Politics
Democrats Restart Campaign Against Trump at RNC With Focus on Project 2025
U.S. Sen. Cory Booker campaigns for President Joe Biden in Milwaukee on July 16, 2024. (Michael Izquierdo / WTTW News)
Democrats restarted their campaign against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Tuesday, ending a self-imposed pause that followed an attempt to assassinate the former president.
U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), campaigning on behalf of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, sought to focus the campaign on the contents on Project 2025, a 900-page manifesto titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”
“We’re at a crossroads here,” Booker said. “The contrast couldn’t be more stark.”
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Booker was flanked by Ben Wikler, the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin; AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler; and Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager. The senator called Project 2025 frightening, noting that it calls for the Affordable Care Act to be repealed.
“It will put us in this dystopian world,” Booker said.
In addition, Project 2025 calls for a national abortion ban and calls for the FDA to reverse its approval of abortion pills and criminalize their distribution.
However, the official platform of the Republican Party does not call for a national abortion ban, which Trump has said he opposes. However, the platform invokes the 14th Amendment as part of its promise to “protect unborn life.”
That would require courts to treat fetuses as people endowed with rights under the U.S constitution, which could open the door to a national abortion ban and an end to fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization.
Booker pleaded with reporters to focus on what Trump did as president — not what he is saying while running for a second term.
“It doesn’t take much to just look at the four years of Donald Trump and see what you got: an erosion of women’s rights, an erosion of reproductive rights, an erosion of abortion rights,” Booker said. “I don’t care what they say. You have evidence. We have clarity.”
Shuler and Booker called Biden the most pro-union president in history, noting that he walked the picket line with striking auto workers.
“This isn’t complicated,” Booker said, urging reporters and journalists to “lay two presidencies side by side and see who has the best record” on a host of issues.
Fulks told reporters Democratic delegates will officially nominate Biden for president in a virtual roll call before the Democratic National Convention starts on Aug. 19 in Chicago.
The plan for a virtual roll call was developed when the timing of the convention threatened to keep Biden and Harris off the ballot in Ohio, where Republican lawmakers initially resisted changing the law.
Even though Ohio officials extended the deadline, Democrats will move forward with the plan for the virtual roll call. Fulks told reporters the Democratic Party will not “play games about who is on this ballot.
“We’re not going to leave it up to Ohio Republicans to have President Biden not be on the ballot in every single state,” Fulks said.
The move will also give Democrats who want to see Biden replaced at the top of the ticket because of his poor performance in the first debate with Trump less time to mobilize — and make the official roll call set for the first night of the convention even more of a foregone conclusion than normal.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
