Project 2025's Paul Dans will challenge Lindsey Graham in South Carolina Republican primary

Source: The Guardian

Mon 28 Jul 2025 14.56 EDT
First published on Mon 28 Jul 2025 12.09 EDT


Paul Dans, one of the main forces behind the conservative blueprint Project 2025, will run against Lindsey Graham in the South Carolina Republican primary next year. News outlets reported on Monday that Dans will join a crowded field of Republican contenders looking to unseat the senator. Dans is planning a formal announcement for Wednesday in Charleston.

Dans served as the director for Project 2025 until July 2024, when sustained criticism of the project threatened Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency. Dans left the Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025, as the project became a liability last year. Since then, though, as Trump has put in place or introduced many elements of the project, Dans has reveled in it. Dans, who served as chief of staff in the office of personnel management (OPM) in the first Trump administration, told Politico earlier this year that the second Trump administration has been “actually way beyond my wildest dreams”.

In the 900-plus page manifesto, Project 2025 called for dismantling the US government’s so-called “deep state” of career employees, replacing them with political appointees beholden to the president’s agenda. It also detailed a host of policy changes, from cracking down on immigration to eliminating programs and protections for LGTBQ+ people. Dozens of conservative groups helped create the project, and some of its key proponents have gotten spots in the second Trump administration.

“To be clear, I believe that there is a ‘deep state’ out there, and I’m the single one who stepped forward at the end of the first term of Trump and really started to drain the swamp,” Dans told the Associated Press. He said the US Senate is the “headwaters of the swamp”.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/28/paul-dans-south-carolina-project-2025