Rachele Fruit, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, joined the SWP in Philadelphia in 1970, where she was active in the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. As a high school student she participated in civil rights protests in 1964 during Mississippi Freedom Summer.
She explains that the Oct. 7, 2023, Tehran-backed Hamas pogrom in Israel marks a watershed in world politics. She makes defense of Israel as a refuge against Jew-hatred and pogroms a key part of her campaign.
In 2018 Fruit joined a solidarity brigade to Cuba and has built demonstrations opposing Washington’s economic war against Cuba’s socialist revolution. In 2023 and 2024, Fruit testified on behalf of the SWP for independence for Puerto Rico at the U.N. hearing on Decolonization. She attended an international conference of the Sugarcane Workers Union in the Dominican Republic last year.
Fruit first ran for office for the SWP in 1973 in Detroit, where the party was active in the fight against a police terror squad. She ran for governor of Georgia in 2018 and governor of Florida in 2022, campaigning for solidarity with labor struggles, against Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and in defense of Cuba’s socialist revolution.
Today Fruit is a hotel worker in Miami and a member of UNITE HERE Local 355.
Dennis Richter, Socialist Workers Party candidate for vice president, grew up in rural Minnesota. After joining the SWP in 1972 he worked with party members who came out of the labor struggles of the 1930s whose continuity went back to the Bolshevik Revolution. Richter organized and participated in demonstrations against the U.S. rulers’ wars from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. He has spoken out in defense of Ukrainians’ fight to defend their national sovereignty.
An industrial worker for over 50 years, he has been active in the unions on the railroad, in meatpacking and in the steel and garment industries. He fights for workers control over rail transportation to guarantee safety.
Richter traveled to Cuba in 1971 and 2018, learning firsthand about the socialist revolution to bring the perspective of emulating its example to workers here.
He ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 2017 and for governor of California in 2021.
Today Richter works as an airline food service worker and is a member of UNITE HERE Local 23 in Fort Worth, Texas.