The Group Translating Project 2025 Into Spanish to Warn Old Latinos About Trump

In July, María Teresa Kumar, president of Voto Latino, began noticing something urgent about older and undecided Hispanic voters in her group’s internal polling, and also in the data from focus groups they had conducted in a handful of swing states since January. 

Kumar and her colleagues at Voto Latino — a nonprofit organization geared towards Hispanic and Latino voter-outreach that has pledged tens of millions of dollars to backing Kamala Harris in the 2024 election — saw that details of Project 2025 were not breaking through to older Latino voters and Spanish speakers, particularly those living in five battleground states that will determine whether Harris or Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office next year.

Part of the problem is that they couldn’t find an organization or any major Democratic Party organ that had translated Project 2025 into Spanish.

After reviewing the data, Kumar and her staff hatched a plan: Voto Latino’s research team and leadership needed to identify which chapters of Project 2025, the MAGA policy blueprint for a second Trump term created largely by prominent Trump allies and veterans of his first administration, could have the most impact in turning these undecided Latino voters away from Trump. 

Over this past summer, according to a member of the Voto Latino digital team, the nonprofit had multiple meetings with staff at the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on these matters, with both committees providing some messaging guidance on voters and Project 2025.

The Voto Latino team then got to work translating select excerpts from the lenghty conservative policy book into Spanish, while developing a strategy for turning the translations into a multi-million-dollar digital ad campaign aimed directly at key states in the closing sprint of the 2024 presidential race.

It has become clear to both Republican and Democratic operatives over the course of the presidential race that the far-right agenda is a liability to Trump’s chances, given its extreme approach to reproductive rights, immigration, and pretty much every other sphere of governmental policy. It got to the point that the former president has been arguing in recent months that he barely knows anything about the project and had nothing to do with it — even though he’d been getting briefed on it and the project’s authors and personnel included some of his closest advisers and most trusted allies. As Rolling Stone reported this summer, Trump privately exploded to aides and confidants about how Project 2025 was saying the quiet part out loud regarding the GOP’s plans, and that its abortion sections in particular risked badly damaging his 2024 candidacy.   

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Project 2025 is more than 900 pages long and would represent a monumental translation project that is beyond implausible given the time constraints of the election. The sections Voto Latino senior staff chose to translate involve weaponizing the Justice Department against Trump’s domestic enemies; vast crackdowns on reproductive rights and abortion; mass deportation; LGBTQ+ issues; education policy; and economics and small-business matters.

“We decided on the LGBTQ question specifically because they’re trying to weaponize this idea of Latino families, and oftentimes they’re very stereotypical in what they perceive our priorities are,” Kumar explains. “What we know at the end of the day that is this is our polling is known shown is that for everything from abortion to LGBTQ, the community deeply believes that that is actually a very private, [that] those are private issues that the government should not be in in our bedrooms, that our government should not be judging others.”

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Voto Latino says this is the first time in the group’s history that it is running Spanish language, digitally targeted advertising. The digital ad campaign, which Voto Latino says it is putting $3.5 million behind, will be centered on Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Voto Latino typically zeroes in on young voters in different Latino communities, but the group says the Project 2025 effort is geared specifically toward older Spanish speakers. “99 percent of Latino young voters under the age of 33 are English dominant,” Kumar says in an interview with Rolling Stone. “This is strictly aimed at their parents and their grandparents, and that is what makes it unusual when we normally focus on young Latinos.”

The nonprofit plans to begin rolling out a new series of Spanish-language videos highlighting Project 2025 this week. The online ad campaign is set to push a total of 10 Spanish-language videos — each of which will also have a version in English — specifically targeted to those older voters living in the five battlegrounds. 

Voto Latino’s final push before the end of the 2024 race comes at a time when Democratic strategists and politicians across the country are sweating over the erosion of the party’s support among Hispanic and Latino voters compared to the numbers that former President Barack Obama once enjoyed. Ever since Trump’s rise ahead of the 2016 election, he and the GOP have made significant inroads with Latino voters into the Democrats’ dominance of this large, especially diverse voting bloc — even as Trump has continued to amp up the highly racist and authoritarian campaign rhetoric and promising a wide range of policies geared towards ethnic cleansing.

It’s unclear if promoting these chapters of Project 2025 will have the kind of effect on Spanish-speaking swing-state voters that Democrats want. However, in such a jarringly close election that will likely come down to the margins in just a handful of states, both Republicans and Democrats are banking on every inch mattering, and employing every possible tactic to give them an edge.

Voto Latino released a Spanish-language teaser of the initiative last week, highlighting Project 2025’s plans to replace a slew of federal employees with right-wing loyalists, the dismantling of federal agencies like the Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security, and the destruction of climate protections.

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“One of the things that we know is that 64 percent of the policy recommendations in Project 2025 — ranging from leaving the Paris Climate Accords, increasing military spending, increasing offshore drilling, developing federal land — Trump has already implemented in his first administration,” says Kumar. 

“I want the voters to really understand that this is not a shadow proposal, it’s not off to the side,” she adds. “Project 2025 is actually very integral to what Trump promises to execute on his first day.”