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 my candidacy for the DNC chairmanship,” Williamson said in a video announcing her candidacy, “because I feel I can bring a level of expertise to the process of realizing this possibility of victory over to increase over the next two and four years. years in a way that won’t happen if we just look at traditional political means to make that happen.”
Williamson added that she has spoken to Democratic voters about what they would like to see from their party.
“I’ve traveled a lot around this country and I’ve seen how much pain there is out there,” she said. “I have been up close and personal with people who had no health care, who couldn’t survive with just one job, who were so depressed about so many of the circumstances in their lives that were in fact at least indirectly a result of 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 enter the race to succeed retiring DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison.
She joins a wide range of candidates who have previously announced their bids for the chairmanship, including former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, Minnesota Democratic Party Chairman Ken Martin, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler, New York State Senator James Skoufis and former Maryland Senate. candidate Robert Houton.
So far, most candidates say they would try to start a new term as DNC chairman by learning what went wrong for their party in 2024 and conducting a so-called “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 like their wallets were more important than their pain. We need to understand what it is that has emotionally and psychologically disconnected people from the sense that the Democratic Party was part of a great legacy in American history.”
There have not yet been any public forums where the candidates have met and answered questions from members of their party, but those meetings will start in the new year. The official election for the next DNC chairman will take place on February 1.
In her video, Williamson added that her goals as chair of the DNC would include connecting the problems in voters’ lives with public policy solutions.
“I want to help people connect to the political issues in their lives in a very real and personal way. And I want to help people understand that by joining the Democratic Party they can really make a difference,” she said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
