Claudia De la Cruz

De la Cruz was born in the South Bronx to immigrants from the Dominican Republic. She attended Theodore Roosevelt High School and graduated in 1997. In 2001, De la Cruz earned a bachelor's degree in forensic psychology from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In 2007, she earned a master's degree in social work from Columbia University and a master's degree in divinity from Union Theological Seminary. ==Career and activism==

At the City University of New York, De la Cruz coordinated a teen group to study resistance movements and march against the 2003 Iraq War. She saw that church was important to her "social and political formation" and "wanted to do community organizing from a faith-based perspective". With the People's Forum, she has participated in numerous pro-Palestinian protests, including a "Shut Down Wall Street" event during the Gaza war. On October 3, 2023, De La Cruz participated in a forum sponsored by Code Pink, Peace in Ukraine and the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition that aimed to spur opposition to U.S. support of the Ukrainian government’s fight against the Russian invasion. ==2024 presidential campaign==

De la Cruz announced her presidential campaign on September 7, 2023. She and running mate Karina Garcia were the presidential ticket for the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a Marxist–Leninist party, in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. On January 28, 2024, Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia held their first in-person campaign event in Newark, New Jersey. On February 29, 2024, De la Cruz participated in a presidential candidates debate hosted by the Free & Equal Elections Foundation alongside Green Party candidates Jill Stein and Jasmine Sherman and Libertarian Party candidates Chase Oliver and Lars Mapstead. In March 2024, the South Carolina Workers Party voted to place De la Cruz and Garcia on the state ballot for president and vice president. In June 2024, De la Cruz gave a speech at a pro-Palestine protest surrounding the White House. In the 2024 election, it was claimed that the Democrats worked to keep De la Cruz and other third-party candidates such as Cornel West off of ballots, with De la Cruz alleging in a statement that this was done because the party didn’t want to compete with a socialist candidate. Republicans opposed this and Brad Raffensperger, Georgia Secretary of State, overruled the decision. De la Cruz received 167,772 votes (0.11%). De la Cruz nearly doubled the PSL's 2020 total, and won the most votes received by a candidate running on an explicitly socialist presidential ticket since the Socialist Party's Norman Thomas in 1936. ==References==