And they both agree: Older and younger generations must fight for a brighter future. pic.twitter.com/ihGkFzpDhp

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) August 21, 2024

Goluboff-Schragger thanked President Joe Biden for deciding to leave the campaign and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, and for “recognizing that it’s time for a new generation.”

“What he did was not for me, not for you, but for our country,” Gialloreto says. “This is something spectacular, and we’re going to take advantage of it.”

After eighty years in the fray, Angie is urging a new generation to step up. “It’s time young people should have the voice and daggonit, they better have the opportunity to express it,” she says. “There’s been this closed door thing. ‘Oh, you’re too young.’ No! Do it. Express yourself. Let people know what you want and how you feel.”

“I started at 15,” she says. “I sure in hell am not going to stop at 95.”

On the first night of the Democratic National Convention, three women shared their personal stories of needing an abortion or miscarriage management. One was Kaitlyn Joshua, who was denied this care in Louisiana shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. 

When Joshua began to miscarry around 11 weeks into her pregnancy, the bleeding was profuse and the pain worse than birth with her first child. Over two days, two emergency rooms turned her away. When she arrived at the second ER, her jeans were soaked in blood and a security guard put her in a wheelchair. Again, doctors wouldn’t confirm her miscarriage, provide a dilation and curettage procedure to remove the fetus, medication to hasten the miscarriage, or even medicine to alleviate the pain. “I was in pain, bleeding so much my husband feared for my life,” she said on stage in Chicago. 

“It took me weeks to pass my pregnancy at home,” she said Tuesday, at a training session for how Democrats should message the abortion issue in their communities. “I was terrified. And the experience made me see how black women are dying at alarming rates in our country.” 

Joshua’s miscarriage changed her life in one way she did not expect—she became a campaign surrogate for the Democratic presidential ticket, first for President Joe Biden and now for Vice President Kamala Harris. In June, she appeared in a campaign ad for the Biden campaign. She plans to spend the fall campaigning across the country for Harris. 

After the panel on Tuesday, I caught up with Joshua. We discussed what it was like to suddenly become a reproductive rights advocate, to retell the story of her miscarriage over and over, and what it took to have another child under Louisiana’s strict abortion ban.

MJ: How did you decide to take your experience with a miscarriage under an abortion ban and use that to become an advocate for reproductive rights?

KJ: I actually had no intention [of speaking out]. I have a twin sister who’s a doctor now, and at the time, she had called me from med school, and she was like, “Look, the Louisiana Department of Health is holding a hearing.” And mind you, this was two months after my miscarriage, so I was still mad as hell, right? Still angry at the experience, and still very jaded on the whole thing. And I told her, “No.” And she said, “If you don’t say anything, they’re not going to know what is happening in these emergency rooms as a result of our near total abortion ban in Louisiana.” So I said, “Fine.” 

I definitely think storytelling is going to move the needle in this election.

And I’m so glad that I did, because as soon as I shared my story, not only did the Louisiana Department of Health take that feedback and try and do some work the next legislative session, but an NPR article picked me up immediately, and then before I knew it, CBS 60 Minutes picked it up, and then I’m getting calls from the White House, and now I’m touring with Kamala Harris. And so I’m glad I did it, because I feel like it’s such important work. I definitely think storytelling is going to move the needle in this election. And without those stories and women speaking out, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.

MJ: Are you able to see the impact that your story is having on people?

KJ: Someone who ran into me in the hotel was like, “Oh my god, I saw you on the stage last night. I need you to know I’m here with all of these wealthy white people, and they are now voting Democrat and now completely switched over from Republican because of the abortion issue.” I don’t think we would be as far in the conversation around reproductive freedom or reproductive justice if we weren’t storytelling and people understanding the intersectionalities of maternal health care and abortion care.

Also adding another component, in my opinion, as a woman of color, being able to highlight the issue around black maternal health in this country is really important to me, and so I feel like I also can carry the water on that too.

MJ: What is it like to tell your story over and over, and so publicly?

KJ: While I’m telling the story, it’s like I’m almost reliving it every single time. I had done a great job, before I signed my name to the campaign, of just burying that story in the back of my mind and moving forward. That sounds so bad, but I just didn’t want to constantly relive the trauma. And so I did the work with my therapist. And now, sharing the story in the moment, while difficult, afterwards the way that people receive it and the way that they comfort you, it’s very therapeutic, actually. And so in a lot of ways, even though it doesn’t get easier to tell the story, when I see the impact that it has, that makes it a little bit easier.”

MJ: Given what you went through and the fact that the law hasn’t changed in Louisiana, the strict abortion ban is still in place, do you feel comfortable trying to have another baby?

KJ: I had another baby. So my son is 10 months old. He’ll be 11 months in two days.

MJ: Congratulations!

KJ: My husband and I made the crazy decision to travel [to New Orleans] from our house [in Baton Rouge] for me to go to my appointments and see a physician that believed in abortion care, should I ever need it, or should my life be in danger. I understand my privilege in that. Not everybody can drive an hour and a half away and then drive out an hour and a half back, take off the work, do all the things to be able to get to a provider that fully practices in their full capacity, but we were blessed to be able to do it. And that was the only way I was going to do it, because I was not going back to the hospitals that I went to.

A name that looms large in Chicago this week belongs to a woman who died 19 years ago.

Shirley Chisholm, the first Black person to run for a major party’s presidential nomination and the first woman to run as a Democrat, is on the lips of delegates and speakers gathered at the Democratic National Convention. Her 1972 candidacy has come to stand for the idea that a woman belongs in the White House. It’s an idea that is on the ballot this year—in more ways than one.

The stakes in this election aren’t symbolic.

“If you don’t have a seat at the table, you are on the menu,” Shannon Watts, the founder of anti-gun violence group Moms Demand Action, said at a convention panel on Chisholm’s legacy. “Women are on the menu.” 

It’s a well-worn phrase, but given the choice facing the country, it had an eerie ring: One party hopes to elect the first woman president. The other is coalescing around the idea that women should step away from public life in order to bear and raise children. The hope for a first female president is tempered by the knowledge that losing wouldn’t just be a setback for women in politics, but for women in every corner of the country.

“I know firsthand what’s at stake for women, because I represent the state of Florida, and we have seen essentially the state version of what Project 2025 will be like if, God forbid, Donald Trump ever returns to the White House,” Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said. “Extreme MAGA Republicans, led by Ron DeSantis in our state, have enacted a near total abortion ban.”

Under a second Trump term, the federal government would significantly curtail access to abortion, placing limits on women’s ambitions and endangering their health. The administration could undo authorization for abortion drugs, limit access to contraception, and implement the Comstock Act to cut off access to abortion nationwide. 

In selecting Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate, the Trump campaign aligned itself with factions on the far right explicitly hoping to redefine women’s role in society. Vance has infamously denigrated “childless cat ladies” for having no stake in the future of the country, and included Harris in that group. He has agreed that the job of post-menopausal women is to help raise their grandchildren. 

“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had,” Vance tweeted two days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

When Harris became the Democratic nominee, she immediately and inadvertently represented an opposite notion: that a woman past reproductive age belongs in the White House. But the fact of Harris being a woman is almost incidental. Unlike in 2016, when Hillary Clinton stressed the historic nature of her candidacy and talked about breaking the last glass ceiling in politics, Harris doesn’t dwell on the historic aspect of her campaign.

“The results of this election feel so existential,” Wasserman Schultz explained. “As exciting as it is—and I am really, incredibly excited about the possibility of finally electing a woman president—her gender is just almost like a bonus.”

On Tuesday, delegates and activists mulled about a massive meeting room as music blared, waiting for a morning women’s caucus event to begin. As I spoke to a few, a trend emerged: They had gotten into politics two years ago, after Roe fell. To them, the stakes in this election weren’t symbolic, they were real.

In the days after that decision came down, Cathy Kott of Georgia turned to her daughter, now in her thirties, and said, “I can’t believe I didn’t raise more of an activist.” Her daughter shot back, “What about you?” A few days later, her daughter’s words still ringing in her ears, Kott got a text asking her to run for a seat in the Georgia State House. She signed up. 

“When they banned abortion in Missouri, it lit a fire,” says Marsha Snodgrass, a delegate from the state. She got involved in politics for the first time, gathering signatures for a ballot initiative to restore abortion rights there, and two weeks ago agreed to come to Chicago as a delegate.

At a panel on Chisholm’s legacy on Monday, host Juanita Tolliver, an MSNBC political analyst, recounted the two preconditions Chisolm believed were necessary for a woman to become president. The first was that men have time to get used to the idea. The second was that women and young people come together across race and class.

It would take until 2044 for this to happen, Chisholm predicted. 

In Chicago, Democrats are hoping she was 20 years off the mark. “I think our time as women, as women of color, has come,” said Alexis Lewis, 70, a Black delegate from California who remembers Chisholm’s campaign. “Women can do more than be wives and mothers.”

It’s a very 1972 debate to be having. But in 2024, it’s alive and well.

A name that looms large in Chicago this week belongs to a woman who died 19 years ago.

Shirley Chisholm, the first Black person to run for a major party’s presidential nomination and the first woman to run as a Democrat, is on the lips of delegates and speakers gathered at the Democratic National Convention. Her 1972 candidacy has come to stand for the idea that a woman belongs in the White House. It’s an idea that is on the ballot this year—in more ways than one.

The stakes in this election aren’t symbolic.

“If you don’t have a seat at the table, you are on the menu,” Shannon Watts, the founder of anti-gun violence group Moms Demand Action, said at a convention panel on Chisholm’s legacy. “Women are on the menu.” 

It’s a well-worn phrase, but given the choice facing the country, it had an eerie ring: One party hopes to elect the first woman president. The other is coalescing around the idea that women should step away from public life in order to bear and raise children. The hope for a first female president is tempered by the knowledge that losing wouldn’t just be a setback for women in politics, but for women in every corner of the country.

“I know firsthand what’s at stake for women, because I represent the state of Florida, and we have seen essentially the state version of what Project 2025 will be like if, God forbid, Donald Trump ever returns to the White House,” Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said. “Extreme MAGA Republicans, led by Ron DeSantis in our state, have enacted a near total abortion ban.”

Under a second Trump term, the federal government would significantly curtail access to abortion, placing limits on women’s ambitions and endangering their health. The administration could undo authorization for abortion drugs, limit access to contraception, and implement the Comstock Act to cut off access to abortion nationwide. 

In selecting Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate, the Trump campaign aligned itself with factions on the far right explicitly hoping to redefine women’s role in society. Vance has infamously denigrated “childless cat ladies” for having no stake in the future of the country, and included Harris in that group. He has agreed that the job of post-menopausal women is to help raise their grandchildren. 

“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had,” Vance tweeted two days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

When Harris became the Democratic nominee, she immediately and inadvertently represented an opposite notion: that a woman past reproductive age belongs in the White House. But the fact of Harris being a woman is almost incidental. Unlike in 2016, when Hillary Clinton stressed the historic nature of her candidacy and talked about breaking the last glass ceiling in politics, Harris doesn’t dwell on the historic aspect of her campaign.

“The results of this election feel so existential,” Wasserman Schultz explained. “As exciting as it is—and I am really, incredibly excited about the possibility of finally electing a woman president—her gender is just almost like a bonus.”

On Tuesday, delegates and activists mulled about a massive meeting room as music blared, waiting for a morning women’s caucus event to begin. As I spoke to a few, a trend emerged: They had gotten into politics two years ago, after Roe fell. To them, the stakes in this election weren’t symbolic, they were real.

In the days after that decision came down, Cathy Kott of Georgia turned to her daughter, now in her thirties, and said, “I can’t believe I didn’t raise more of an activist.” Her daughter shot back, “What about you?” A few days later, her daughter’s words still ringing in her ears, Kott got a text asking her to run for a seat in the Georgia State House. She signed up. 

“When they banned abortion in Missouri, it lit a fire,” says Marsha Snodgrass, a delegate from the state. She got involved in politics for the first time, gathering signatures for a ballot initiative to restore abortion rights there, and two weeks ago agreed to come to Chicago as a delegate.

At a panel on Chisholm’s legacy on Monday, host Juanita Tolliver, an MSNBC political analyst, recounted the two preconditions Chisolm believed were necessary for a woman to become president. The first was that men have time to get used to the idea. The second was that women and young people come together across race and class.

It would take until 2044 for this to happen, Chisholm predicted. 

In Chicago, Democrats are hoping she was 20 years off the mark. “I think our time as women, as women of color, has come,” said Alexis Lewis, 70, a Black delegate from California who remembers Chisholm’s campaign. “Women can do more than be wives and mothers.”

It’s a very 1972 debate to be having. But in 2024, it’s alive and well.

For the entirety of his political life, Trump has deployed a strategy of pumping endless toxic content into the political ecosystem, leaving the press and his opponents scrambling to keep up. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign marveled at all of Trump’s disqualifying ravings—until they realized she was drowning in them. With another outrageous tweet always coming, nothing stuck to him, as each controversy was forgotten when Trump tossed his next shiny object. Trump defined his opponent, and no one could land a punch on him.

Over the years, several commentators have analogized the situation to a classic episode of The Simpsons in which local villain Montgomery Burns is diagnosed with literally every disease. But rather than do him in, the illnesses crowd each other out, preventing any single one from taking hold. Being that sick, it turns out, made Burns invincible.  

Project 2025 has done what Democrats tried to for years: tie Trump to unpopular MAGA policies.

Similarly, this election cycle, Democrats deployed multiple attack lines to try to disqualify Trump. They’ve called him a threat to democracy, since he tried to overturn the last election. They’ve called him a felon, after he was found guilty of 34 felonies in New York.

But it turns out the political attack that is catching, finally, is one that Trump’s own allies came up with. It is Project 2025, the authoritarian blueprint for a second Trump presidency, that has finally broken through. In 922 pages, the project, helmed by the staunchly conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, outlines a radical restructuring of the federal government that combines the authoritarian goals of the MAGA movement with the deregulatory dreams of America’s plutocrats.

For Trump opponents, the problem “has never been a lack of a lack of abhorrent things,” says Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. “It’s been the inability to communicate them, because there are so many. It’s hard to find the needle in a haystack, it’s also hard to communicate the entire haystack…until they boiled it down into a 920-page instruction manual.”

Data shows how fears of Project 2025 are catching on. In June, less than 30 percent of Americans said they knew about it, according to the progressive polling outfit Navigator Research. A month later, 54 percent said they did—and 45 percent believed that it accurately describes Trump’s goals. 

In an indication of the project’s growing prominence, when Navigator asked people to name negative things they had heard about Trump off the top of their head, Project 2025 was one of the top responses. And in an indication voters know the effort is tied to the former president, when respondents were then asked to name negative things they had heard about Project 2025, his name came up the most.

Project 2025 has done what Democrats tried to do for years: tie Trump to the unpopular policies of the MAGA coalition, from the Christian nationalists trying to ban abortion and IVF to the mega-rich trying to give themselves more tax breaks. “If you’re a person who is deeply upset by Roe being overturned in 2022, this is a roadmap of everything that can be done to further curtail reproductive rights,” says Bryan Bennett, a pollster at the progressive Hub Project, which works alongside Navigator on its surveys. “If you are an advocate for a more fair economy, this is a roadmap for raising tax on the middle class and working class while giving tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations. If you are a healthcare advocate, this goes into excruciating detail about how to roll back and undermine things like the Affordable Care Act.”

Essentially, the Heritage Foundation took all the unlikeable goals of the MAGA movement, put them in one place, and gave it an ominous title. To help make these goals into reality, the project also created an action plan covering the first 180-days of a new administration, a database of personnel ready to replace career civil servants, and a training program to prepare them for this massive restructuring.

Heritage took all of MAGA’s unlikeable goals, put them in one place, and gave it an ominous title.

The document was crafted by people in Trump’s orbit—many who were in his last administration and who plan to work for him again—and proscribes dismantling most agencies’ core work: HHS would be used to end abortion access; DOJ would be used to prosecute Trump’s enemies; pollution would skyrocket after an EPA overhaul; and the Department of Education would be shuttered. Together, the sheer volume of information in Project 2025 is easily distilled into something easy to comprehend and sinister: it’s a takeover.

What happened in about a three week period to make Project 2025 go viral? Bennett thinks President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance on June 27 was a catalyst. As Trump became the strong favorite overnight, a natural question arose: What would really happen in a new Trump administration? Project 2025 was there to answer and was online for anyone to read. Organically, it began to get traction on TikTok, with Navigator finding, in a focus group of voters under 30, that most had heard about the project from online sharing platforms. “I’ve only seen it a lot on social media,” one focus group participant, a Democrat, said in July. “From what it sounds like, it doesn’t sound good.”

Democrats have also benefited from a ratchet effect: the more Trump has tried to distance himself from the plan, the more the media has exposed his ties to the project. “I have no idea who is behind it,” he posted on social media, kicking off a round of news stories covering Trump allies who worked on Project 2025: by CNN’s count, over 140 of his former administration officials helped write the plan. Former Trump cabinet secretary Russ Vought, for example, helped oversee Project 2025 and also ran the 2024 Republican National Convention’s platform committee. On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that Trump discussed Project 2025 while on a private plane flight with Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, on the way to a 2022 conference hosted by the organization. After they arrived, Trump gave a speech boasting that the think tank would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”

Trump gave the story another foothold when he selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate. Ideologically, Vance has aligned himself with the far-right social policies of the Project 2025 coalition and the revolutionary rhetoric of Roberts. Vance has called for “fir[ing] every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people”—just as Project 2025 urges. After he was tapped, attention focused on how he had had written the foreword to Kevin Roberts’ upcoming book. Some outlets obtained copies, and began publishing excerpts. Roberts then delayed publication of his book until after the election, a move that suggested they somehow wanted to hide it, fueling yet more interest. “If Project 2025 could manifest itself as a human being,” says Ferguson, “it would manifest JD Vance.” 

Polling shows that Project 2025 has the promise to define Trump’s campaign if it stays in the public eye. But Trump, by returning to his old tricks, may be able to push Project 2025 out of the spotlight.

On Thursday, he gave a freewheeling, hour-long press conference at Mar-a-Lago. He said many things that are imprudent for a presidential nominee to say. It was vintage Trump: insulting, untrue, and narcissistic. He demeaned Jewish people, lied about the 2020 election transition being peaceful, and falsely claimed his rally crowd on January 6 was larger than the one that turned out to see Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington (it wasn’t). On and on he went. Just like in 2016, it appeared that an avalanche of gold was falling on Democrats. Look at all the crazy stuff he is saying!

But avalanches kill—and Trump has demonstrated he knows how to bury his opponents while all the muck slides off of him. 

For the entirety of his political life, Trump has deployed a strategy of pumping endless toxic content into the political ecosystem, leaving the press and his opponents scrambling to keep up. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign marveled at all of Trump’s disqualifying ravings—until they realized she was drowning in them. With another outrageous tweet always coming, nothing stuck to him, as each controversy was forgotten when Trump tossed his next shiny object. Trump defined his opponent, and no one could land a punch on him.

Over the years, several commentators have analogized the situation to a classic episode of The Simpsons in which local villain Montgomery Burns is diagnosed with literally every disease. But rather than do him in, the illnesses crowd each other out, preventing any single one from taking hold. Being that sick, it turns out, made Burns invincible.  

Project 2025 has done what Democrats tried to for years: tie Trump to unpopular MAGA policies.

Similarly, this election cycle, Democrats deployed multiple attack lines to try to disqualify Trump. They’ve called him a threat to democracy, since he tried to overturn the last election. They’ve called him a felon, after he was found guilty of 34 felonies in New York.

But it turns out the political attack that is catching, finally, is one that Trump’s own allies came up with. It is Project 2025, the authoritarian blueprint for a second Trump presidency, that has finally broken through. In 922 pages, the project, helmed by the staunchly conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, outlines a radical restructuring of the federal government that combines the authoritarian goals of the MAGA movement with the deregulatory dreams of America’s plutocrats.

For Trump opponents, the problem “has never been a lack of a lack of abhorrent things,” says Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. “It’s been the inability to communicate them, because there are so many. It’s hard to find the needle in a haystack, it’s also hard to communicate the entire haystack…until they boiled it down into a 920-page instruction manual.”

Data shows how fears of Project 2025 are catching on. In June, less than 30 percent of Americans said they knew about it, according to the progressive polling outfit Navigator Research. A month later, 54 percent said they did—and 45 percent believed that it accurately describes Trump’s goals. 

In an indication of the project’s growing prominence, when Navigator asked people to name negative things they had heard about Trump off the top of their head, Project 2025 was one of the top responses. And in an indication voters know the effort is tied to the former president, when respondents were then asked to name negative things they had heard about Project 2025, his name came up the most.

Project 2025 has done what Democrats tried to do for years: tie Trump to the unpopular policies of the MAGA coalition, from the Christian nationalists trying to ban abortion and IVF to the mega-rich trying to give themselves more tax breaks. “If you’re a person who is deeply upset by Roe being overturned in 2022, this is a roadmap of everything that can be done to further curtail reproductive rights,” says Bryan Bennett, a pollster at the progressive Hub Project, which works alongside Navigator on its surveys. “If you are an advocate for a more fair economy, this is a roadmap for raising tax on the middle class and working class while giving tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations. If you are a healthcare advocate, this goes into excruciating detail about how to roll back and undermine things like the Affordable Care Act.”

Essentially, the Heritage Foundation took all the unlikeable goals of the MAGA movement, put them in one place, and gave it an ominous title. To help make these goals into reality, the project also created an action plan covering the first 180-days of a new administration, a database of personnel ready to replace career civil servants, and a training program to prepare them for this massive restructuring.

Heritage took all of MAGA’s unlikeable goals, put them in one place, and gave it an ominous title.

The document was crafted by people in Trump’s orbit—many who were in his last administration and who plan to work for him again—and proscribes dismantling most agencies’ core work: HHS would be used to end abortion access; DOJ would be used to prosecute Trump’s enemies; pollution would skyrocket after an EPA overhaul; and the Department of Education would be shuttered. Together, the sheer volume of information in Project 2025 is easily distilled into something easy to comprehend and sinister: it’s a takeover.

What happened in about a three week period to make Project 2025 go viral? Bennett thinks President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance on June 27 was a catalyst. As Trump became the strong favorite overnight, a natural question arose: What would really happen in a new Trump administration? Project 2025 was there to answer and was online for anyone to read. Organically, it began to get traction on TikTok, with Navigator finding, in a focus group of voters under 30, that most had heard about the project from online sharing platforms. “I’ve only seen it a lot on social media,” one focus group participant, a Democrat, said in July. “From what it sounds like, it doesn’t sound good.”

Democrats have also benefited from a ratchet effect: the more Trump has tried to distance himself from the plan, the more the media has exposed his ties to the project. “I have no idea who is behind it,” he posted on social media, kicking off a round of news stories covering Trump allies who worked on Project 2025: by CNN’s count, over 140 of his former administration officials helped write the plan. Former Trump cabinet secretary Russ Vought, for example, helped oversee Project 2025 and also ran the 2024 Republican National Convention’s platform committee. On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that Trump discussed Project 2025 while on a private plane flight with Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, on the way to a 2022 conference hosted by the organization. After they arrived, Trump gave a speech boasting that the think tank would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”

Trump gave the story another foothold when he selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate. Ideologically, Vance has aligned himself with the far-right social policies of the Project 2025 coalition and the revolutionary rhetoric of Roberts. Vance has called for “fir[ing] every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people”—just as Project 2025 urges. After he was tapped, attention focused on how he had had written the foreword to Kevin Roberts’ upcoming book. Some outlets obtained copies, and began publishing excerpts. Roberts then delayed publication of his book until after the election, a move that suggested they somehow wanted to hide it, fueling yet more interest. “If Project 2025 could manifest itself as a human being,” says Ferguson, “it would manifest JD Vance.” 

Polling shows that Project 2025 has the promise to define Trump’s campaign if it stays in the public eye. But Trump, by returning to his old tricks, may be able to push Project 2025 out of the spotlight.

On Thursday, he gave a freewheeling, hour-long press conference at Mar-a-Lago. He said many things that are imprudent for a presidential nominee to say. It was vintage Trump: insulting, untrue, and narcissistic. He demeaned Jewish people, lied about the 2020 election transition being peaceful, and falsely claimed his rally crowd on January 6 was larger than the one that turned out to see Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington (it wasn’t). On and on he went. Just like in 2016, it appeared that an avalanche of gold was falling on Democrats. Look at all the crazy stuff he is saying!

But avalanches kill—and Trump has demonstrated he knows how to bury his opponents while all the muck slides off of him. 

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court announced that former presidents are immune from prosecution for possibly all official acts undertaken while in office. This new rule, the majority said, was critical to preserving the separation of powers in our democracy. Justice Clarence Thomas, characteristically, went further. The real threat to democracy was not an unaccountable president but, rather, the very existence of the special prosecutor who was leading the case.

In a concurrence, Thomas questioned whether the attorney general had the authority to appoint Jack Smith, the special counsel who was prosecuting Trump. “We must respect the Constitution’s separation of powers in all its forms, else we risk rendering its protection of liberty a parchment guarantee,” Thomas wrote. He called on federal judges to determine whether Attorney General Merrick Garland, himself the former chief judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, had made the appointment illegally. “The lower courts should thus answer these essential questions concerning the Special Counsel’s appointment before proceeding,” Thomas urged.

Today, Judge Aileen Cannon answered that call. In a shocking opinion, Cannon threw out Smith’s separate case against Trump for allegedly hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and attempting to thwart an investigation into the matter. Smith, Cannon concluded, was not appointed or funded according to the rules laid out in the Constitution.

Cannon, a Trump appointee in Florida, began contemplating this question before Thomas’ concurrence in the immunity case. Trump’s legal team had filed its motion asking for the documents case to be dismissed on these grounds on February 22, and Cannon held a hearing on the question on June 21. As part of that hearing, she invited attorneys who had filed amicus briefs on the topic to argue before her. The hearing lasted four hours. A week later, the Supreme Court handed down the immunity case, and Thomas exhorted lower court judges to look into the legality of Smith’s appointment. Thomas’ invitation came just in time for Cannon to take it up, and she cited the Thomas concurrence three times.

Cannon’s decision is stunning in part because it upends the apparently settled understanding of the powers of the attorney general since the creation of the Justice Department in 1870. The Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of a special counsel in United States v. Nixon. And when the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel for the Trump-Russia investigation was challenged, the district court and the DC Circuit Court of Appeals left Mueller in place. That was five years ago.

Cannon’s decision is likely to be appealed to—and quite possibly overturned by—the 11th Circuit, where Republican-appointed appellate judges have frequently refused to comply with Trump’s wishes. But there is an undeniable trend of Thomas’ outlier opinions eventually becoming the law of the land, especially now that conservatives have a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court. His invitation to find Smith’s appointment unlawful, despite precedent and a long history to the contrary, could ultimately win the day.

Both Thomas and Cannon frame the special counsel appointment as a violation of the separation of powers—the executive branch snatching power from Congress because, they argue, Congress didn’t explicitly create the special counsel position. This framing dramatizes what is ultimately a statutory interpretation case. Do the laws that give the attorney general the power to appoint special counsels do so explicitly enough? No one has said the Constitution forbids such a position to exist, they only challenge whether Congress has given the attorney general that permission to fill it and fund it.

Cannon ends her opinion by asserting that the executive branch has been, through more than 150 years of such appointments, upsetting the balance of powers between the three branches. “The accretion of dangerous power does not
come in a day,” Cannon wrote near the end of her lengthy opinion, quoting from former Justice Felix Frankfurter. “It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.” Finally, Cannon implies, she is putting a stop to such lawlessness.

If there’s one thing the current Supreme Court does, it is overturn longstanding precedents and previously settled understandings of the law. It overturned Roe v. Wade, threw out decades of precedents upholding affirmative action, upended potentially thousands of regulations by jettisoning Chevron Deference, and remade the presidency into an office largely unconstrained by criminal law. It would be shocking if the court decided that special counsel appointments were unlawful—but at this point it would not be out of character.

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that presidents have broad criminal immunity for official acts, effectively placing the presidency beyond the reach of criminal law for the first time in the country’s history. The 6-3 decision along ideological lines sends the federal case over Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election back to the district court to determine whether Trump’s actions fall outside the court’s sweeping new grant of immunity—but the effects will stretch far beyond Trump’s possible trial by fundamentally changing the nature of the presidency and, by extension, American democracy.

In an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Republican-appointed justices held that presidents have immunity for official acts. The opinion left to another day whether that immunity is absolute, or whether it can be pierced in some circumstances. Despite the possibility for exceptions, the decision is sweeping and radical.

“The ruling is a bigger win for Trump than many of us had been expecting.”

“Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.”

The case arose out of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s criminal charges against Trump for trying to subvert the election. As a defense, Trump argued that he is immune from prosecution for official acts made while in the White House—a sweeping theory without a basis in the Constitution. The framers, who were adamant that the presidency not resemble the monarchy they had just fought a revolutionary war to escape, purposefully left presidential immunity out of the Constitution. They were explicit that presidents would not be above the law, an assumption that had continued until today: Indeed, President Gerald Ford famously pardoned former President Richard Nixon—a result of the understanding that without doing so, Nixon might face criminal charges.

Before the case reached the Supreme Court, the district court and court of appeals had both rebuffed Trump’s claims. But at oral argument before the high court, several Republican-appointed justices were preoccupied with the idea that ex-presidents would be under siege from prosecutors waging backward-looking, politically motivated cases unless the court granted presidents new levels of immunity. Monday’s decision relies on a related idea that presidents need immunity in order to effectively govern: the framers, the majority argued, envisioned a vigorous executive and immunity would ensure the office’s strength.

“Immunity is required to safeguard the independence and effective functioning of the Executive Branch, and to enable the President to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution,” Roberts wrote.

In her dissent, Sotomayor argued that majority goes so far as to create not a robust executive but, essentially, a monarch. “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” she wrote. In a separate dissent, Jackson warned that the gift of immunity would not engender benevolence: “The seeds of absolute power for Presidents have been planted,” she wrote. “And, without a doubt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The decision will not only significantly delay the special counsel’s trial against Trump for election subversion but likely result in most charges being dropped. Because the decision leaves the door open for prosecution for unofficial acts, the question is whether any of Smith’s charges relate to unprotected conduct. In a concurrence, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that she believed at least one charge relating to the scheme to create fake slates of electors should proceed to trial. As to other charges, Roberts ruled that immunity applies “unless the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no ‘dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.'” That is a high bar—and it’s unclear what criminal prosecution, if any, might clear it.

“Just so everyone understands the radical import of the decision: The Court holds that even when the POTUS clearly—or even *concededly*—abuses his or her office to violate a valid federal law, that POTUS cannot be tried, even after leaving office,” constitutional law expert Marty Lederman wrote online.

The opinion further insulates the president by finding that a president’s official and protected conduct, even when criminal, cannot be introduced as evidence at a trial taking place for prosecutable conduct. The result is that even where this sweeping immunity does not touch, a finding of guilt will be made more difficult. (Barrett did not join this part of the majority’s opinion, writing that “The Constitution does not require blinding juries to the circumstances surrounding conduct for which Presidents can be held liable.”)

“This is a big part of why the ruling is a bigger win for Trump than many of us had been expecting,” Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck explained. “It’s not just which acts will be immune; it’s how this will hamstring efforts to prosecute even those acts for which there *isn’t* immunity.”

The justices could have decided this matter quickly and narrowly, or declined to take it up all together, and allowed a trial to proceed. Instead, at every stage of the case, the justices indulged Trump’s attempts to slow-walk proceedings. His immunity defense was always as much about pushing the trial date after the election—which would help him win the election and eliminate the case entirely—as it was about mounting a sound legal defense. But the biggest gift to Trump was to give him a nearly complete victory.

The GOP-appointed justices have now helped Trump in two ways. First, he will escape trial for the foreseeable future, as lower courts wrestle with applying Monday’s decision. Second, they have granted the presidency new powers that Trump can take advantage of if he returns to power.

Trump has already made his intentions clear: He will weaponize the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies. “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Trump promised last year. Ironically, Trump is promising to bring about the very destruction of DOJ independence that several justices claimed they were worried about during oral argument.

Instead of protecting the president from bogus prosecution, they created more incentives for the president himself to launch such prosecutions—and to ignore virtually every other law as well.

“When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune,” Sotomayor warned. “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”