So long, Marianne: McSpirituality star Williamson drops out of 2020 race

As you may know, McSpirituality guru Marianne Williamson has finally dropped out of the 2020 US presidential race. She made the official announcement on her campaign web site a couple of days ago.

January 10, 2020

I ran for president to help forge another direction for our country. I wanted to discuss things I felt needed to be discussed that otherwise were not. I feel that we have done that.

I stayed in the race to take advantage of every possible opportunity to share our message. With caucuses and primaries now about to begin, however, we will not be able to garner enough votes in the election to elevate our conversation any more than it is now. The primaries might be tightly contested among the top contenders, and I don’t want to get in the way of a progressive candidate winning any of them.

The extent to which Williamson was able to "elevate our conversation" is debatable; I've written quite a bit on that and related topics on this blog (see links at the end of this post). As I've noted on some of those earlier posts, Marianne made a couple of valid points on the debate stage, and the policy outlines on her campaign web site seemed well thought out. For the most part, though, the snide memes and other responses inspired by her candidacy were well-deserved.

Reporting on the news of Williamson's exit from the race, Vox's Emily Stewart led with a snark.

New Zealand’s prime minister can rest at ease that she won’t be getting a call from Marianne Williamson in January 2021 — at least not from Marianne Williamson from the White House.

Stewart's reference was to Williamson's vow at the first Democratic debate in June 2019 that her first action in office would be to call the Kiwi PM, "who said that her goal is to make New Zealand the place where it’s the best place in the world for a child to grow up. And I would tell her: ‘Girlfriend, you are so on.’ The United States of America is going to be the best place in the world for a child to grow up."

The Vox piece provided a capsule review of some of the controversies surrounding Williamson, most of which her critics have known about for years, but which gained wider attention once she hit the campaign trail.

Williamson’s record...came under scrutiny, including not only some of her weird tweets but also some of her questionable advice on weight loss and seeming suggestions that mental illness can be addressed through spirituality instead of medical treatment. (Her campaign has said that Williamson believes Western medicine should come first and she would “never tell anybody to get off their medication.”) On the campaign trail, Williamson’s comments about vaccines were also scrutinized after she called mandatory vaccines “draconian” and “Orwellian” at a campaign stop. She later walked back the comments and said that “many vaccines are important and save lives,” though she understands the skepticism around drugs “rushed to market by Big Pharma.”

But it wasn't the sheer fact of being controversial that stymied Williamson's efforts. Nathaniel Rakich, writing for FiveThirtyEight, offered a more analytical view of why her run for prez never really caught on.

Maybe one reason why Williamson didn’t fare better in the polls is that the more voters got to know her, the less they liked her. According to an average of polls conducted in May, Democrats were not very familiar with Williamson; 13 percent of them had a favorable impression of her, 10 percent had an unfavorable one and the remainder didn’t have an opinion. And even though Williamson’s favorable rating increased by 9 points after the first two debates (according to an average of polls conducted Aug. 1-25), her unfavorable rating increased more — by 16 points. This made her one of the few Democratic candidates who was more unpopular than popular among members of her own party — generally speaking, not a good place to be.

Williamson may have hoped that her New Age rhetoric (“I’m going to harness love for political purposes”) would help her appeal to the spiritual side of the Democratic Party, but it looks like it just turned voters off. As my colleague Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux wrote in September, although “spiritual but not religious” people make up around one-third of the Democratic Party, they are not a cohesive group, do not vote as a monolith and tend to prioritize shared values and policy positions over a shared spiritual identity. They also tend to be more highly educated than the broader public, which might disabuse them of a candidate who has heterodox views on vaccines and antidepressants or who ridiculed the idea that “wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country.” Ultimately, it was harder than Williamson probably expected to get, as she once quipped, “everyone who has a yoga mat” to vote for her.

While that gives me hope for the survival of critical thinking in America, at least among the more progressive voters (yes, even some of the McSpirituality-inclined folks), Rakich concludes that most likely, the failure of Marianne Williamson's presidential campaign ultimately came down to money, or lack thereof. Marianne simply wasn't able to raise enough cash to continue appearing on the debate stage, or to continue maintaining a campaign staff, which she laid off earlier this month. Apparently even the donations of puckish republicans, who willingly gave money to Williamson's campaign because of her entertainment value, were unable to keep the love guru's boat afloat.

Williamson insists that a "politics of conscience" is still possible, and that "love will prevail." I'm not so sure, but in any case, I think I'm far from the only person whose first thought, upon hearing that Marianne has officially taken her hat back out of the ring, was, "Good riddance." I'm all for entertainment value, but given what we currently have sitting in the Oval Office, we need to clear the stage as much as possible for the serious candidates.

Related on this Whirled:

• 10 January, 2011: Snippets for a Monday afternoon (under "What's wrong with this (big) picture?") -- Marianne's weight loss book and the totally contrived marketing backstory that she cooked up with Oprah.
• 5 July 2019: So wrong, Marianne -- Musings on Williamson's first debate performance in late June, on her history as a New-Wage icon, on the new-agey "love and light" mindset, and on why Marianne is the wrong choice to go up against Trump.
• 31 July 2019: Marianne Williamson: still so wrong -- Williamson got to talk more during her second performance at the Democrats' "debate," and some of what she said made sense, but as the title of the post noted... still so wrong.
• 11 November 2019: The Williamson Institute: not quite Trump U, but still crapitalism -- Her presidential run may have been doomed from the beginning, but no worries: Williamson still managed to get some marketing mileage out of it.