Williamson, Phillips set to debate each other in New Hampshire

Democratic presidential candidates Marianne Williamson and Rep. Dean Phillips (Minn.) are set to take part in a debate scheduled for early January in New Hampshire, an event that won’t feature their main competitor, President Biden. 

The debate will be hosted by New England College, a liberal arts nonprofit school, on Jan. 8 at the DoubleTree Hotel in Manchester, N.H. It will be moderated by the founder of the communications firm McElveen Strategies and former WMUR Political Director Josh McElveen, and it will air on SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124 at 7 p.m. EST.

To qualify for the debate, candidates had to be on the Democratic Party ballot for the first-in-the-nation primary and poll above 5 percent.

The Democratic National Committee shuffled the primary calendar last year to move South Carolina ahead of New Hampshire, though the Granite State is still going ahead with its old schedule and holding the primary on Jan. 23. For this reason, Biden has not filed to be on the ballot in New Hampshire.

However, his allies have launched a write-in campaign for the president in the hopes he will win the primary anyway and avoid the potentially embarrassing optics of losing to someone who’s actually on the ballot. New Hampshire Democratic operative Kathy Sullivan launched a Super PAC called “Granite for America” to fundraise for the effort. 

The debate is an opportunity for Williamson and Phillips to make their cases as they struggle to gain traction in their effort to unseat their party’s incumbent.

Both participants will have 90 seconds for opening and closing statements and one minute for answers. If a candidate invokes the other, they will be given 30 seconds to respond. 

Williamson, an author who also ran for president in 2020, polled at 12 percent in a Quinnipiac University survey last month.

“My expectation is that it will be substantive and my definition of success is that I blow it out of the park,” Williamson said in a statement to The Hill. 

Phillips’ campaign did not respond to The Hill’s request for comment.

Both participants, along with The Young Turks host and presidential candidate Cenk Uygur, are battling to get their name legally on the ballot in key states before fall next year.

The outsider candidates are already facing obstacles in states like Florida and Massachusetts, where the state Democratic Parties have only submitted Biden’s name on the primary ballot, decisions further complicating the path for the incumbent-challenging Democrats to make a larger imprint in the election process.