KEY POINTS

  • Williamson said she accomplished her goal of raising issues no one else was discussing
  • She pledged to support the eventual Democratic nominee
  • She had been polling less than 1% and said she realized she'd never gain enough support to win

Self-help guru Marianne Williamson, who based her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination on love, ended her campaign Friday, saying she wants a progressive to win.

“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,” Williamson said in announcing her decision.

Williamson, 67, laid off her entire staff recently but continued to make campaign appearances in New Hampshire and Iowa.

Williamson, a best-selling author and spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey, said she has realized she will not be able to gain enough support to win the nomination and would rather not “get in the way of a progressive candidate winning.”

“I learned many things about America during this campaign,” Williamson said, adding, “These are not times to despair; they are simply times to rise up. Things are changing swiftly and dramatically in this country.”

She also wished luck to the remaining 13 candidates and pledged to back the eventual nominee.

During the June Democratic debate, Williamson said she saw President Trump’s election as a symptom of a spiritually diseased society and said only love could defeat him.

Among her campaign positions was the need for as much as $500 billion for reparations for slavery and a proposal for a Department of Peace to augment the State Department’s peace-building agencies.

Williamson had been garnering less than 1% support in polls and last appeared on the debate stage in July because she failed to meet polling and fundraising minimums. In a South Carolina poll released Friday, she registered no support.

Williamson, who was born in Houston, was founder of Project Angel Food, which delivered food to homebound HIV/AIDS victims, and co-founded the Peace Alliance.

Before running for president, her only other foray into politics was a 2014 effort to represent California’s 33rd Congressional District.

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