Independent presidential candidate Diane Sare campaigned in Iowa beginning Aug. 20, meeting farmers and veterans and visiting the Iowa State Fair and the Henry Wallace house. On Aug. 23, Black Iowa News published a long interview with her, conducted by founder and publisher Dana James. The article cites Sare’s success in getting on the ballot for U.S. Senator from New York in 2022 and 2024 and notes that she is running with Jose Vega.
Asked what independent candidates can offer Black voters, Sare answered on economics. “Freedom and equality—it means nothing unless there’s a physical economic basis for it,” she said. “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 going to need every single person.”
On culture Sare discussed Antonín Dvořák’s National Conservatory in New York, funded by Jeanette Thurber in the 1890s, and the Black composers who came out of it—H.T. Burleigh and Hall Johnson—before it was destroyed under Jim Crow. Dvořák, she said, had concluded that “the kernel of a great and noble school of American music is the Negro spiritual and the Native American music.” Knowing that history matters, she argued, because “then you say, ‘Well, of course it’s normal for an African American to be a genius.’”
She told Iowans the situation is worse than they know on two fronts. “We are potentially very close to a nuclear war… you have people now discussing using tactical nuclear weapons.” And on the economy she pointed to the Strait of Hormuz, fertilizer shortages and “the spring planting that didn’t happen,” warning of a food crisis this autumn: “The cattle herd is the smallest it’s been in 75 years.”
For Iowa specifically she advocated the North American Water and Power Alliance, citing Des Moines’s water problems.
“These billionaire perverts who are running things will never give up their power willingly,” she said. “But if they go into a free-fall collapse, we have an opportunity to change everything.”
