As he looks back at the defeat of former Vice President Kamala Harris last fall, the thing that keeps bothering Andrei Cherny, a onetime Democratic speechwriter and state party leader, is that he didn’t know what Ms. Harris would have done as president if she had won.
The way he saw it, President Trump ran on his own ideas, but Ms. Harris only ran against Mr. Trump’s. “The oldest truism in politics is you can’t beat something with nothing,” Mr. Cherny said.
Now Mr. Cherny, the co-founder of a nearly two-decade-old liberal policy journal, is organizing a group of Democratic thinkers to recreate what Mr. Trump’s allies did when he was voted out of office: draft a ready-made agenda for the next Democratic presidential nominee.
They’re calling it Project 2029.
The title is an unsubtle play on Project 2025, the independently produced right-wing agenda that Mr. Trump spent much of last year’s campaign distancing himself from, and much of his first few months back in power executing.
The fact that Democrats turned Project 2025 into a cudgel against Mr. Trump during the campaign has not deterred Mr. Cherny and the other Democrats working with him from borrowing the tactic. They plan to roll out an agenda over the next two years, in quarterly installments, through Mr. Cherny’s publication, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The goal is to turn it into a book — just like Project 2025 — and to rally leading Democratic presidential candidates behind those ideas during the 2028 primary season.
The undertaking, which has not previously been reported, strikes at the heart of a raging debate consuming Democratic lawmakers, strategists and policymakers: whether the root of the party’s problems is its ideas or its difficulty in persuading people to embrace them.
The surprise success of Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, in the New York mayoral primary only added fuel to that debate. Did he succeed because of the audacity of his ideas — “freeze the rent,” “free buses” and “free child care” — or because of the clarity and simplicity of those phrases? Was it his relentless focus on affordability? And would it have worked if he weren’t as charismatic and savvy at social media as he proved to be?
Many strategists see the party’s issue as more style than substance, arguing that Democrats need to do a better job at packaging and delivering their plans to voters, rather than crafting new proposals entirely.
“We didn’t lack policies,” said Celinda Lake, a prominent Democratic pollster. “But we lacked a functioning narrative to communicate those policies.”
Ms. Lake complained that Democrats presented voters with “agencies and acronyms and statistics” rather than with a clear story about “what we’re going to fight for.” An innovative refundable tax rebate, in other words, would not suddenly unlock the Electoral College.
But others believe the party has been losing ground nationally because its ideas are stale, uninspiring and unresponsive to the demands of today’s voters.
Neera Tanden, who served in the White House in the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations and now leads the Center for American Progress, said that for years, Democrats have failed to appreciate the role that Mr. Trump’s policies have played in his success.
“Liberals underestimate the power of Trump’s ideas, and that we need better ideas to take on both Trumpism and the G.O.P.,” she said. “We get wrapped up in his personality. But he puts forward an idea like ‘No tax on tips,’ and that’s an important signifier that he is championing working-class people.”
Ms. Tanden is part of a sizable advisory board for Project 2029 that includes Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former president of the New America Foundation; the economist Justin Wolfers; Felicia Wong, until recently the president of the progressive Roosevelt Institute; and Jim Kessler, a founder of the centrist group Third Way.
Mr. Cherny, now the president of the journal he helped create, called the assemblage “the Avengers of public policy, or the Justice League, depending on your personal persuasion: the best thinkers from across the spectrum.” The group plans to hold public conferences to hammer out their differences on topics including the economy, national security, government reform and education.
Some would-be allies are skeptical that such an ideologically diverse and divergent set of policy minds could craft anything close to a coherent agenda, let alone a politically winning one.
“Developing policies by checking every coalitional box is how we got in this mess in the first place,” said Adam Jentleson, who has spent recent months preparing to open a new think tank called Searchlight. “There is no way to propose the kind of policies the Democratic Party needs to adopt without pissing off some part of the interest-group Borg. And if you’re too afraid to do that, you don’t have what it takes to steer the party in the right direction.”
Mr. Cherny’s little-known Democracy quarterly has quietly helped to shape some Democratic administrations. Six of Mr. Biden’s cabinet-level appointees at one point published essays in the journal. Years before she won her seat in the Senate, Elizabeth Warren outlined in its pages her plans for what eventually became the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Now, a robust fight is underway among Democratic intellectuals about how to define the party into the future.
One of the most visible fissures is between a populist wing that wants to cast corporations and billionaires as villains (see the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour anchored by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont) and advocates of the so-called abundance agenda, named for the book with that title by Ezra Klein, a columnist for The New York Times, and Derek Thompson, who recently announced his departure from The Atlantic.
Supporters of the abundance approach seek to work with corporations — “There will be no green transition without corporate ingenuity,” Mr. Klein wrote in a recent column — and cut through regulation to solve problems and achieve progressive outcomes more quickly. The party’s long-term success, the argument goes, will be determined most by showing that liberalism works.
The populist wing, at its simplest, seeks to redistribute power and wealth to the working class and away from economic and corporate elites, and to mobilize voters through that fight.
Nick Gourevitch, a Democratic pollster, said that policies matter, but so does the context in which they are presented to voters.
He said it was imperative for Democrats to tell voters that they think the existing system stinks, not just to propose ideas. Saying that the tax system was “rigged” to favor the rich, he said, made Democratic proposals to make corporations and the wealthy “pay their fair share” nine percentage points more popular, in one recent poll he helped conduct.
“People think that our various systems and laws are broken,” he said. “If you acknowledge that the system needs to be fixed to work better, then you start in a better place. It is more about convincing people we are for what is popular, and communicating that to them, than it is about wrapping it up with a new type of tax credit.”
Some party strategists privately expressed concern about the decision to brand Project 2029 after a document that Democrats pilloried in 2024.
The Biden and Harris campaigns made Project 2025 a central boogeyman in the 2024 race, trying to yoke Mr. Trump to its most hard-line provisions, including reshaping the federal government, curbing abortion rights and climate protections and drastically reducing immigration. A New York Times and Siena College poll in September showed that only 15 percent of likely voters said they supported the policies in Project 2025, while 63 percent opposed. An NBC News survey showed Project 2025 was less popular than socialism.
Mr. Trump repeatedly disavowed the policy road map, which had been spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, though it was drafted by many of his allies and he aligned with many of its specifics. Russel T. Vought, a key Project 2025 architect, now leads the White House budget office.
Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, as well as of the Democracy journal, said Project 2025’s political toxicity wouldn’t mean that Project 2029 “is fated to be unpopular.”
“Our ideas aren’t radical or extreme,” he said.
Instead, he said he hoped to refresh the view of the Democratic Party among the less well off.
“Liberalism has not done its best job of connecting with working-class people,” he said. “We want what we put out to shape the conversation in the primary season.”
Of course, Democratic candidates did engage in a spirited policy fight during the party’s last open primary, in 2019. But many in the party now point to that period as having dragged the party sharply to the left, even though Mr. Biden, who ignored the progressive wing during much of the period, ultimately won the nomination. Indeed, some of Ms. Harris’s comments that year — including about using taxpayer funds to provide transgender surgical care to federal prisoners — were used against her last year with devastating effect.
Marc J. Dunkelman, a fellow at the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy at Brown University who is involved in Project 2029, said the effort’s most important goal was to devise ways to connect to voters who have lost faith in the political system.
“We need to grapple with the fact that people think government isn’t working, and they’re right,” he said. “Whether we like it or not, the Democratic Party is the party of government, and government doesn’t work. If you want people to vote for us, you have to demonstrate you have a plan to make things work.”
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
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