The Harris-Walz campaign is launching a battleground-state push to sign former President Donald Trump to Project 2025 ahead of his first debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday, Scripps News has learned. This follows a weekend of outreach in which officials say tens of thousands of volunteers reached more than 1 million voters.

The new blitz comes as the campaign contrasts what it sees as Harris’ “New Way Forward” with Trump’s “extreme Project 2025 agenda,” referring to the 922-page plan from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, designed for the “next conservative president.” Top campaign surrogates will accompany local officials to 18 events across the country, including key swing states such as Virginia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia.

According to a planned route map of stops obtained by Scripps News, the events will reflect issues central to the campaign, such as reproductive freedoms and labor rights. They will appeal to voting coalitions central to their electoral strategy: young voters, union members, small business leaders, Hispanic voters and moderates.

The campaign includes events in Pennsylvania with Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, in Virginia with New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and the founder of that state’s Latino Caucus, with local farmers and small business leaders in Madison, Wisconsin, with union leaders in Phoenix and Lansing, Michigan, with students and Gen Z voters in Las Vegas, with a reproductive health expert in Portland, Maine, with Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson, a member of the “Tennessee Three,” in Savannah, and in Florida with co-chairs of the state’s Republicans for Harris.

The campaign hopes to emphasize pre-debate discussions, which officials say will focus on Harris’ work supporting the middle class and warnings about Trump’s plans to amass unchecked power.

Democrats have heavily promoted Project 2025 and tried to tie Trump to it, warning that proposed measures would restrict abortion, slash social safety net programs and lay off tens of thousands of government workers.

RELATED STORY | Project 2025: Dismantle the Department of Education, Cut Taxes, and Restrict Abortion

This past weekend, the Harris-Walz campaign hosted a weekend of action centered around Project 2025, with more than 2,000 events, organizers said.

“With hundreds of offices and thousands of staff spread across the battlegrounds, we can leverage all the buzz around the debate and reach hard-to-reach voters about Project 2025,” said Dan Kanninen, Harris-Walz’s battlegrounds director, ahead of the weekend push.

Public opinion research has shown that voters are overwhelmingly unfavorable toward the project, with a significant number still unfamiliar with it. In an Economist/YouGov poll of Americans conducted in early August, nearly half said they had an unfavorable opinion of Project 2025, and 39 percent didn’t know enough about it to answer.

More than a third of respondents in swing states surveyed last month by Emerson College Polling/The Hill said Project 2025 made them less likely to support Trump, a number that rose among independents. However, more respondents in every state said the project made no difference to their vote or that they were unfamiliar with it.

Trump has repeatedly denied any ties to the plan and the people behind it, though its drafters include former Trump administration officials and the document overlaps with several of his policy proposals.

The former president spent the weekend ramping up his rhetoric around issues central to his campaign, such as immigration and alleged political corruption. At a rally with supporters in Wisconsin, Trump suggested that achieving the mass deportations he proposed would be a “bloody story.” In a post on his Truth Social app, he escalated his previous calls to lock up his political enemies, suggesting that those responsible for alleged election fraud “will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include lengthy prison sentences, so that this perversion of justice does not happen again.”

Several courts and state officials have dismissed Trump’s claims of election fraud as baseless.

But with Harris poised to top the ticket, the country remains evenly divided between the candidates. A poll released Sunday by The New York Times and Siena College showed Trump and Harris neck and neck, with the former president narrowly leading the vice president 48-47. Trump and Harris were tied or within the margin of error in all of the swing states expected to decide the election.

Harris has spent the past few days in Pittsburgh preparing for the debate, where she has publicly expressed her confidence in facing Trump. During a visit to a local grocery store, she told reporters what she wants to tell Trump: “It’s time to turn the page on division. It’s time to unite our country. To chart a new path forward.”

She will face Trump for the first time on Tuesday at 9 p.m. Eastern Time at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

After the debate, with less than 60 days until Election Day, Vice President Harris, Gov. Tim Walz and campaign officials are expected to storm battleground states, continuing to push Project 2025 and its ties to Trump. Harris will kick off the “New Way Forward” tour with rallies in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, while Walz will visit Michigan and Wisconsin.

RELATED STORY | ABC sets microphone policy, other rules for presidential debate