Butch Ware: The Green Candidate

A UC Santa Barbara professor and 2024 Green Party Vice Presidential candidate, ⁠Butch Ware⁠ is now running for Governor of California and challenging the two-party system head-on, despite ongoing legal battles to keep him on the June primary ballot.

In this conversation with host Michelle Zacarias, Ware speaks candidly about California’s housing and homelessness crisis, immigration enforcement, universal healthcare, and what he sees as both parties’ failures to serve working-class Californians. He makes the case that a third-party candidate isn’t just viable but necessary.

Here at The Latino Newsletter, interviewing a candidate does not mean we are endorsing that candidate. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit newsroom, we are offering this conversation strictly for civic information purposes. Our team has reached out and will continue to contact other candidates in the California governor’s race. We are on the media lists for several of these campaigns, and if any candidate wants to speak with us, they can reach us at this email. We take elections seriously, and our community deserves to hear directly from the people asking for their votes.

Here is the episode:

This episode of The Latino Newsletter podcast was produced by Joaquín Cotler, Juan Diego Ramírez, and Michelle Zacarias. Julio Ricardo Varela edited the conversation. The music is by Cast of Characters via Soundstripe.

Season 2 of The Latino Newsletter podcast was made possible through individual donations⁠ and ⁠the Latino Media Consortium⁠.

The Latino Newsletter is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Help us reach our $100,000 goal to fund our podcast’s third season and to offer more opportunities for journalists to file their stories without paywalls or paid subscriptions.

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Published in Chicago: Thank you to the team at La Voz del Paseo Boricua in Chicago for asking us to reprint Lola Rosario’s opinion piece. We happily agreed, and their team also told us that Lola’s piece will be part of their printed magazine.

A few days after we published Lola’s original English-language piece, our San Juan team and Lola worked on a Spanish-language version.

Somos Berkshires: We also wanted to announce that the team at Somos Berkshires in Western Massachusetts will occasionally post Spanish versions of our stories. ¡Qué cool! Earlier this week, the team posted about our César Chávez reporting.

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