The 71-year-old onetime 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.”
Williamson ultimately opted to continue on for two more primaries, but won just 2% of the vote in South Carolina and about 3% in Nevada.
“I hope future candidates will take what works for them, drinking from the well of information we prepared,” Williamson wrote in 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.”
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Her second White House bid featured the same nontraditional campaigning style and many of the same policy proposals. But she struggled to raise money and was plagued by staff departures from her bid’s earliest stages.
She tweaked Biden, an avid Amtrak fan, by kicking off her campaign at Washington’s Union Station and campaigned especially hard in New Hampshire, hoping to capitalize on state Democrats’ frustration with the president.
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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.”
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In exiting this cycle’s race she wrote Wednesday that “while we did not succeed at running a winning political campaign, I know in my heart that we impacted the political ethers.”
“As with every other aspect of my career over the last forty years, I know how ideas float through the air forming ever new designs,” Williamson said in an email to supporters announcing that she was no longer running. “I will see and hear things in different situations and through different voices, and I will smile a small internal smile knowing in my heart where that came from.”