LAWRENCE, Mass. — Joe Tache, a youth worker and community organizer running for U.S. Senate with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, brought a blunt message to the Merrimack Valley this week: neither major party is built to serve working people, and the immigrant communities being targeted by federal enforcement need a fundamentally different politics.
Tache spoke with Caribbean Television Network at “The People’s Agenda Regional Town Hall,” an initiative of the Merrimack Valley Project held in Lawrence.
He is not a Democrat and will not appear on September’s primary ballot.
Voters will instead find him in the November general election listed under Socialism and Liberation, one of the few names on the ballot running fully outside the two-party structure.
“Every election season, politicians come around and make promises based on what they think people want to hear, but they never actually deliver,” Tache said. “I fundamentally believe it’s because both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are more accountable to the corporate donor class, the billionaires that support them, than they are to the very people who make this country run.”
Tache, 31, is a socialist based in Roxbury who describes himself as a youth worker and community organizer. According to his campaign materials, he has spent more than ten years working alongside activists in movements against worker exploitation, war, police brutality, and gentrification. His campaign literature frames his Senate run as more than an electoral bid — it is, in his words, an effort “to build a working-class movement capable of winning the society we all deserve.”
His campaign is explicit about its funding posture.
Tache does not accept money from corporations or from groups like AIPAC, his flyer states, positioning the campaign as accountable only to working-class voters. The slogan printed across his literature — “Time’s Up for the Billionaires” — captures the through-line of nearly every answer he gave in Lawrence.
Tache is also an immigrant’s son. His father is from Cameroon, in West Africa, a background he returned to repeatedly when discussing immigration and the communities he says are the foundation of the economy.
For CTN’s audience, Tache’s most direct appeal came on immigration.
Asked what he could do for immigrant communities facing aggressive federal enforcement, he called it one of the most important issues in American society today and rejected the premise that immigrants are a burden.
“Immigrants are actually the backbone of our communities, whether it’s in agriculture or healthcare or manufacturing and logistics,” he said. “They’re building their lives here.”
Tache noted that ICE has operated since 2003 with the support of both parties, and argued the agency is a symptom of a deeper political failure rather than an isolated problem. His prescription goes beyond ending enforcement raids.
“We need to stop the demonization and scapegoating of immigrants,” he said. “The issues we’re facing in our society — the scarcity, the high cost of living — have not been caused by immigrants. They’ve been caused by a small class of people who are holding all the wealth at the top.”
He said his priority in Congress would be “not just to abolish ICE, but actually to completely transform our immigration system to one where immigrants are treated with full and equal rights and have a pathway to citizenship.”
Pressed to name what he would fight to change immediately if elected, Tache offered three priorities.
The first is the influence of money in politics. “The political class is more accountable to the paid lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and the donors that they represent,” he said. “I’m fighting to break from that and actually represent the people of this country.”
The second is healthcare. Tache pointed to cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, but he did not spare Democrats in his critique. “The Democratic Party has failed to create a health care system that provides healthcare as a right to every single person,” he said. “That’s something I’m fighting for — to ensure that health care is universal and treated as a human right.”
The third is military spending. “We spend over a trillion dollars every single year on the military, on waging wars abroad, on bombing schools and hospitals abroad instead of building them here at home,” he said. He tied that spending directly to unmet domestic needs like universal child care. “It’s not because we don’t have the money. It’s because the politicians in charge don’t care to manage those resources in a way that prioritizes people’s needs instead of their rich donors in the military-industrial complex.”
Tache was candid about the obstacles facing an independent left campaign.
Asked how confident he was that he could assemble a broad coalition as a third-party candidate, he did not downplay the difficulty.
“It’s very difficult to build a third party in the United States, and that’s been set up intentionally by the Democrats and the Republicans to maintain the status quo,” he said. But he argued that difficulty is not a reason to stay home. “I’ve lived in this society for 31 years. I’ve seen that no matter if a Democrat or Republican is in office, life keeps getting harder for us regular everyday people while the rich continue to get richer off of our backs.”
He listed climate change, the disruptions of artificial intelligence, and the military budget as problems he says the major parties have no answer for. “Even though it’s very difficult, I’m very glad to be doing it, and I’ve seen excitement all across the state around our campaign.”
To voters who might see a third-party bid as a spoiler that hurts other candidates more than it helps him, Tache pushed back on the framing itself.
He acknowledged that the incumbent, Senator Ed Markey, has won elections for more than 50 years — then questioned what those wins have delivered.
“Is the point of our politics inside society just to win elections?” he asked. “If so, then vote for somebody who’s been in office for 50 years and overseen a long-term decline in quality of life for people in Massachusetts. But if you actually want a change, then we need to break from the status quo.”
With about 80 days remaining before the election, Tache was asked how he intends to become known to communities, including Haitian communities, that have never heard of him. He said the campaign has been door-knocking, running social media outreach, and attending events like the Lawrence town hall across the state. But he placed much of the blame for his low profile on the press.
“The reason that people don’t know about me is fundamentally because of the way that the corporate media conspires in order to protect just the Democratic and Republican parties,” he said. “We’ve been confirmed to be on the ballot since April, and yet I’ve been excluded from debates, excluded from candidate forums.”
He turned that complaint into a call to action for voters. “If people are out there watching and are upset that you haven’t heard about me yet, you should be reaching out to the local media, reaching out to other organizations that are holding events for candidates,” he said. “Even if you don’t know if you’re going to vote for me, everybody should know about the options they have and not have the election predetermined by the corporate media and who they decide to platform.”
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CTN covers candidates across the political spectrum who address issues affecting the Haitian and Caribbean diaspora. Coverage of a candidate is not an endorsement. CTN has invited and will continue to invite candidates in this race to speak with our audience.
