Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson speaks at the California Democratic Party’s 2019 Fall Endorsing Convention in Long Beach, California on November 16, 2019.
Mark Ralston | AFP | Getty Images
Author Marianne Williamson announced her withdrawal from the 2024 presidential campaign.
“As of today, we are suspending our campaign,” she wrote in a message to supporters on Wednesday evening.
“While the extent of our failure is obvious to all, a measure of success is nonetheless real,” she wrote. “We have articulated deeper, more authentic truths than those regularly acknowledged by the political establishment.”
Williamson was one of the few Democratic challengers to incumbent President Joe Biden, along with House Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn. Both she and Phillips consistently polled in single digits.
Williamson won about 2% of the vote in South Carolina’s Democratic primary last weekend.
The self-help guru campaigned on an anti-establishment platform with the goal of “destroying the system,” as one of her slogans goes. This was her second presidential bid after a failed primary campaign in 2020.
Williamson, 71, said she is running for president to “correct” former President Donald Trump’s damage and prevent him from winning a second term.
But the Texas native entered the race primarily to be an alternative to Biden, at a time when early polls showed the president lagging on key issues like the economy and among Democrats’ core voting blocs, like Latino voters , lost support.
Biden’s perceived vulnerabilities offered candidates like Williamson and Phillips the opportunity to enter the campaign primarily as Biden surrogates.
“Biden will not win. I will,” Williamson wrote in an X-Post just hours before the results of the Nevada Democratic primary on Tuesday.
As primary season got underway, it quickly became clear that Williamson’s enthusiasm and often spiritual message did not resonate more with voters this year than it did in 2020.
Biden won victories in New Hampshire as a write-in candidate and in the South Carolina primary, pushing Williamson even further to the edge of the field.
Their best chance of winning votes was in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire, where Biden’s name was not officially on the ballot. New Hampshire voters pride themselves on their independence from the strict two-party system, and outsider candidates tend to do better in the Granite State than elsewhere.
Despite the structural advantages that New Hampshire offered a candidate like Williamson, she ultimately secured only 4% of the Democratic primary vote.
“Although we failed to run a successful political campaign, I know in my heart that we influenced the political landscape,” Williamson wrote Wednesday.
“We have spoken for those who are most ignored in America today and whose wounds most need healing. I wish I could have reached out to her,” she wrote.
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2024-02-08 03:53:11
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