Marianne Williamson's New Campaign Manager Ready to 'Expose' Democrats

Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson will hire from within after a series of staff shakeups that led to the departure of two campaign managers in a matter of weeks.

The campaign plans to announce Friday that Williamson's New Hampshire state director, Carlos Cardona, will be promoted to lead her longshot presidential campaign in a move they hope will instill a renewed sense of stability after a series of departures.

In an interview with Newsweek, Cardona claims to have a plan to chip away at President Joe Biden's commanding lead over the field, betting on the same grassroots energy in the Democratic base that elevated Barack Obama—Cardona's political idol—and progressive Senator Bernie Sanders to the top of the polls in their presidential campaigns.

Running from Biden's left, Cardona said he hopes to bring the president to task on where his administration has fallen short, seeking to bank on his unpopularity with the electorate and the perception that he has abandoned the progressive voters he courted to achieve victory in 2020.

And New Hampshire—an early battleground state where Biden could potentially be ineligible to compete after leaders there indicated plans to defy his proposed changes to the 2024 primary calendar—will serve as ground zero for the campaign to make that case.

"Democrats cannot win in 2024 by just simply saying 'we have to defeat Donald Trump' or DeSantis," Cardona told Newsweek in his first interview as campaign manager. "That cannot just be the winning argument, that we passed a mediocre infrastructure plan or we slowed down recession. Democrats are not going to win with just that simple messaging. The American public expects more and wants more."

Unseating a president is one of the most daunting tasks in politics, as just 10 have failed to win a second term. And since the advent of the modern primary system in 1972, no sitting president has failed to win their party's nomination to run again.

And like other progressive challengers in the past, Williamson faces a New Hampshire electorate that has traditionally favored moderates, with significant ground to make up in order to be competitive. In even the most optimistic polls, Williamson is still performing at or below double digits in a three-way race between Biden and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a member of the Kennedy political dynasty more known for his popularity among conservatives and embracing of conspiracy theories than for his career as an environmental lawyer.

But Cardona knows New Hampshire. A young, Latino resident of a conservative pocket of the Granite State, Cardona hosted each of the candidates running for the Democratic nomination in 2020 at his home that cycle and learned their idiosyncrasies.

He grew up impoverished in Puerto Rico, and understands what makes the Hispanic community and working class tick. He also loves his state, and he believes Biden's plans to move New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary to South Carolina will likely prompt the type of backlash that could hurt him with the state's influential electorate.

"Joe Biden has shown his true colors," Cardona said. "To me, that tells me that he doesn't think Granite State voters are important."

He might be able to convince New Hampshire, but the campaign also needs to overcome a national Democratic establishment that has already committed itself to preventing a challenge to the sitting president. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has indicated it does not plan to sponsor debates between the candidates.

More recently, the Williamson campaign was blocked from meeting with several chapters of the High School Democrats of America after the DNC—which oversees the group—committed to backing Biden as the presumptive nominee in 2024.

Williamson, however, has sought to make the case that Biden—while achieving high marks of approval from members of his party for his job performance—is no longer seen as viable, particularly given additional polling that shows low enthusiasm from voters for the prospect of him serving a second term.

"We're gonna continue to expose those bad actors, wherever they may be," Cardona said. "So they either do a fair process, and everybody plays by the same rules, or we're going to expose them and use our platform to make sure that the American public knows that this is not fair what they're doing."

But Cardona also inherits a campaign that has seen significant turnover in recent months. In May, Williamson campaign manager Peter Daou left his post just one month into the job, while her deputy campaign manager, Jason Call, resigned shortly after what the campaign described was a mutual decision to take the campaign in a more progressive direction. (Daou disputed the claims in an interview with Politico.)

Several weeks later, Daou's replacement, Rosa Calderon, left the campaign after allegations reemerged from a 2017 incident in which she was accused of financial fraud by a local Democratic Party group in California. (The campaign did not deny the allegations but declined to respond to Politico's questions about it at the time, calling the reporting "an apparent political 'hit' piece.")

Williamson has also faced allegations of mismanagement as a candidate, including becoming the subject of a Politico piece at the start of her campaign based on interviews with one-dozen former staffers describing her "toxic" treatment of staff during her failed 2020 presidential bid.

Cardona downplayed those narratives, however, arguing they were no different than the tribulations faced by campaigns on a regular basis, and reflected a "vulture media" with no interest in reporting the positives of their message.

"Efforts to mischaracterize common campaign occurrences as dramas unworthy of a run for the highest office in the land are ludicrous," he said. "Neither Williamson nor her campaign have anything to apologize for, and despite the attacks against her, false claims and media blackouts, her popularity is growing and she will continue to persevere.

"If other campaigns were looked at under the same lens, very similar narratives could be spun. Our campaign features a wonderful team that's been with us from the very beginning."

Even facing a significant spending advantage—and significant ground to make up in the polls—Cardona said he sees demographics as the greatest opportunity for the Williamson campaign to compete, if not move the needle, leaning even into hot-button issues that national Democrats have sought to avoid.

In 2020, Williamson was the first candidate to endorse reparations for Black communities, a position that was later adopted by other candidates. More recently, she hosted an online campaign event with a transgender congressional candidate in California, directly challenging the culture war issues that clouded a recent Pride event Biden held at the White House.

And while Biden has sought to champion issues like Native American sovereignty with the appointment of figures like Deb Haaland as his secretary of the interior, Williamson has pushed policies to honor the terms of treaties the U.S. reneged on more than a hundred years earlier—including ceding majority control of sites like the Black Hills in South Dakota.

"We're not anti-Joe Biden. We're not anti-Democratic Party. We're running because we believe that our policies are better and the American public have been asking for these," Cardona said. "So I don't think the American public has to be convinced, they just have to know that there's somebody out there running and fighting along these lines, and fighting for these policies.

"Ultimately, this is not about winning or losing. This is about making sure that our democracy lives on, and that the American public has an option that is not the lesser of two evils."