When spiritual adviser and bestselling self-help author Marianne Williamson returns to New Hampshire on Wednesday, she’ll be a declared candidate challenging President Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.

Williamson officially kicks off her second straight White House campaign at an event on Saturday at Washington D.C.’s Union Station.

Williamson, who called for reparations for slavery and a Department of Peace as part of her unsuccessful long-shot campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, becomes the first Democrat with a national following to challenge the 80-year-old president in the Democratic primary.

While most public opinion surveys indicate plenty of Democrats would prefer someone else as their party’s standard bearer in 2024, most leaders in the Democratic Party from both the establishment and progressive wings say they will support Biden. Pundits expect the president to announce his re-election campaign for a second term in the White House in the early spring.

“You can appreciate what the president has done — defeating the Republicans in 2020 — and still feel it is time to move on,” Williamson said a week and a half ago in an interview on a New Hampshire news-talk morning radio program.

Williamson told host Jack Heath on “Good Morning New Hampshire” that “many of us, myself included, feel that in order for the Democrats to win in 2024, we’re going to have to be able to offer to the American people something much more” than what Biden has offered.

During the 2020 cycle, Williamson was an unconventional candidate who preached the politics of love. She emphasized “six pillars for a season of moral repair,” including economic justice. She proposed creating a Department of Children and Youths and a Department of Peace, and she pushed for reparations for the descendants of African-American slaves. Among her unorthodox acts was holding a meditation session while campaigning in New Hampshire.

But Williamson struggled with fundraising and failed to qualify for most of the Democratic debates. Days after laying off most of her small staff in January 2020, she dropped out of the race just ahead of the start of the nomination primaries and caucuses.

Williamson traveled to New Hampshire recently, ahead of her 2024 announcement, and it’s likely she’ll spend plenty of her time campaigning here going forward. That comes as no surprise as political strategists have said that if there’s going to be a primary challenge against Biden, New Hampshire appears to be the state where the action will take place.

New Hampshire, which prides itself on its well-informed electorate and its emphasis on small-scale and grassroots retail politics, has for a century held the first primary in the race for the White House. While Republicans are making no changes to their presidential nominating calendar in the 2024 election cycle, the Democratic National Committee last month voted overwhelmingly to approve a new top of the calendar pushed by Biden that upends the traditional schedule.

New Hampshire is supposed to vote second in the DNC’s calendar, along with Nevada, three days after South Carolina, under the new schedule.

But Granite State Democrats, as well as Republicans, warn that New Hampshire will still go first — courtesy of a long-standing state law that mandates the leadoff primary position — and that a primary not sanctioned by the DNC, where Biden doesn’t take part, could invite a bit of trouble for the president.

“President Biden will not file for election in the New Hampshire primary, which will still go first,” longtime New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley emphasized on the eve of the DNC calendar vote. And he warned that “this will set him up, we believe, for an embarrassing situation where the first primary in the country will be won by someone other than the president. This will only fuel chatter of about Democrats divisions.”

Buckley’s prediction appears to be materializing with the arrival of Williamson.

Asked about the DNC’s nominating calendar move, she told Politico earlier this year “that is spitting in the face of democracy.”

And she’s not alone.

Environmental lawyer and anti-COVID vaccine crusader Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was in New Hampshire on Friday. Kennedy, the son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy who is mulling his own Democratic bid for president, defended the primary at an event at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, which for nearly a quarter-century has been a must-stop in the Granite State for potential or actual White House contenders.

Sununu courts GOP donors

Republican Gov. Chris Sununu was in Florida on Friday, addressing and mingling with some of the top dollar donors in the Republican Party.

Sununu, who says he’s seriously mulling a run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, spoke at a donor retreat at the Breakers, an exclusive beachfront resort in the upscale southeastern Florida seaside resort community of Palm Beach. The conference, hosted by the politically influential fiscal conservative group the Club for Growth, also included a handful of other actual or potential Republican White House contenders.

The appearance by Sununu, who’s poll numbers remain sky high but who’s not known for his fundraising prowess, was his second straight at a major donor retreat, following his stop last week in Austin, Texas, at a conference hosted by Karl Rove, the longtime Republican strategist and former top political adviser to then-President George W. Bush.

And as this reporter first spotlighted on Twitter, Sununu hosts a gathering for donors on March 15 at the Bedford Village Inn in Bedford, N.H.

Sununu has said that any decision on his 2024 intentions wouldn’t come until after this year’s legislative session, which includes a new two-year state budget.

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