Former Vice President Kamala Harris has revealed who she actually wanted as her 2024 running mate—and it wasn’t the man she ended up with.
An abstract from Harris’ upcoming memoir 107 Days, detailing last year’s presidential campaign and seen by The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire, tells how her “first choice” was then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. However, Harris feared voters were not ready to back a ticket featuring both a Black woman and a gay 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. “And I think Pete also knew that—to our mutual sadness.”
Harris added that Buttigieg would have been an “ideal partner” for her White House bid if she were a “straight white man.”
Instead, she picked Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota over Buttigieg and other names floated at the time, including Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania.
Walz, at the time largely unknown outside the Midwest, quickly rose in profile thanks to several headline-grabbing cable news appearances and by launching the Democratic attack line that Trump and other Republicans are “weird.”
According to Lemire, Harris does not say in her book whether Walz knew he wasn’t her first choice.
Buttigieg, a 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful, was seen as a strong contender by Harris’ allies thanks to his strong name recognition and his combative style against the GOP. His age, 42 at the time, was also seen as a plus, as selecting him as a potential VP would allow Harris to demonstrate that the party is moving on from the then-81-year-old Joe Biden.
Harris writes that Buttigieg was top of her initial eight-person shortlist for running mate, praising him as “a sincere public servant with the rare talent of being able to frame liberal arguments in a way that makes it possible for conservatives to hear them.”
To this day, Buttigieg is one of the few Democrats who regularly appears on the pro-Trump Fox News.
Ultimately, Buttigieg didn’t even make it to Harris’ final shortlist, with a source telling Lemire that Harris did not discuss her reasoning with Buttigieg.
A previous excerpt from 107 Days revealed that Harris was highly critical of Biden’s decision to seek a second term. Biden eventually suspended his re-election campaign after a disastrous CNN debate, leaving Harris with just over three months to mount her own White House run from scratch.
“The stakes were simply too high,” Harris wrote. “This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Harris, Walz, and Buttigieg’s offices for comment.
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