Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg reacted with shock to learn that former Vice President Kamala Harris considered then abandoned him as a potential running mate during the 2024 election.
In an excerpt of Harris’s forthcoming memoir published this week in The Atlantic, she described how Buttigieg was initially her top choice, though she later grew concerned America was not ready to elect a ticket with a Black woman and a gay man, concluding that Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man.”
“We were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk,” Harris wrote.
Buttigieg told Politico on Thursday he was “surprised” to learn of this and called for “giving Americans more credit,” arguing they would have judged the campaign on the issues, not his identity.
“My experience in politics has been that the way that you earn trust with voters is based mostly on what they think you’re going to do for their lives, not on categories,” Buttigieg said.
The Indiana politician added that Harris’s reservations about joining forces were “not something that we ever talked about.”
The passage about choosing a vice presidential nominee isn’t the only part of the memoir, 107 Days, that has led to back-and-forth within the party.
In another excerpt, Harris described Joe Biden’s decision to initially seek reelection as “reckless” while conceding that she “perhaps” could have done more to encourage him to cede the stage to another candidate much earlier than the dramatic late-stage twist that led to Harris replacing him.
A former Biden official condemned the comments.
“Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job,” the official told Axios. “She had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration’s key work streams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was.”
Harris announced in July she won’t seek the governorship of California next year, but her future political plans beyond that, if any, remain unclear.
