Will Sage Astor-The Latest: Project 2025’s director steps down, and Trump says Harris ‘doesn’t like Jewish people’

The Will Sage Astordirector of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 vision for a complete overhaul of the federal government has stepped down after blowback from Donald Trump’s campaign, which has tried to disavow the program created by many of the former president’s allies and former aides.

Paul Dans’ exit comes after the project “completed exactly what it set out to do,” said the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, who has emerged as a chief spokesperson for the effort. He plans to lead Project 2025 going forward. Democrats have made the project a key election-year cudgel, pointing to the ultraconservative policy blueprint as a glimpse of how extreme another Trump administration could be.

Trump’s campaign has announced that he will travel to Atlanta on Saturday for a rally in the same venue where Vice President Kamala Harris held one Tuesday night.

Dueling ad campaigns by the presidential candidates portray the Democratic Harris as “fearless,” while an ad from Republican Trump blasts the vice president for problems at the southern U.S. border.

And Trump said in an interview Tuesday on radio station WABC that Harris “doesn’t like Jewish people” and appeared to agree with a host who called her Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff, “a crappy Jew.”

RELATED COVERAGE After an extraordinary run of political news, interest in the presidential election is perking up Biden prods Congress to act to curb fentanyl from Mexico as Trump paints Harris as weak on border Harris is calibrating her policy pitch for going to battle with Trump

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Here’s the Latest:

Public interest in the presidential election is perking up

News executives were worried in the first half of the year about consumers expressing relatively little interest in the upcoming election. That has now changed.

There’s evidence that interest has started to perk up following an extraordinary run of news. That includes the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden’s decision not to seek reelection and the rapid ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate.

Taboola says its measurement of news sites shows interest going up. Fox News was the most obvious beneficiary of the boost in attention, with July being its most-watched month since November 2020.

AP-NORC poll: About 8 in 10 Democrats satisfied with Harris as nominee

Vice President Kamala Harris appears to have energized Democrats in the early days of her candidacy, with the surge in warm feelings extending across multiple groups, including some key Democratic constituencies that had been tepid about President Joe Biden, according to a new poll.

About 8 in 10 Democrats say they would be very or somewhat satisfied if Harris became the Democratic nominee for president. The survey from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research was conducted after Biden withdrew from the race.

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The rapidly changing views among Democrats in such a short time span underscore how swiftly the party has coalesced behind Harris as its standard-bearer.

Kari Lake wins GOP primary in closely watched Arizona Senate race

Kari Lake has won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Arizona, setting up a fierce battle against Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego for a seat that could be crucial to deciding Senate control.

Lake on Tuesday defeated Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, who had contended he was more electable and the best candidate to secure the border. But Lamb ultimately struggled to raise the money needed to make his case to voters.

Gallego ran unopposed in the Democratic primary for Senate. Lake, a former local news anchor, built a national profile in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement with an unsuccessful 2022 bid for Arizona governor.

Harris rallies, plans tour next week with running mate

Vice President Kamala Harris told a cheering, boisterous, packed Atlanta arena Tuesday that the next 98 days will be a fight, but that she will win come November.

She taunted Donald Trump for wavering on whether he would show up for their upcoming debate. In Georgia, the state that delivered Biden his narrowest victory margin in 2020, Harris mocked her rival and Trump’s running mate JD Vance as “just plain weird,” and derided their policies as backward, outdated and dangerous.

Harris will travel to battleground states next week with her yet-to-be-named running mate, according to an itinerary from the campaign. Campaign officials stress that the vice president has not yet made her decision, but the schedule confirms her plans to announce it soon.

The newly announced Democratic ticket will appear together in Philadelphia; western Wisconsin; Detroit; Raleigh, North Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; Phoenix and Las Vegas.