Marianne Williamson drops out of Democratic presidential race

Marianne Williamson, the self-help author who argued that the United States needed “a season of repair” to bring fundamental change, has suspended her long-shot presidential campaign, she announced Wednesday night.

Williamson, 71, said her campaign “did what we could to shed some light in some very darkened times.”

“I read a quote the other day that said sunsets are proof that endings can be beautiful, too,” she said in a YouTube video. “And so today, even though it is time to suspend my campaign for the presidency, I do want to see the beauty and I do want all of you who incredibly supported me on this journey — as donors, as supporters, as team and as volunteers — to see the beauty too.”

Williamson, who also unsuccessfully ran in the Democratic primary in 2020, formally launched her second campaign last February as the first challenger to President Biden’s reelection bid.

“President Biden is doing his best to help people survive an unjust system. A Democratic president should be doing much more,” she told The Washington Post then. “We need to offer people more than the alleviation of their stress. We need to offer fundamental economic reform. Nothing short of that will beat the Republicans in 2024.”

Williamson said she was running on universal health care, tuition-free higher education, paid family leave, free child care and a higher minimum wage. She later became the only Democratic candidate to call for a cease-fire in Gaza.

However, her campaign had little traction. In the New Hampshire primary, Williamson won about 4 percent of the vote, despite focusing much of her campaigning in the Granite State. Biden, who did not appear on the New Hampshire ballot, won nearly 64 percent of the vote as a write-in candidate, while Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), another long-shot Biden challenger, won about 20 percent.

Michael Scherer contributed to this report.