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 Harris would have done as president if she had won.

The way he saw it, President Donald Trump ran on his own ideas, but Harris only ran against Trump’s. “The oldest truism in politics is you can’t beat something with nothing,” Cherny said.

Cherny, the co-founder of a nearly 2-decade-old liberal policy journal, is now organizing a group of Democratic thinkers to replicate what 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 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 Trump during the campaign has not deterred 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 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 Assembly member 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, adding that Democrats presented voters with “agencies and acronyms and statistics” rather than with a clear story about “what we’re going to fight for.”

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 with 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 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 GOP,” 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.”

Tanden is part of a sizable advisory board for Project 2029 that includes Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser under former President Joe Biden; Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former president of the New America Foundation; 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.

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 like 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.”

Cherny’s little-known quarterly, Democracy, has quietly helped shape some Democratic administrations. Six of 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 Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.) 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,” 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.

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 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% of likely voters said they supported the policies in Project 2025, while 63% opposed. An NBC News survey showed Project 2025 was less popular than socialism.