Marianne Williamson loses second campaign manager in two months
Other staff departures have also been rampant.
Marianne Williamson has lost her second campaign manager in as many months in what has proven to be a rocky 2024 presidential bid.
Roza Calderon’s departure was announced Monday on a small far-left podcast, the Vanguard, and independently confirmed by two sources to POLITICO granted anonymity to discuss internal staffing dynamics. One person familiar with the campaign said that Calderon quit.
“She tried to right the ship and lead this campaign. Marianne knocked her down every chance she got,” the person said.
Calderon was first hired as a fundraiser for the Williamson campaign in late April and then took on the top job in May after then-interim campaign manager Peter Daou stepped down along with deputy campaign manager Jason Call.
Calderon’s experience in such roles was limited. She ran for Congress in 2018 but lost. During that campaign, she was sentenced to probation after allegedly stealing money from a local Democratic Party group to spend on gas, movie downloads and BottleRock music festival tickets. She had also embellished her resume calling herself a director of development when she was in fact a contractor at the progressive nonprofit Our Revolution.
Williamson, the campaign press secretary and Calerdon did not respond to a request for comment.
Williamson is running a longshot campaign in the Democratic primary — her third bid for public office since 2014 — and hit a polling high of 9 percent in a FOX News Democratic primary poll. But since the campaign launched in March, staff have been fleeing the team. There have been at least seven departures in the last month.
The campaign raised less than $1 million in the first quarter of 2023, and it is not running any broadcast advertising.
Williamson hasn't been on the campaign trail for the last several weeks. Instead, she has been doing virtual events so she could be in London for the birth of her first grandchild. She has been hosting online roundtables, which she calls “Firelight Chats,” but has not traveled to any of the early voting states since April.