Marianne Williamson, an author and former Democratic presidential candidate, announced Thursday that she is launching a campaign to become the next chair of the Democratic National Committee.
“I am announcing I’m running for DNC chair,” Williamson said in a video announcing her candidacy, “because I feel that I can bring a level of expertise to the process of lifting up this possibility of victory over the next two and four years in a way that will not occur if we are only looking traditional means of politicking in order to make that happen.”
Williamson added that she’s been talking to Democratic voters about what they’d like to see from their party.
“I’ve traveled extensively throughout this country, and I’ve seen how much pain there is out there,” she said. “I’ve been up close and personal with people who didn’t have health care, who couldn’t survive on just one job, who were so depressed about so many of the conditions in their lives that were, in fact, at least indirectly due to bad public policy, and too many of them didn’t feel like the Democratic Party had their back.”
Williamson is the latest candidate, and the first woman, to jump into the race to succeed outgoing DNC Chair Jaime Harrison.
She joins a wide field of candidates who previously announced their bids for chair, including former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, Minnesota Democratic Party Chair Ken Martin, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler, New York state Sen. James Skoufis and former Maryland Senate candidate Robert Houton.
So far, most of the candidates say that they would seek to begin a new term as DNC chair by learning what went wrong for their party in 2024 and conducting what is often called a “postmortem” analysis of the election.
Williamson agreed with that strategy in her video, saying, “We need to know what it was that made people feel that their wallets were more important than their pain. We need to understand what it is that has made people emotionally and psychologically disconnect from a sense that the Democratic Party was part of a great legacy in American history.”
There have been no public forums yet where the candidates have met and taken questions from members of their party, but those meetings are slated to start in the new year. The official election for the next DNC chair will be held on Feb. 1.
In her video, Williamson added that her goal as chair of the DNC would include connecting the problems in voters’ lives to public policy solutions.
“I want to help people connect with the political issues that are going on in their lives in a very real and personal way. And I want to help people understand that by connecting to the Democratic Party, they can truly make a difference,” she said.
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