WASHINGTON – Paul Dans, a leading figure behind Project 2025, is set to challenge Sen. Lindsey Graham in the Republican primary in South Carolina. This adds him to an already competitive race that may influence the allegiance of President Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters in the upcoming midterm elections.

Dans expressed to The Associated Press that he envisioned reductions in the federal workforce and cuts to federal programs under the Trump administration, aligning with the goals of Project 2025. However, he believes “more work is necessary,” with a focus on the Senate.

“With Project 2025, we have fundamentally shifted the game in shutting down the progressive era’s influence,” Dans stated in an interview with the AP. “When you examine the obstacle, it’s the United States Senate. That’s where the core issues lie.”

Dans, who is set to formally announce his campaign at an event Wednesday in Charleston, said Graham has spent most of his career in Washington and “it’s time to show him the door.”

Challenging the long-serving Graham, who has routinely batted back contenders over the years, is something of a political long shot in what is fast becoming a crowded field ahead of the November 2026 midterm election that will determine control of Congress.

Trump early on gave his endorsement of Graham, a political confidant and regular golfing partner of the president, despite their on-again-off-again relationship. Graham, in announcing he would seek a fifth term in the Senate, also secured the state’s leading Republicans, Sen. Tim Scott and Gov. Henry McMaster, to chair his 2026 run. He has amassed millions of dollars in his campaign account.

Other candidates, including Republican former South Carolina Lt. Gov. André Bauer, a wealthy developer, and Democratic challenger Dr. Annie Andrews, have announced their campaigns for the Senate seat in an early start to the election season, more than a year away.

Graham, in an appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” did not discuss his reelection campaign but fielded questions on topics including his push to release “as much as you can” from the case files on Jeffrey Epstein, something many of Trump’s supporters want the government to do.

Dans, an attorney who worked in the first Trump administration as White House liaison to the office of personnel management, said he expects to have support from Project 2025 allies, as well as the ranks of Trump’s supporters in the state who have publicly tired of Graham.

After Trump left the White House, Dans, now a father of four, went to work at the Heritage Foundation, often commuting on weekdays to Washington as he organized Project 2025. The nearly 1,000-page policy blueprint, with chapters written by leading conservative thinkers, calls for dismantling the federal government and downsizing the federal workforce, among other right-wing proposals for the next White House.

“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 said, noting he compiled much of the book from his kitchen table in Charleston.

Among the goals, he said, was to “deconstruct the administrative state,” which he said is what the Trump administration has been doing, pointing in particular to former Trump adviser Elon Musk’s work at the Department of Government Efficiency shuttering federal offices.

Dans and Heritage parted ways in July 2024 amid blowback over Project 2025. It catapulted into political culture that summer during the presidential campaign season, as Democrats and their allies showcased the hard-right policy proposals — from mass firings to budget cuts — as a dire warning of what could come in a second Trump term.

Trump distanced himself from Project 2025, and his campaign insisted it had nothing to do with his own “Agenda 47.”

Dans is launching his campaign with a prayer breakfast followed by a kick-off event at a historic venue in Charleston.

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Kinnard reported from Chapin, South Carolina, and can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP.