2028 Independent Presidential Candidate Diane Sare Has a Message for Black Voters: Look Beyond Democrats and Republicans

You probably haven’t heard of Diane Sare. The independent East Coast political activist of the LaRouche movement isn’t a well-known name in Iowa — yet. Some people might recall the late Lyndon LaRouche, an economist and former repeat presidential candidate, whom Sare met in 1987 and considered a mentor.

Sare’s experience includes running for the U.S. Senate in New York against incumbent Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand in 2022 and 2024 respectively, losing both races. Sare, 60, who was born in Burlington, Vermont, announced her campaign for president on Jan. 10, 2026. A musician, Sare attended Hamilton College and the New England Conservatory of Music, and she directs a community chorus she founded in Manhattan. Her spouse is Christopher. Her running mate is Jose Vega, 27.

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An ally suggested she campaign in Iowa, and Sare arrived in the Hawkeye state on Aug. 20, meeting with Democrats, farmers and veterans. She attended the Iowa State Fair to better understand Iowa issues and discuss her platform, which includes reforming the Federal Reserve, increasing nuclear power plants and fusion energy, building high-speed rail, modernizing water management systems, implementing Medicare for All, directing credit to restore industry and family farms, among other priorities.

Iowans have long enjoyed a steady stream of presidential candidates with its previous first-in-the-nation caucuses. However, the Democratic National Convention didn’t include Iowa when it voted for its 2028 early-state calendar, instead prioritizing racial diversity in selecting South Carolina to go first. The Census Bureau’s 2025 estimateputs Iowa’s Black population at 4.9%, or 159,000 residents. The white population is 87.7%, or 2.8 million residents.

Many people had also expected Iowa to lose its status due to the 2020 Iowa Democratic Caucuses vote debacle. In July, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart told the Iowa Capital Dispatch the party “will have more to say” about whether it will adhere to the schedule after the November midterms. The Iowa Republican caucuses are expected to remain first.

According to Ballotpedia, Sare is among dozens of candidates who have already registered with the Federal Election Commission to run in the Nov. 7, 2028 presidential election, though it’s still early. Sare is listed as unaffiliated.

Pew Research Center data show many voters have become frustrated by the tireless fighting and divisive rhetoric between Democrats and Republicans, especially in recent years. According to the center, 37% of Americans wish there were an option beyond the two major political parties — Democrats and Republicans — especially among younger adults. About 25% of adults surveyed said neither party represents them well, the Pew Center found.

In 2026, 73% of Black Americans identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning, 14% as Republicans or Republican-leaning, and 13% as non-lean/refused to answer, according to Pew.

Sare, who in 2011 called for impeachment of former President Barack Obama, said her economic policies and platform offer concrete solutions for voters who are fed up with or disenfranchised from the nation’s two-party system.

Dana James, founder and publisher of Black Iowa News, a digital and print platform, interviewed Sare about her campaign.

Black Iowa News: Do you describe yourself as an independent candidate, and what does that mean to you beyond simply not being a Democrat or Republican?

Diane Sare: “What it means really is that the parties have failed us, and I think we see a move now where both parties are not that interested in their primary elections. They go right onto the convention with their hand-selected candidate, and I think what we’re seeing is a terrible gap between the people and the people that they are voting for. So there’s a horrible lack of trust between the people and their alleged representatives . . . It’s actually shifted because of this so-called MAGA phenomenon, which I think really came out of the Tea Party, which was a bunch of working-class people. It became a different thing because it used to be just rich people. Now it’s a lot of angry working-class people. But then you see people leaving them too because a lot of people voted for Trump because they thought he was going to be anti-war and take care of the working class. And lo and behold, did not do that. He reverted or fulfilled his Roy Cohn training, and we’re in a really scary place right now. And that’s. . .why I decided to run for president; I did not fly in here on my own charter jet. I am not a reality TV star, and I was thinking about what LaRouche had done as a presidential voice for policy, particularly on the economy. And I said, we need a presidential voice. We have a disaster in the White House, but there is no opposition. The Congress has completely abdicated. They have the power to defund the Iran War. They have the power to defund the genocide in Gaza, and they will not. So far, there’s been an increasing move in that, but so far they won’t do that. And it’s very easy to sit back and say impeach Trump, and, believe me, he’s committed crimes worthy of impeachment. But if you’re not even going to do your job, which is to stop this, that’s how they stopped the Vietnam War. They stopped the funding. So I said we need a voice. We need a voice that’s actually for presidential policy. I think we’re headed for a massive crisis in this country. The economy is crashing. We’re going to have possibly food shortages. This thing with the Strait of Hormuz is not a small deal. We’re already having energy shortages. We didn’t get fusion. We didn’t develop nuclear, and we shut down coal. I mean, so what do people do then? And therefore, I think in a moment like that, someone who’s saying, ‘Hey, we can learn from what FDR did in the Depression, what Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War,’ there’s an American system of credit, the principle of the general welfare and the Constitution. We have to outline the policies, so that’s something I’m very interested in doing. It’s not just a negative campaign, but saying, ‘Okay, reinstate Glass-Steagall, nationalize the Federal Reserve, build 42,000 miles of high-speed. You know, very concrete.”

Black Iowa News: What do you think that independent candidates can offer Black voters that Democrats and Republicans have failed to offer?

Sare: “It’s economics. I mean if people cannot afford to have a house or raise a family. What we can say, freedom and equality — it means nothing unless there’s a physical economic basis for it . . . I think that our nation needs a mission because if we have a certain quality of unity for a mission, everything is going to look different, and we’re going to be looking for the talent and the potential. We throw so many people on a scrap heap right now . . . Now, if your nation is saying, ‘Look, we need 42,000 miles of high-speed rail, and we need to figure out how to get to Mars, and we need to cure Parkinson’s,’ then you can’t throw people away. You’re gonna need every single person, and you’re gonna need people who are looking for the talent.”

Black Iowa News: Do you think that it’s easier or more difficult to run as an independent? Do you think it’s easier or more difficult to be accepted?

Sare: “Well, I’ll tell you, everyone else thinks it’s more difficult . . . It is in the sense that I’m also not delusional because of what I went through. So I could say, well, I could run as a Democrat, for example, in New York, where I remain the only person in the whole United States now who’s gotten on the ballot in New York, because they tripled the signature requirement for independents. So if you’re a Democrat or Republican, it’s 15,000 signatures in six weeks. John McCain couldn’t even do it. Now it’s 45,000. I did it, and I’m the only one, and I did it twice. The Libertarian Party crashed and burned; the Green Party. New York has no minor parties anymore, and so that is very hard. I’m looking at the ballot access question. It’s designed to be impossible because you have a fiefdom, and they don’t want an independent . . .”

Black Iowa News: What do you believe that Black Americans, in particular, should demand from independent presidential candidates that they have not demanded or received from the two major parties?

Sare: “. . . It’s obvious that the nation is becoming a lot more racist with the ICE policies and so on. But you can’t just say, ‘Don’t be a racist, right? It’s the solution question because it’s easy to say, ‘I’m being raped. So you get rid of the rapist.’ Can you pay your rent? Do you have a house? Does that guarantee? And I think that this is where candidates are not held to account. It’s easy for you to say the drinking water’s bad, or you don’t support genocide, or you don’t think we should be funding wars. What are you going to do? What are you going to do to rebuild our cities, rebuild our transportation grid, improve our public schools, allow our children to become geniuses? What is your plan for that? And force them to think that through. I see it because I’m actually trying to lead a slate of independent candidates, and what I’m trying to do is actually help them because a lot of people are running independent because they’re very fed up. So I say, ‘OK, I understand you’re fed up. What is your solution? And that’s really, I think, the biggest thing. Not only for Black voters, for all voters, we have not held these people accountable, and I think, because the economy is so difficult, I suppose the more that you are suffering, the more that you are impoverished, the harder that you have to work, the harder it is to have the morale or the hope that you can move that jerk who’s in that seat, but but we can, especially in an election year, you can scare them.”

Black Iowa News: What are you prepared to do differently in your outreach to us, to Black Americans?

Sare: “I’ll tell you one thing that I’ve thought about not my whole life, but since I lived in D.C. for 10 years, and one really important area is culture. Because I didn’t know this history, and one thing I think is really important is for us to know our history. There was supposed to be an American school of classical music that Antonin Dvorak, who was in a way a student of Brahms came here to found, and he went around the country listening, and he said, “The kernel of a great and noble school of American music is the Negro spiritual and the Native American music, and they had a national conservatory for a few years in the 1890s in New York, funded by a woman named Jeanette Thurber, and that’s where H.T. Burleigh, came out of, and Hall Johnson, and a lot of these Black composers, and it was killed because of Jim Crow, etc. We have a political culture. The ideas of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, however short our founders fell from those principles. It was true. It is true that every human being is created equal. That is a true principle. We’re supposed to live up to that. We’re supposed to grow into that. So we had a potentially great political culture, but we should have a great artistic culture, and I think this thing again, particularly the spirituals, which I consider part of classical music. Classical music is one area, and then I just think if we knew the history, we were just at the Henry Wallace House, and of course George Washington Carver, and people don’t know this history, right? So I think that’s one very important thing because then you say, ‘Well, of course it’s normal for an African American to be a genius, right?’ And again, if the nation has a mission, then we need geniuses. So we’re going to want to bring develop that in every single person in the nation. So I think that would be, I think that would be different. I think it’s quite different than anything else I’ve heard.”

Black Iowa News: What are your thoughts around affirmative action and the DEI conversation when it comes to college admissions, employment and areas where racial disparities are still there?

Sare: “There really needs to be affirmative action. I think there also does have to be a merit-based system . . . That’s why I think, in a sense, we can start from the bottom up and assign quotas, but the question is, why? What is your mission? What is your purpose? And if you have a purpose, then it also makes sense to have quota, you know, systems of affirmative action because you want everyone to have an equal opportunity involved, but you don’t want to create arbitrary constructs to check off boxes.”

Black Iowa News: Now, in terms of data centers and your proposed project with high-speed rail, historically, these kinds of projects have sometimes displaced Black communities rather than benefited them. How would you prevent that from happening under your administration?

Sare: “We wouldn’t do it. I mean, I look at New York State. They shut down Indian Point, a nuclear power plant, which was perfectly in good shape for another at least two decades, and replaced it with coal-fired and gas-fired plants. Where in Queens and the Bronx, the African American Bronx. My running mate, he’s running for Congress. A young man named Jose Vega, who’s 27 years old, running in the Bronx against Richie Torres. His family is El Salvadorian. His stepfather, actually, who’s been in this country for 20 years, got picked up by ICE and shipped out of the country, and Jose always makes the point . . . The Bronx has the highest asthma rate in the whole United States. You have Robert Moses putting the Cross Bronx parking lot (Expressway) and then the dirtiest power plants right there. So, absolutely, it is an issue I am aware of, and I would not do it. Would not allow that to be done. It’s an outrage. And again, I’m sorry. I get really angry about this because if we had a mission, you could never treat people like that.

We’ve got people who’ve committed horrible crimes, and no one’s even convening a grand jury about it, but if you say there’s something, there’s a mission for mankind, because what is it that makes us human? It’s in the invisible domain, right? It’s our creativity. It’s that we can make a contribution to generations for centuries to come . . . But if you have an actual human identity, then these ephemeral things like skin color, religion, sexual, whatever. It doesn’t matter because you’re looking for something which is really universal and in a way which hasn’t even been discovered yet.”

Black Iowa News: How can people get to the level where that’s something they can worry about when they’re experiencing rising costs, food insecurity and all of these issues are top of mind?

Sare: “ . . . You have to actually care, and then you have to figure it out . . . because every situation is going to be different.”

Black Iowa News: What about reparations and the need to repair the harm — the generational harm that has been done to Black Americans?

Sare: “Some like giving people money, particularly because I think our whole entire society is so horribly broken. I guess the horrible standard of living of young white people might be higher than the horrible standard of living of young Black people, but I don’t consider that an equal. We should all want something much better than where almost anybody is at right now. But do you have a way that you can see this working for the good? I’m open to discuss it. I have a hard time imagining that it would actually fix anything because I think the whole trajectory is down.”

Black Iowa News: What would you do about ICE if you were elected, since ICE is an issue for immigrants, people of color and Black people?

Sare: “When did we create ICE anyway? I don’t think we need it. We have to have a path to citizenship. We have an insane program. I mean, there’s two aspects. One, as I said, if you go over and invade a country and make their life unlivable, and then they come here, you have no right to throw them out. You made the mess. So stop doing that. What we’ve done to Haiti is an absolute atrocity . . . crime. So you’ve made this mess. I don’t think we should have open borders where we have no clue who’s coming in, but it means you better have the number of judges that you need. You better have a way of rapidly processing large numbers of people, and then you better figure out. For example, now, I mean, the whole thing is criminal. But one of the particularly criminal things about this whole ICE deportation policy is again the numbers. You assign a quota. So then, what do the ICE agents do? They go sit at the courthouse where people who are are trying to be legal. Why? Because they know the people at the courthouse aren’t legal, and they’re there trying to fix it. Right? I mean, it’s so sick . . . There has to be hope. There has to be a future place. Everyone knows who’s lived in any city anyway knows dozens or hundreds of cases of people here who don’t have status, who should be citizens, and there is no way for them to get across that, which is outrageous. You have to have that . . . a reasonable way for people to get citizenship who have been here. The other thing that I think will happen is, you will see if there are criminals who, in other words, you’ll be able to see if there’s a criminal element. It will stand out in bold relief because you’ve created an opportunity for all the people who want to become citizens. But there is no-I don’t care how criminal someone is. We don’t have a right to be criminal and brutalize people and put them in full detention centers with no medical care where they die. And I mean that is just absolutely abhorrent, and it destroys the people who are doing that to other people, whether they know it or not.”

Black Iowa News: Black Americans, in particular, experience significant disparities in maternal and infant health, life expectancy and access to health care. What would you do to address those disparities?

Sare: “I think it has to be addressed. And also, no one is taking care of the mental health of women after they give birth, right? I think that is one of these things that requires a special effort.”

Black Iowa News: Lack of mental health care is at a crisis, too. People don’t have access.

Sare: “It’s horrible. I was at a meeting three years ago of a bunch of retired cops talking about the stuff they’re dealing with, especially since they legalized pot, but I’m vehemently opposed to legalization, not decriminalization. I don’t want people going to jail, but having commercial marijuana in every street corner is so destructive. And then they rolled it out in New York’s the whole state of New York in a completely insane way. But I think the whole thing is destructive. I really oppose it . . . because now you have mental illness and nowhere to go, and it’s combined because the new super high THC marijuana things can cause psychosis and schizophrenia very easily. Like it’s a huge correlation, so you’re dealing with severely mentally ill people, and police officers aren’t trained. And I heard these retired cops saying there was a naked man in front of one of the projects wielding a machete . . . They said we used to have a place where you take someone like that. They said there is no place now. We take him to the emergency room. So lo and behold, 80% of nurses in the state of New York have been assaulted. Why have they been assaulted?”

Black Iowa News: What do you want voters in Iowa to know?

Sare: “I’d like to say the situation is much worse than people imagine. We are potentially very close to a nuclear war. The result of our post-industrial economy is that we didn’t have enough weapons to send them to Ukraine and Israel and start a war with Iran. We are out of conventional weapons, and so you have people now discussing using tactical nuclear weapons. And a tactical nuclear weapon is about the size of what we used on Hiroshima. This is so evil, but they are insane enough. You have people like Rear Admiral Buchanan, who said it ceased two years ago. Now, he said, “Well, the thing I worry about is if we had a nuclear war, would we still have enough weapons at the end of it to remain the global hegemony?” If they think you can win a nuclear war, we are in deep trouble, worse than people can imagine.

So that’s one, and the other area where it’s far worse than people think is the economy. This bubble is going to crash, and we can all think it would be nice to be rich, but the billionaires are really panicked, which is part of the reason for fueling the war more. Because we’re talking about futures of weapons. Ukraine is buying airplanes from Sweden that are not going to be produced for three years. That means they have no intention of ending the war, and it’s a meat grinder. I mean, millions of people have died in this war. So we are talking about the U.S. may not feel it as much as some countries in Asia or South America, but thanks to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the fertilizer shortages, again that’s not instantaneous. That’s the spring planting that didn’t happen. So the food shortage is this autumn, and they’re talking about 342 million more people facing starvation on the planet, and I fear in the United States, if we don’t have people who are putting actual solutions on the table, that we could have real chaos. I’m very worried about that, and I think that’s why it’s so important that my voice is out there, and we’re talking to people, and we’re saying this is what you are actually facing. It’s not just a personal hardship; it is a full-on physical, economic blowout. The cattle herd is the smallest it’s been in 75 years. They’re shutting down the meat processing plants, so farmers are going to have to drive 200 miles. No, when you get to that point, this is not a gradual collapse. One bridge collapses, and the whole thing goes out. And again, so I think we’re very close to that kind of disaster, and of course that’s the reason why I could end up becoming a prominent voice because people are going to say, ‘Well, I thought she was nuts, but you know, this now makes sense.’ So that’s really the compelling reason, I have to say: the situation is so much worse than people are aware of, and that is not a reason to be hopeless. In a sense, it’s an opportunity because these billionaire perverts who are running things will never give up their power willingly. But if they go into a free-fall collapse, we have an opportunity to change everything. So instead of being under it, we have to think about what we actually need, what we actually want, what a just society should look like, and we have to be prepared when everything goes crazy to be putting that in place.”

Black Iowa News: What else should Iowans know about you?

Sare: “Well, I think Iowa can be a really important part of the nation, and I think we have to address some of the problems Iowa is facing. And part of why I’m here is I want to know about that. I’m advocating for the North American Water and Power Alliance, which is this massive continent-wide water project that should have been built in the 1960s. I know Des Moines is having a lot of water issues right now. That would not be happening had that been built. We should build it. I also was in touch with some people about the incredibly high cancer rates . . . So I think these things have to be addressed . . .

So, my website is actually going to have state pages, which have all the issues of the state, and then how would the state benefit from Diane’s program. Where are the high-speed rail corridors going to be in Iowa? Where is the water going to go through? I want to hear from people. So if there are Iowans who have ideas, or there was some great thing that should have been built years ago that wasn’t built, tell me.”

Email Diane Sare at Diane@sareforpresident.com.

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See more from Diane Sare’s visit to the Iowa State Fair

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