Kamala Harris wanted to pick Pete Buttigieg as her 2024 vice presidential candidate but decided against it because she believed it was too risky to choose a gay candidate, according to a new excerpt from her forthcoming memoir.
The losing Democratic standard bearer felt Buttiegieg would be the best running mate but believed American voters were not ready to vote for a White House ticket of a Black woman and a gay man.
“(Buttigieg) would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man,” Harris writes. “But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man.”
Harris, who was catapulted into the race when former President Biden abruptly pulled the plug on his reelection bid, admitted considering throwing caution to the wind and picking Buttigieg.
But she considered it too important to play it safe to prevent President Trump from returning to power, according to The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire.
She wound up picking Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a more conventional choice. Their ticket wound up losing to Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
“Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it,” she writes. “But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.”
The former vice president says she believes Buttigieg would agree with her veepstakes calculus, although he hasn’t commented on being passed over.
“And I think Pete also knew that — to our mutual sadness,” she writes.
Harris dishes on her failed campaign in 107 Days, a campaign memoir that hits bookstores this week.
The trailblazing first Black vice president controversially admits that she and other Biden aides were “hypnotized” into agreeing that he and First Lady Jill Biden should be left to decide whether he was fit enough to run for four more years in office. The move blew up in Democrats’ faces when Biden’s advanced age was exposed in a stumbling debate performance against Trump.
Harris also stirred the pot by accusing some Biden loyalists of undermining her. They’ve hit back by suggesting she wasn’t up to the task of taking on Trump.
Buttigieg, 43, who served as Biden’s transportation secretary, won plaudits for his communication skills in his failed 2020 presidential primary bid.
He is considered a potential 2028 Democratic hopeful, along with a crowded field including California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Harris herself hasn’t closed the door on another run for the White House.
