Even as members of the Democratic Party criticized Howard Schultz for floating the possibility of running as a third-party candidate, 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, who ran for Congress as an independent in 2014, told Bold TV this time the cost would be too high if she threw the race toward President Trump’s re-election. So this time in her bid for federal office, she’s running as a Democrat.
“Well, the Constitution does not mention political parties and George Washington warned us against them,” Williamson told Bold TV. “I think this whole dichotomy, including ‘liberal’ versus ‘conservative’ is getting old, and it’s a distraction from the deeper things we need to be discussing. At the time [when she ran as an independent in California in 2014], I felt it was a principled thing to do because I do feel the American political conversation should involve more than just Democrats and Republicans or even Conservatives and Liberals. However, this is a different time and given this president, not because he’s a Conservative—which actually I don’t think he is—but given his performance, his policies, and his falsehoods, I would not risk sending ten votes away from a candidate with a good chance of defeating him. I think that this whole issue of the parties is like two broken legs and two broken arms, but what we’re facing now is more like a bullet close to the heart.”
“I think whenever you feel a calling within yourself to do something that you feel is yours to do, it can’t be about who else is doing it,” Williamson told Bold TV. “We are living in very serious times and we all have to move into a very deep place within ourselves to find the energies, the insights, and the activation in order to take us through these times to a better place. The dominant political conversation is not a container for those kinds of energies. It is superficial, it is narrow, it reacts only to circumstances, it does not inspire vision. It treats the leaves but it doesn’t treat the roots, and so I feel that somebody…must introduce a conversation that speaks to the deeper dynamics of what went wrong, what’s happening now, what we need to do to make things right, and the place we need to find within ourselves as citizens in order to make that happen.”
Within political circles Williamson has low name identification and is not included in many national polls for the Democratic nomination. If she is included, she is trailing far behind frontrunners like Sens. Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Cory Booker. Yet Williamson said this doesn’t bother her, and said that the majority of primary voters were undecided and open to someone they didn’t know about yet.
“In terms of what makes me stand out, I don’t wake up in the morning and ask what makes me stand out,” Williamson said. “I’m not living from that strata of calculation, to me that’s the corruption of the political process. First of all, as you said anybody who knows anything about politics knows whoever is quote-unquote ‘ahead’ right now it is so irrelevant. But, secondly and I think even more significantly, being on the road talking to people in Iowa, talking to people in New Hampshire, talking to people in South Carolina and Nevada. The thing is it really doesn’t matter what they’re saying on TV, what matters is what the people in Iowa, Nevada, South Carolina and New Hampshire think. In those first four primary states, and they take very seriously, in my experience and I haven’t traveled to Nevada yet, but in those other three states my experience is that they take very seriously their role. They know that who they elect in their caucuses and their elections will determine the political conversation in the United States for the next two years. So, they’re not listening to what the TV is saying. They’re listening to the candidates and I think that’s profound. I think that’s very democratic and in a beautiful way. So all of that other stuff – like I said I’m running in a different conversation and it doesn’t include – it’s not about the football game to me.”
