The race to lead the Democratic Party in the wake of Kamala Harris’s election defeat expanded on Thursday as author and two-time candidate Marianne Williamson announced that she was seeking the role.
Williamson is a long-shot candidate for the job and enters an already crowded field as the Democratic Party faces an internal debate about its future. Harris’s defeat in swing states across the board led to Donald Trump’s first popular vote victory, a crushing blow for the Democrats who also saw two incumbent senators unseated, throwing total control of the legislative and executive branches into Republican control.
Williamson’s two runs for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 and 2024 both ended in defeat. But her first run, coupled with an energetic campaign and media presence, including on the debate stage, earned Williamson fans in progressive circles across the country. That was evident in 2024 when, despite the Democratic primary process being sidelined by the party in favor of propping up Joe Biden’s bid for re-election, Williamson garnered 3 percent of the vote in Michigan, where an “uncommitted” campaign urged voters angry about Biden’s response to the war in Gaza to register protest votes in the Democratic primary.
Staffers who worked for her 2020 bid, speaking anonymously due to nondisclosure agreements, described the campaign as an intensely toxic environment perpetuated by Williamson, whom they said displayed intense flashes of anger and sometimes lashed out physically. She denied the allegations at the time, calling them “slanderous” and “categorically untrue.” In January of 2020, she laid off her entire campaign staff ahead of the Iowa Caucuses.
With her typically flowery language, Williamson wrote in a statement Thursday announcing her DNC candidacy: “[I]t’s important that we recognize the psychological and emotional dimensions of Trump’s appeal. We need to understand it to create the energy to counter it.”
“As DNC Chair, I will not just have a 50-state strategy; I will have a 365 days-of- the-year strategy. We will create ways for the American people to be involved in the political process not only when there’s an election, but all the time,” Williamson went on to say. “People will know not only what Trump might be doing that transgresses our values, but what Democrats are doing — all around the country — to promote them!”
Before entering politics, Williamson was largely known as a self-help guru who wrote on matters of spiritualism; her work was supported by talk-show magnate Oprah Winfrey, to whom she became an informal adviser.
Other candidates for the DNC job include seasoned party operatives, as well as both successful and failed candidates for elected office. The DNC’s current chair, Jaime Harrison, is a former lobbyist and staffer to Rep. Jim Clyburn who was elected after losing a bid for Senate against Lindsey Graham. Along with less prominent names, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley — who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2016 — is winning some support for his bid, as is Wisconsin state party chair Ben Wikler, who wowed Daily Show host Jon Stewart with his prescription for a new party. Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party chair Ken Martin is a leading contender as well, buoyed by the Democrats’ successes in his state while other parts of the “blue wall” turned red.
The party’s senior leadership is facing open ridicule from progressives and more measured criticism from others in left circles as furious younger Democrats demand answers from the Harris campaign and Bidenworld over the 2024 presidential election loss.
Adding to their frustration has been the response from Harris campaign officials. In an appearance on Pod Save America, members of campaign leadership insisted that the vice president ran a flawless campaign, despite complaints that she turned away from key parts of the Democratic base in favor of winning political centrists and Republicans opposed to the former president with a campaign that embraced figures like Liz Cheney.
Some, like Williamson, are openly resentful of the incumbent president for shooing away the idea of holding a real primary and stepping aside until it was far too late, when his vice president would be forced to run an awkward, protracted run for the office. Harrison is not running for the DNC position again, after proclaiming loudly that voters did not have concerns about Biden or his age after the president’s June debate with Trump.
Biden and Harris have both been virtually silent since the election. The president sat down for an interview with MeidasTouch, a Democrat-aligned outlet, which avoided questions about Harris’s defeat and his own performance in the campaign. He and Harris have not publicly discussed their own diagnoses for her defeat and are unlikely to do so before leaving office in January.
Democrats are due to meet in Maryland’s National Harbor, just outside of the capital, at the end of January for the party’s winter meeting; the chair elections and other leadership races will be decided then.
