EXCLUSIVE — Democratic presidential candidate and author Marianne Williamson has denounced the Democratic National Committee for not encouraging a competitive primary process this election cycle as the party contends with concerns over President Joe Biden‘s age and mental acuity after last week’s debate.
“It was the wrong thing to do to suppress other candidates,” Williamson told the Washington Examiner of the DNC. “How can a party saying we’re working to save democracy say, except in this case, where we believe that even if democracy is so important that we need to suppress democracy?
“The fact that this sort of blew up in their face, I think it almost was going to blow up in somebody’s face regardless of what the specific detail was, because it was simply wrong,” she said. “It was not in alignment with the highest integrity, it wasn’t in alignment with democracy.”
Williamson ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and 2024, and she suspended her campaign in February after the South Carolina primary before relaunching it a couple of weeks later following its Michigan counterpart and more than 101,000 Democrats voting “uncommitted” in protest of Biden’s Middle East policy. She described Biden’s debate as an “unfortunate experience.”
Biden lost his train of thought during his first 2024 debate against former President Donald Trump and, at times, stood with his mouth agape. Biden, his campaign, and the White House have conceded it was “a bad night,” attributing it to a cold, his multiple trips abroad, and even over-preparation.
But that did not prevent Rep. Lloyd Doggett (R-TX) from becoming the first Democratic lawmaker to call for the president to step down as the party’s nominee this week. Doggett’s announcement has been met with an escalation in outreach from Biden to elected Democrats on Capitol Hill and around the country. The president also granted an interview to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
“I felt like, no, this, we’ve got to change course here,” Williamson said of the debate. “We need to recalibrate. We need to recalibrate quickly.
“Given the situation, I think that the real danger for Democrats in this year’s election is not people voting for Donald Trump, people have the right to vote for Donald Trump, it’s a free country and so forth, the real problem for us electorally is not people voting for Trump, the problem is people staying home,” she added. “I was obviously running against the president a long time before there was any sign of the cognitive decline issues or anything like that, but we all know what we know, we all see what we see, so everybody, whether you’re on the Right or the Left, everybody can see what’s happening with the president.”
A spokesman for another Democratic primary challenger, Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN), did not respond to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment. Phillips stood down from House Democratic leadership because of his campaign.
But venture capitalist Jason Palmer, who surprised political pundits on Super Tuesday by earning more votes than Biden in American Samoa, did, though he did not criticize the DNC, which has been scrutinized since 2016 over its response to Sen. Bernie Sanders‘s (I-VT) competing campaign against eventual nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“It was a tough situation,” Palmer told the Washington Examiner. “Almost always, incumbent presidents don’t really have any competition. This just happens to be the first time we’ve had an 81-year-old incumbent president.”
Like Doggett, Palmer, who underscored that his own campaign remains suspended, called on Biden to “step down and open up the race to a younger generation of candidates.”
Palmer said he would not publicly support one contender, but his top six candidates are Vice President Kamala Harris, Govs. Wes Moore (D-MD), Gavin Newsom (D-CA), Jared Polis (D-CO), J.B. Pritzker (D-IL), and Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI). Those governors attended a White House meeting with Biden on Wednesday, which was organized to ease their concerns but has raised more questions after he confirmed a doctor’s consultation that press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had denied earlier that day. He also reportedly told the governors he would stop scheduling events after 8 p.m.
“It’s been percolating in everybody’s mind for a little while,” Palmer said. “He’s 81 years old, there’s been a stream of videos that have come out of him looking very frail, and then seeing him on the debate stage for 90 minutes and the answers that he gave to the questions it, you know, he had a very low bar to clear during that debate, and he didn’t clear that bar on some very basic things.
“It just became really clear that, even though he’s passed a number of pieces of bipartisan legislation, he’s been a great transitional president these last few years, he’s not going to win this campaign,” he added. “It’s really urgent for Joe Biden because it’s his choice to do the right thing and be like George Washington and pass the mantle onto the next generation of leaders. … The timing of the convention is almost perfect for there to be four to six candidates who compete in multiple debates and then we go to an open convention. I think it could be a really exciting time for democracy in America.”
Former House Minority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) has similarly endorsed the idea of a “mini primary” before next month’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago if Biden does decide to stand aside.
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Biden’s political future appears to rest, in part, on his first post-debate interview with Stephanopoulos, which will air Friday on ABC in its entirety, along with a full transcript posted online.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the DNC for comment.
