The Running Mate Kamala Harris Didn't Dare Choose [View all]

[PunkinPi]

As Kamala Harris rushed to pick a running mate last year, her “first choice” was her close friend Pete Buttigieg, but she decided that it would be “too big of a risk” for a Black woman to run with a gay man.

Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner—if I were a straight white man,” Harris writes in a passage of her soon-to-be-released book, 107 Days, that I saw. “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.”

“And I think Pete also knew that—to our mutual sadness.”

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Harris writes that Buttigieg originally topped the eight names on her vetting list because “he is 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.”

Source - https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/09/kamala-harris-running-mate-pete-buttigieg/684249/?gift=SCYx-5scVta3-cr_IlgTyTfgkzX7TNG8ELix2pNfRhc