Kamala Reveals Who Her ‘First Choice’ For Running Mate Was
Former Vice President Kamala Harris says her top pick for a 2024 running mate was Pete Buttigieg — but she ultimately passed on him due to concerns about public perception and what she called the “limits of America’s readiness” for diversity on the ticket.
In excerpts from her upcoming memoir 107 Days, published Wednesday by The Atlantic, Harris reveals that Buttigieg, the former South Bend mayor and Biden’s Transportation Secretary, was her “first choice” for VP.
“Pete would have been an ideal partner—if I were a straight white man,” Harris wrote. “But 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 described Buttigieg as “a sincere public servant” with a gift for “framing liberal arguments in a way that makes it possible for conservatives to hear them.” But in the end, she wrote that the ticket would have asked for too much “novelty” from an electorate she believed wasn’t ready.
Instead, Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her vice-presidential nominee after President Biden dropped out of the race just 107 days before the election. Harris’s decision came as Democrats scrambled to unite behind a candidate, and Buttigieg was reportedly under consideration for both VP and future presidential runs.
Buttigieg, who declined to run for U.S. Senate in Michigan earlier this year, is said to be positioning himself for a 2028 White House campaign.
Harris’s memoir, which will be released September 23, doesn’t shy away from attacking Biden either. She accuses the former president of putting his ego over the country by running again in 2024.
“Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness,” she wrote. “The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition.”
The book offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at how Harris navigated the final stretch of the 2024 campaign and her decision-making in the wake of Biden’s political collapse.