Amid growing concerns and doubts about President Joe Biden and whether he will actually run for re-election in 2024, some Democrats are giving serious thought to mounting their own campaigns to win the Democratic Party’s nomination.
One of those is author Marianne Williamson, who has teased a possible presidential run over the past week and recently confirmed her intention to formally launch a campaign next month, Breitbart reported.
Williamson mounted an unsuccessful presidential bid in 2020 that garnered plenty of attention but little actual support, and she ultimately dropped out of the race before any caucus or primary votes were cast.
Imminent presidential campaign confirmed
According to Northwestern University’s student-run Medill News Service, Williamson confirmed in an interview that the March 4 “announcement” event in Washington D.C. that she has teased will indeed be the formal launch of a 2024 campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
“I wouldn’t be running for president if I didn’t believe I could contribute to harnessing the collective sensibility that I feel is our greatest hope at this time,” Williamson said.
Per the outlet, she warned of the “threat of authoritarianism” and took direct aim at who she viewed as responsible for the nation’s current ills — “corporate oligarchs, fossil fuel companies, gun manufacturers, and the military-industrial complex” — and chastised elected officials for not doing enough to address them.
“People who run the government are divided into two categories, those who either don’t care to fix it, or do not have the spine to fix it. And neither category should be running this country,” Williamson said.
She also took exception to the “undemocratic” way in which the Democratic National Committee and President Biden unilaterally altered the traditional order of states ahead of the 2024 primary season, in which South Carolina — which is viewed as more favorable to Biden — was moved from third to first and supplanted Iowa and New Hampshire as the traditional first caucus and primary in the nation.
Williamson asked rhetorically, “How can you claim to be a champion of democracy when your own process is so undemocratic?”
Campaign announcement was teased last week
Politico reported Saturday that Williamson issued a statement that said, “As America gears up for the 2024 presidential election, I’m preparing an important announcement on March 4th in Washington DC,” and cited several reasons that “propelled me to explore the possibility of running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2024.”
Just one day earlier, in an interview with the news outlet’s Playbook, Williamson said that she “absolutely” would run as a Democrat and expressed how she took issue with some of President Biden’s dubious claims about how the “economy is getting stronger.”
“I think that speaks to the disconnect between the analysis of party elites versus the struggle of everyday Americans. We’re being asked to limit our political imaginations — to just accept the low unemployment and low inflation rate, that that is sort of the best that we can get,” she explained. “But that is a hollow victory. The majority of Americans are still struggling to survive.”
Williamson also lashed out against the DNC over its alteration of the primary schedule in that interview with Politico as well.
“How can the Democratic Party present itself as a champion of democracy and do something as undemocratic as overtly engineering the primary schedule to make sure that their chosen candidate would win it?” she asked. “That is spitting in the face of democracy.”
