The 71-year-old onetime spiritual advisor 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.”
But Williamson ultimately opted to continue for two more primaries. She 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.”
Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips is the last nationally known Democrat still running against Biden, who has scored blowout victories in South Carolina and Nevada and easily won in New Hampshire — despite not being on the ballot — after his allies mounted a write-in campaign.
Williamson first ran for president in 2020 and made national headlines by calling for a “moral uprising” against then-President Trump while proposing the creation of the Department of Peace. She also argued that the federal government should pay large financial reparations to Black Americans as atonement for centuries of slavery and discrimination.
Her second White House bid featured the same nontraditional campaigning style and many of the same policy proposals. 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 announcing her campaign at Washington’s Union Station. She campaigned especially hard in New Hampshire, hoping to capitalize on some state Democrats’ frustration with the president. That followed a new plan by the Democratic National Committee, championed by Biden, that reordered the party’s 2024 presidential primary calendar by leading off with South Carolina on Feb. 3.
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.”
The DNC isn’t holding primary debates, and some states’ Democratic parties, including in North Carolina and Florida, aren’t even planning primaries to give Biden’s challengers a chance.
Williamson is a native of Texas. In 1970, she moved to California to attend Pomona College, where she studied theater and philosophy and protested the Vietnam War; she dropped out a couple of years later. After bouncing around the country and being sidetracked by what Entertainment Weekly called “bad boys and good dope,” she moved to L.A. in 1983 and shared an apartment with actor Laura Dern.
Williamson became a spiritual leader and wrote more than a dozen books, one of which Winfrey promoted by saying, “I have never been more moved by a book than I am by this one.” Her books sold millions of copies, and she attracted a large celebrity following; in 1991, she officiated the wedding of Elizabeth Taylor and Larry Fortensky at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch.
Williamson was also actively engaged in Los Angeles-area charities that helped those with HIV or living in poverty.
She ran an unsuccessful independent congressional campaign in California in 2014. In 2018, she moved to the East Coast. She ended her 2020 presidential run shortly before the lead-off Iowa caucuses, announcing that she didn’t want to take progressive support from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who was ultimately the last candidate to drop out before Biden locked up the nomination.
Times staff writers Seema Mehta and Faith E. Pinho contributed to this report.