Are Democrats losing Latinos, and the election, to Donald Trump?
CBC
At a sidewalk stand staffed by Donald Trump's allies, in a bustling Hispanic hub in the critical election state of Pennsylvania, a man seeking voter-registration papers describes the moment his political views shifted.
"La pandemia," says Jorge Lami, who plans to cast his first-ever ballot for Trump.
The pandemic.
It comes up frequently in discussions about why Democrats risk losing Latino voters for the third straight election, with potentially game-changing electoral consequences.
Lami, a Dominican-born Uber driver, laments the economic pain of recent years, first with businesses shut down, then with inflation, which has just finally eased.
He lives in the majority-Latino city of Allentown, Pa. Democrats typically dominate here, yet on this day, many cars honk their horns and pedestrians sporadically offer thumbs-up as they pass the Trump stand.
In a nearby county, Karen Acuna Bertolo reached the same conclusion, albeit earlier than Lami: She became a Trump supporter in 2020.
A mother and business owner, she says her turning point came amid prolonged school shutdowns and destructive anti-police protests — she blamed Democrats for both.
"That's when it changed for me. I became Republican," said the Nicaraguan-born woman, who co-owns a refrigeration-products business with her husband near Philadelphia.
Latino Democrats have expressed concern and urged their party to strengthen its ground game in Pennsylvania, a state that could prove decisive in the presidential election.
The election may hinge on a crude equation: Will more working-class voters of colour shift to Trump than college-educated whites move away from him?
To be clear, Trump isn't expected to win most Latino voters: Polls do suggest he could keep gaining ground, and potentially even rival George W. Bush's two-decade-old Republican record of 44 per cent of Hispanic voters.
Everything hinges on the extent of the shift, according to one longtime political operative, author, and expert on Latino voters.
"Is it one or two points? That's surmountable [for Democrats]," said Mike Madrid.
Erfan Soltani, a 26-year-old Iranian man, has been sentenced to death in Iran, according to human rights groups. It comes amid widespread protests in the country and a deadly government crackdown.
The United States is telling its citizens to leave Iran, as Washington maintains its pressure on Tehran to cease its crackdown on protesters and U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to strike the Iranian government over the issue.
U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States may meet Iranian officials and was in contact with the opposition as he weighed a range of strong responses, including military options, to a violent crackdown on Iranian protests, which pose one of the biggest challenges to clerical rule since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
A crackdown on nationwide protests in Iran has killed at least 538 people and even more are feared dead, activists said Sunday, while Tehran warned that the U.S. military and Israel would be "legitimate targets" if America uses force to protect demonstrators.
For years, many of Venezuela’s exiles in Spain — leading opposition figures and citizens — have hoped for a day when ousted president Nicolás Maduro would no longer be in power.
The U.S. attack on Venezuela has shifted the ground for guerrilla groups operating across the country's borderlands with Colombia, raising fears of possible betrayal by Venezuelan regime officials, while opening the door to a wider conflict should U.S. boots ever hit the ground, local security experts say.
Protests sweeping across Iran neared the two-week mark on Saturday, with the country’s government acknowledging the ongoing demonstrations despite an intensifying crackdown and as the Islamic Republic remains cut off from the rest of the world.
Russia didn’t just use a hypersonic missile to target a site in western Ukraine near the border with Poland, in the European Union, but high ranking officials then went on to boast about the power of the nuclear-capable weapon, in what some saw as a clear warning to the West.
The official White House narrative of how a U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and killed a U.S. citizen in her vehicle in Minneapolis is bumping hard up against what can be seen in videos of the incident.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed a Minneapolis motorist on Wednesday during the Trump administration's latest immigration crackdown on a major American city — a shooting that federal officials claimed was an act of self-defence but that the city's mayor described as "reckless" and unnecessary.
When Marco Rubio took the lectern at Mar-a-Lago shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump announced the country had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, it was the culmination of a decade of effort from the secretary of state and a clear sign that he had emerged as a leading voice within the Trump administration.
The catchphrase going into Tuesday's coalition of the willing meeting on Ukraine in Paris appears to be: expect the unexpected.
Deposed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro pleaded not guilty on terrorism and drug-trafficking charges during his first appearance in a New York court on Monday.