Democrats’ Project 2029 Is Doubling Down on Failure

The Democrats' Project 2029 takes up the unique strategy of getting the very people who drove their party into the disastrous rut it is now stuck in to come up with the ideas that will get it out.

President Biden Delivers Remarks At Medal Of Freedom Ceremony

Former president Joe Biden awards Hillary Clinton the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a ceremony at the White House, on January 4, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Tom Brenner / Getty Images)


For anyone hoping Kamala Harris’s disastrous 2024 loss would make the Democratic Party drastically change direction, the bad news can be summed up in two words: Project 2029.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that Democrats are planning their own version of the right-wing policy blueprint that is the driving engine of Donald Trump’s presidency, which they’ll roll out piecemeal each quarter for the next two years in one of the party’s intellectual organs, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The man leading the effort is also that journal’s founder and coeditor: Andrei Cherny, a New Democrat wunderkind and (briefly) former Arizona Democratic party chair, who claims to have put together a team that’s “the Avengers of public policy.”

But based on the names we know so far, Cherny’s team is less the Avengers and more the Great Lakes Avengers — the hapless joke team of uselessly powered “heroes” who do more dying than saving the day. The Project 2029 brain trust now tasked with saving the Democratic Party is quite literally composed of the same line-up of people who brought the party to its knees in the first place, handing Donald Trump power not once, but twice.

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