Mmmm, I'm gonna have to challenge you here.
First of all, it's just flatly not true that there's a "growing number of extreme nationalists, misogynists, and racists among ordinary Americans." That movement has become more vocal and visible in post-2016 America, but there's absolutely no evidence -- and indeed, a lot of evidence to the contrary -- that their numbers are growing instead of shrinking. The Republicans got lucky with Trump's win in 2016 thanks to a combination of decades of anti-Hillary smears, extensive Russian interference/psyops, the anti-democratic Electoral College, and general misplaced complacence that he was never going to win and people didn't need to bother voting for two disliked candidates. They've flatly lost every competitive nationwide election since then -- 2018, 2020, 2022, and very probably 2024. In between, their hand-picked Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (guaranteeing the right to an abortion in all 50 states) and set off a titanic tidal wave of voter support for abortion rights, even in very dark red states like Kansas and Kentucky (which are not liberal by any stretch of the word). In fact, the Republicans' (flatly false) excuse that they just wanted to "return [abortion rights to the states]" has been unveiled as another lie due to their desperate attempts in this election cycle to ratfuck voter-approved abortion questions off the ballot in Arkansas, Missouri, Florida, and elsewhere. This is a badly losing issue for them, even in deep red states, and they don't want people to vote on it, because they hate democracy. We'll get to that.
Likewise, polls of "culture war" issues like LGBTQ+ rights, abortion rights, immigrants' rights, etc., consistently get much more support among ordinary Americans than not. The ordinary public is becoming more liberal, not less, even in the face of constant aggressive and reactionary attempts to undo the sum total of social and civil rights movements from the 20th century. Republicans' views are getting less popular, not more, and this is also driven by the ongoing demographic change in America. Within a generation or two, whites may be in the statistical minority, and that deeply terrifies people whose entire political and social identity is built on ethnostate white supremacism. The reason Republicans are getting so extreme and antidemocratic now is because the electorate is getting younger and younger, more diverse, more accepting, and less tolerant of their age-old bullshit. As such, there is a very visible window of time outside which the Republicans will not be able to win competitive nationwide elections, even despite all the advantages they're building into the system and have always had. That terrifies them. It is also why they have decided to destroy democracy.
Which leads us into your next assertion that "US is a democracy, and politicians rely on votes to stay in power. The fact that the Republicans dare to draft such a project shows that they are confident it will gain significant public support. Politicians aren’t fools; they wouldn’t pursue something that only a small group agrees with while the majority opposes it." Yes, maybe, in some exceedingly generic logic that doesn't take any account of the actual situation in the US and the fact that the Republicans have made their hatred for democratic free and fair elections very, very clear. This is why Trump pushed the "election fraud" Big Lie in 2020 and sent a mob to attack the Capitol in an attempt to prevent the certification of Biden's win. This is why states controlled by Republicans have frantically enacted as many voter suppression and voter-removal laws as possible and conducted constant purges to get voters (especially the mysteriously missing 1 million Democrats in Florida) off the rolls. This is why they talk approvingly about Trump being "a dictator on day one." This is why they have pursued a decades-long strategy to capture the federal judiciary (by installing extreme right-wing hacks to the bench and then funneling extreme-right legislation into their courts to get a favorable ruling and/or send it to the extreme-right Supreme Court). And on, and on, and on. The Republicans are explicitly aware that their ideas cannot win in a free and fair election, because their ideas are terrible, and as such have been taking massive, ongoing, and coordinated efforts to disenfranchise American voters, expose them to lakes of sordid Russian propaganda/psyops in favor of Trump, double down on the xenophobia and white nationalism to stoke Fear Of The Other, and everything else they possibly can to prevent voters from voting for their opponents. They hate democracy and they are not counting on democratic methods to implement Project 2025. They intend to do it by secretive oligarch methods funded by right-wing billionaire dark money and their Russian friends. That's the whole point.
Indeed, you can see that in the fact that as soon as Project 2025 became widely known and therefore widely hated, the Republicans were thrown into a panicked fluster of disavowing it and insisting that Trump didn't actually know about it (which is a lie, but that's all the day). Because it is electoral kryptonite, they are trying every single method they can to lie to voters long enough to get into power and do it anyway. Authoritarians can often come to power through democratic elections, but once there, they do their utmost to degrade, erode, or otherwise destroy the institutional safeguards that prevent them from keeping power forever. Trump is a literally textbook example of this and he has made his intentions very clear. He flat-out told a group of Republicans at an event earlier this year that "we'll fix it so you won't have to vote again." He already tried a coup and somehow the Republicans nominated him again, because of the deep corruption of the party on every level, but the Republicans are not doing Project 2025 because they think it will organically generate popular support (and they know it doesn't.) It's a blueprint for a tiny group of extreme right-wing theocrats and fascists to get their way regardless of what the broader public says about it, and represents the culmination of decades of far-right power-play strategies related to exploiting economic, racial, social, and cultural grievances. They're doing this now in order to lock in their power before long-term demographic changes make it impossible for them to win another democratic American election. So their solution is to get rid of democratic American elections, the end. This is explicitly a project for permanent minority rule. They know that and that's what's driving their strategic choices here.
As such, essentially saying that the Republicans aren't really fascist, and/or the real problem and/or are just giving an increasingly fascist American population what they want, removes any moral responsibility for their deliberate choices and legitimizes the populist claim to be acting "for the people" instead of a corrupt institutional system. Everyone knows the many, MANY problems with American politics and government; we don't need to go through them again. But even if they were "just giving the people what they want," which as noted above they're not, it still wouldn't make it okay or defensible. To use the obvious example, just because Hitler was popular and democratically elected in 1933 doesn't make what he did right, and the social forces that propelled him to power weren't just a passive "reflection" of The People's Will but were shaped by the larger fascist-curious interwar 1930s. In fact, America also had a burgeoning fascist movement in the 1930s, driven by WWI and Great Depression fallout, but Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal explicitly created extensive government mechanisms to support society, provide new jobs and welfare, and other integrative and restorative economic methods. This crucial difference in approaches -- the New Deal vs. the Nazis -- is why America remained democratic despite the challenges and Germany fell into autocratic genocidal fascism.
This is because populism and dissatisfaction with democracy rises when people feel that the government is not listening to them, is not responsive to their needs, is ignoring them, or otherwise not doing what they want. It is driven by multiple factors, primarily but not only economic, and it is stoked by powerful interest groups who have a vested interest in using the fissures to discredit democratic governments and movements. It is also by no means limited to America, as you note at the end. Think of the decades-long campaign by the British media against the EU, driven by British isolationism and exceptionalism and a sense that the petty bureaucrats in Brussels had no right to be telling the almighty British Empire what to do. This created and stoked existing social grievances which were often domestically caused (since as Margaret Thatcher destroying the British social-welfare state in the 1980s) and turned that grievance against an external opponent who was easier to blame. As such, as we know, it led to the country voting for Brexit in 2016 despite what a whopping, overwhelming, incredible own goal that was and continues to be for the UK, especially economically and socially. It was obviously dependent on many contextual factors from British history, politics, and culture, and there were certainly many people who actually thought it was the right thing to do (and not just about racism, which uh, hmmm), but it's very difficult to think that this organically or naturally came about without a direct and extensive popular-pressure campaign designed to do just that.
People often vote against their own interests because they have been convinced that democracy is corrupt or ineffective or "just as bad" as authoritarianism, which allows illiberal populists to rise to power. These populists often use racial, religious, or cultural grievances, especially against perceived "outsiders," to artificially stoke existing prejudice and justify crackdowns and/or consolidations of their own personal power and destruction of institutional systems and safeguards meant to stop them from doing that. That's how we got Erdogan in Turkey, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary, and Trump in the US. Other authoritarian movements around the world are also driven implicitly or explicitly by the massive autocratic and antidemocratic global influence disinformation machine headed by Putin in Russia. As such, it's not accurate to insist that this just represents a simple passive "rightward shift" among the global population overall. It is happening because it has been designed and manipulated and pressed into happening. It can still be electorally resisted, which is also the most effective strategy for removing authoritarians, but if we fail to vote out Trump once and for all in 2024, it will be MUCH harder and much more deadly.
Overall, to simplistically claim that the Republican party is just giving the increasingly fascist Americans what they want and expect it to derive broad popular support is, as I have demonstrated above, a diametrically backward conception of the problem. The Republicans are deliberately and increasingly fascist because they realize that very soon, if allowed to continue operating in its accustomed fashion, the American democratic system and American public opinion is going to make them obsolete. They're racing the clock to cement permanent super-minority rule, and to change the rules overall, before America's shifting demographic composition and ideological mindset locks them out. That is why they are throwing so much misinformation, fearmongering, lies, Russian propaganda, and everything else that they can think of at this election, to get Trump and loyal Project 2025 footsoldier Vance into the door before the door slams shut for a long time. That is why this election is so fucking existentially important and why it is so crucial to accurately conceptualize and describe the problem, what it is, and how to respond to it. As such, while I otherwise don't do this much anymore because I no longer have the desire to argue with the people who are likewise brainwashed in the opposite direction and insist it's a Pure Leftist Moral Duty not to vote against fascist authoritarianism (as, uh, also happened with the fragmented and infighting German left-wing opposition in 1932 and good thing nothing bad happened next):
