WASHINGTON (AP) — Self-help author Marianne Williamson, whose 2020 White House campaign has featured more outlandish appeals for spiritual healing than actual voter support, launched another run for president on Saturday, becoming the first Democrat to challenge- an official against President Joe Biden. for the 2024 nomination.
“Starting today, I am running for president of the United States,” he said during a campaign launch in the nation’s capital.
Oprah Winfrey’s 70-year-old spiritual adviser will almost certainly offer only token primary opposition, a testament to how strongly national Democrats are united behind Biden. However, he edited out the president, a longtime Amtrak pilot, holding the inaugural rally in the presidential suite at Union Station, Washington’s rail hub.
Biden gave his speech at Union Station near the Capitol shortly before last November’s election, when he led Democrats in a surprisingly strong rally, urging voters to reject political extremism and arguing that “democracy itself” is in Game.
Williamson, whose red, blue and black campaign signs feature two slogans, “A New Beginning” and “Disrupt the System,” plans to campaign in early voting states for the 2024 election calendar, including New Hampshire, which has threatened that he would challenge a Biden — endorsed the Democratic National Committee’s plan for South Carolina to run the nominating contests.
Democrats and Republicans in New Hampshire have warned that if Biden overcomes an unendorsed state primary and a challenger wins, that result could prove embarrassing for the incumbent, even if that challenger has no real chance of the nomination.
“You can appreciate what the president did, defeating the Republicans in 2020, and still feel like it’s time to move on,” Williamson said in a recent interview on “Good Morning New Hampshire.”
Biden, 80, is the oldest president in US history and would be 86 at the end of a second term. Most people in the United States — and most Democrats, too — say they don’t want him to run again, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll.
The president is expected to announce in the coming weeks that he will run again. First lady Jill Biden recently told the AP that the president has “no more” to do than choose a time and place to announce his re-election bid.
Biden’s political advisers say they are not worried about the Democratic primary and say Biden is eager to beat Donald Trump again in the general election. They say a 2024 campaign against another GOP candidate, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, would look much the same because top Republicans remain promoters of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
The Democratic establishment — and even potential presidential hopefuls who might have run against Biden from the left or the center — are behind Biden, demonstrating how easy his path to the nomination will be. Even if other Democrats follow Williamson’s lead and enter the race, the party has no plans to hold primary debates.
Williamson insists his 2024 campaign is more than just a statement. In an online post last weekend, he did not mention Trump by name, but noted that few predicted he would lead an unconventional campaign for the White House seven years ago.
“Since the 2016 election, it has been strange for anyone to think they can know who can win the presidency,” Williamson wrote. “And I’m not going to go through that again just to add something to the conversation. Running for president to help close an aberrational chapter in our history and help usher in a new beginning.”
A native of Texas who now lives in Beverly Hills, California, Williamson is the author of over a dozen books. In the 1980s, he opened the Center for Life in Los Angeles, and later in New York, which worked to support people with HIV and AIDS. He ran an unsuccessful independent congressional campaign in California in 2014 and supported the Progressive Challenge of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016 against eventual Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
In 2020, Williamson was best known for wanting to create a Department of Peace and arguing that the federal government should pay large financial reparations to black Americans as atonement for centuries of slavery and discrimination.
On the debate stage, he called racism “part of the dark side of American society.” While declaring that Trump used fear for political gain, he chastised his fellow Democratic candidates for getting too lost in the “percentage” of political details instead of trying to stop “the dark psychic force of collectivized hate ” of the then president.
Amid fundraising struggles, Williamson laid off staff nationally and suspended his campaign in the weeks leading up to the 2020 Iowa caucuses, saying he didn’t want to “get in the way of a progressive candidate winning.” He later endorsed Sanders in the 2020 presidential contest. He finished second to Biden.
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