Who is Marianne Williamson, the newly announced Democratic presidential candidate for 2024?
President Joe Biden has his first official primary challenger for the 2024 Democrat presidential nomination after Marianne Williamson throws her hat in.
Marianne Williamson is the first candidate to toss her hat in the ring to be the Democratic party’s candidate for president in 2024. She plans to challenge President Joe Biden in the primaries in what is seen as the longest of long shot bids to take on a sitting president in her own party. She wants Democrats to go in a new direction.
“You can appreciate what the president has done, defeating the Republicans in 2020,” she said in a recent interview. “And still feel that it is time to move on.”
This is her second time running for president. Her 2020 campaign sputtered out early that year as she failed to gain traction in a crowded Democratic field. She did however, bring a spiritualism to the presidential race and garnered attention for her debate performances.
Who is Marianne Williamson?
Williamson is an author of 15 self-help and spiritual books, four of which have been #1 New York Times best sellers. In 1983, Williamson began lecturing on ‘A Course in Miracles’, a non-denominational self-study curriculum for spiritual transformation, which she later turned into a best-selling book ‘A Return to Love’. That led to the now 70-year-old becoming a spiritual advisor to Oprah Winfrey.
The 2024 presidential hopeful, is also an activist founding Project Angel Food to provide counseling and food to HIV/AIDS patients suffering from the ravages of the disease. During her career she has also worked on anti-hunger, poverty, racial reconciliation issues and in 2004 she co-founded The Peace Alliance.
Marianne Williamson political career
Williamson made her political debut in 2014, running for California’s 33rd congressional district as an independent but lost garnering just over 13 percent of the vote. She came to the national spotlight in 2016 when she threw her support behind the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders in his challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
In the 2024 campaign, some of her signature issues were advocating for the creation of a US Department of Peace and federal financial reparations to Black Americans as compensation and atonement for centuries of discrimination and slavery. She also supported overhauling the public education system, Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.