Butch Ware is running independent from the Democratic and Republican parties as a Green Party candidate. He is calling for a universal, single-payer healthcare system, CalCare, free at the point of use for every Californian. His campaign is also fighting for free public higher education in the state and canceling state-held student debt.
Butch Ware is demanding that ICE detention centers on state contracts be closed, all state cooperation with ICE be ended, and that all residents be given access to social programs regardless of immigration or citizenship status. He is calling for a statewide $25/hour minimum wage and for a publicly owned energy grid built by unionized public-sector workers. Butch is calling for California’s $800 billion+ in public pension funds to be divested from weapons manufacturers and corporations tied to war crimes.
The billionaire class and California’s Democratic Party, which absolutely dominates the state’s political machinery, are threatened by these demands brought forward by Butch Ware’s campaign. They have gone to shocking lengths, using despicable and blatantly undemocratic tactics to remove him from the ballot entirely.
This is reminiscent of how the ruling class and Trump-supporting billionaire landlords launched a recall campaign against me in 2021 when I was the socialist on the Seattle City Council, after my office won the nation’s highest minimum wage, the Amazon Tax, and unprecedented renters’ rights victories. Washington State’s Supreme Court upheld bogus charges against me and undemocratically scheduled the recall election in December, after the November elections were over, a clear attempt to disenfranchise working-class voters. Not a single Democratic Party politician publicly opposed the recall attempt. And yet, working people and I built a historic campaign and defeated the recall.
I urge California’s working people to write in Butch Ware on the ballot.
Shockingly, far from supporting Butch Ware, the overwhelming majority of labor leaders have endorsed billionaire Tom Steyer for Governor. These include the leaders of California Nurses Association, California Teachers Association, California Federation of Teachers, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) 3299, UNITE HERE, and the California AFL-CIO.
That the leaders of a swath of unions in the nation’s most populous and prominent state are cheerleading a billionaire venture capitalist indicates the horrific crisis in America’s labor movement, and the need for a reckoning in labor, the need for a militant rank-and-file-led fightback that can sweep these rotten labor leaders from office.
The leadership of the California Democratic Socialists of America formally issued a “No Endorsement” recommendation in their 2026 Primary Voter Guide, but they have all but endorsed Steyer by claiming that “Tom Steyer is somehow running the most progressive campaign,” and that “the most progressive of the current viable candidates for governor is Tom Steyer.”
The capitalist class are parasitic by definition, since their profits only exist by robbing billions of workers of most of the wealth we generate through our labor.
Steyer’s Farallon Capital is a “vulture fund,” which makes obscene profits for Steyer and its other billionaires and multimillionaires by pillaging hundreds of millions of working and poor people in poor neocolonial nations such as Ethiopia and Mozambique. These vulture funds target nations in economic crisis, “whose debt they can buy up at rock bottom prices” and then use legal threats to force the nations into ”making large debt repayments.”
The Financial Times recently reported that vulture funds that buy up “distressed assets at bargain prices … have identified a downturn in private credit as their best opportunity since the [2008] financial crisis.”
Steyer and his wife’s supposed nonprofit Beneficial State Bank has been found to have grossly exploited its auto loan borrowers from California’s poorest Central Valley counties: charging usurious interest rates on loans and then filing lawsuits upon default. Many of Steyer’s bank’s clients have described “spiraling into debt, unable to keep up with annual interest rates as high as 27.99% — only to lose their cars to repossession.”
On top of their effective stamp of approval for Steyer, the DSA leadership is also strongly objecting to a protest vote for a left independent candidate, claiming that “the chance of the top two candidates both being Republicans is still very real.” This is both shameful and untrue. The polls are showing that Democratic candidates (Steyer being one of them) are two of the top three in the poll just released. DSA leaders are running interference for the billionaire candidate of a capitalist political party — a shocking betrayal of working people, even for them.
The last time the California Governor was a Republican was 15 years ago. The last time the State Assembly had a Republican majority was in 1996. The last Republican-majority State Senate was in 1971. This is fearmongering, plain and simple.
The Democratic Party has had the California Governor’s mansion and a supermajority or a near supermajority in both State houses and has crushed efforts for the CalCare universal public healthcare program FOUR TIMES within the last ten years — in 2017, 2022, and 2024, and earlier this year. This is despite the fact that 86 percent of California supports single payer healthcare.
Any idea that the Democratic Party is a friend of working people has been disproven a thousand times over. Working people aren’t being fooled. Poll after poll has shown that tens of millions of working and young people are furious at the wars, the cost-of-living crisis, and are furious at both parties of the billionaires.
A New York Times/Siena poll released yesterday shows that “political disillusionment seems only to be deepening.” The survey estimates that only 26 percent of voters are happy with the Democratic Party and only 33 percent with the Republican Party. Nearly two-thirds of respondents under the age of 30 are angry with both parties.
I urge California’s working people to write in Butch Ware for Governor, and for working people across the nation to join my revolutionary socialist campaign for the U.S. Congress to end all military aid to Israel, to win free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, and to stop the data centers and AI-related mass layoffs.
Solidarity,
Kshama Sawant