Kamala Harris grilled over not picking Pete Buttigieg as running mate

Former presidential hopeful Kamala Harris has defended her decision to not pick Pete Buttigieg as her running mate in last year’s presidential election.

The Democratic former vice-president has been promoting her book, 107 Days, which delves into the short time she had to mount her campaign after Joe Biden dropped out of the running just four months before America went to the polls.

A recent excerpt previewed in The Atlantic offered some insight into her choice for a potential vice-president. Buttigieg, who went up against Biden and Harris for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 race for the White House election, was her “first choice.”

However, it was “too big a risk”, she decided and plumped for Minnesota governor Tim Walz instead.

“We were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man,” she said.

During a recent appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show, Harris was grilled by the gay host about the wording in the book where she said it was “hard to hear” that the then secretary of transportation couldn’t be her running mate “because he was gay.”

Harris replied: “My point is, as I write in the book, in one of the most hotly contested elections… against someone like Donald Trump, who knows no floor, to be a Black woman running for president of United States and [have] a vice-presidential running mate [who is] a gay man, with the stakes being so high, it made me very sad but I realised it would be a real risk.”

She insisted that the decision not to go with Buttigieg, whom she described as “a phenomenal public servant,” wasn’t about prejudice, although she admitted: “Maybe I was being too cautious.”

America was ready for a gay leader, she added, and praised the man, still sometimes called Mayor Pete, for his ability to win over conservative voters.

Speaking to Politico last week, Buttigieg responded to the former vice-president’s comments, saying: “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.

“You just have to go to voters with what you think you can do for them. Politics is about the results we can get for people and not about these other things.”

A poll in July made Buttigieg, who is raising two mixed-race children with his husband, the favourite to be the Democrats’ nominee ahead of the 2028 presidential election. 

107 Days is available now.

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