Self-help author and wellness guru Marianne Williamson has announced the end of her long-shot Democratic challenge to President Joe Biden.
“I hope future candidates will take what works for them, drinking from the well of information we prepared,” Williamson wrote in a statement announcing the end of her bid. “My team and I brought to the table some great ideas, and I will take pleasure when I see them live on in campaigns and candidates yet to be created.”
The 71-year-old one-time spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey contemplated suspending her campaign last month after winning just 5,000 votes in New Hampshire’s primary, writing that she “had to decide whether now is the time for a dignified exit or continue on our campaign journey”.
But Williamson ultimately opted to continue for two more primaries. She won 2% of the vote in South Carolina and about 3% in Nevada.
In her announcement on Wednesday, Williamson said her campaign had “articulated deeper, more authentic truths than those regularly acknowledged by the political establishment”.
Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips is the last nationally known Democrat still running against Biden, who has secured large victories in South Carolina and Nevada and easily won in New Hampshire – despite not being on the ballot – after his allies mounted a write-in campaign.
A Texas native who now lives in Beverly Hills, California, Williamson is the author of more than a dozen books and ran an unsuccessful independent congressional campaign in California in 2014.
Williamson first ran for president in 2020 and made national headlines by calling for a “moral uprising” against then-president Donald Trump while proposing the creation of a Department of Peace. She also argued that the federal government should pay large financial reparations to black Americans as atonement for centuries of slavery and discrimination.
She ended her 2020 presidential run shortly before the leadoff Iowa caucuses, announcing that she didn’t want to take progressive support from Bernie Sanders.
Her second White House bid featured the same nontraditional campaigning style and many of the same policy proposals. She struggled to raise money and was plagued by staff departures from the earliest stages of her bid.
She campaigned especially hard in New Hampshire, hoping to capitalise on state Democrats’ frustration with the president. The Democratic National Committee decided last year to make South Carolina the first voting state, a move that upended a century-old tradition of New Hampshire hosting the first primary.
Williamson acknowledged from the start that it was unlikely she would beat Biden, but she argued in her launch speech in March that “it is our job to create a vision of justice and love that is so powerful that it will override the forces of hatred and injustice and fear.”
The Associated press contributed to this report
