[H]ENNIKER, N.H. — Many people know Marianne Williamson as a spiritual leader and lecturer whose book “A Return to Love” became a New York Times bestseller with the help of Oprah Winfrey.
Fewer know Williamson as a 2016 Bernie Sanders’ presidential supporter turned 2020 Democratic primary competitor.
“The basic struggle is between democracy and aristocracy,” the 66-year-old California author and activist says in a stump speech that calls for a higher minimum wage and more government help with health care and college costs.
Williamson’s progressive positions mirror those of the Vermont U.S. senator, who she endorsed in his first White House bid. Her commitment to Sanders’ campaign generated headlines like “Hollywood’s Favorite New Age Guru Backs Bernie Sanders for President.”
“I don’t think the American people are going to go with an establishment voice,” Williamson said at the time in a YouTube video. “No one who is entrenched within the perspective of the status quo is going to lead us out of the miasma that we are in now.”
Williamson went on to appear with Sanders at a 2017 empowerment conference in Washington, D.C.
Now she is turning heads by entering the 2020 race on her own.
Williamson hasn’t changed her mind about the Vermont independent — although she does tell audiences, “I believe in capitalism with a conscience.”
“I still love Bernie,” she says, “but I feel moved to run.”
Specifically, Williamson wants to morph Sanders’ call for “revolution” into her own campaign motto, “Join the Evolution.”
“Whether you are healing a life, or healing a nation, the same spiritual and moral and psychological principles prevail,” she recently told an audience in the southwestern New Hampshire town of Henniker. “I don’t want to go to Washington to fight for you, I want to go to Washington and create with you.”
The journey is proving challenging. Sanders won the 2016 New Hampshire Democratic Primary by 22 percentage points over eventual party nominee Hillary Clinton and tops the latest 2020 Granite State Poll. Williamson, in comparison, doesn’t even register on the survey, which misspells her first name.
Likewise, while Sanders touts raising nearly $6 million in his campaign’s first 24 hours, Williamson is trying to sign up 65,000 individual donors so she can qualify to appear in Democratic debates. Almost halfway there, she’s focusing her efforts in the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire and fellow early-bird voting enclaves of Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina.
Vermonter Susan Welsh, a retired community college instructor, knows Williamson for her spiritual teachings. When she learned the candidate would be speaking at Henniker’s New England College — where the Norwich resident attended as a freshman in 1968 — she decided to travel across the border.
“She has an uphill climb, but I am listening to everyone,” Welsh says. “I resent that this woman is being counted out before she’s even heard.”
Williamson is grateful.
“You’re listening to all 1,736 candidates,” she told the New England College audience of a field that actually numbers about two dozen confirmed or considering entrants.
She is promoting her platform — which also calls for federal departments of peace and youth — on her website, in press such as the recent Washington Post Magazine cover story “Marianne Williamson Wants to Be Your Healer in Chief” and her coming book “A Politics of Love.”
“You can’t just tinker with the machine,” Williamson told her New Hampshire audience. “We have to heal this country. We have to harness love for political purposes.”
