Kamala Harris: Buttigieg Was ‘First Choice’ for Running Mate, but Too Risky Because He’s Gay

Failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris revealed that former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was her “first choice” to be her running mate, but decided against it because picking a gay man would be “too big of a risk.”

In an excerpt of her upcoming book, 107 Days, obtained by the Atlantic, Harris wrote that Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man.”

“But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man,” the former vice president lamented. “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,” she added.

Buttigieg, who became a rising figure in the Democratic Party with his own failed presidential run in 2020, was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, prior to being nominated to lead the Department of Transportation (DOT) by former President Joe Biden. 

The former DOT secretary, whose primary residence is now in Michigan, was reported to have eyed the state’s open U.S. Senate seat after Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) announced that he would not seek reelection in January.  

Buttigieg later revealed that he would not be running for Senate, nor for governor, in a March social media post:

“I care deeply about who Michigan will elect as Governor and send to the U.S. Senate next year, but I have decided against competing in either race,” he wrote. “I remain enthusiastic about helping candidates who share our values — and who understand that in this moment, leadership means not only opposing today’s cruel chaos, but also presenting a vision of a better alternative.”

This announcement sparked rumors that he would instead run for president again in 2028, Breitbart News reported.

Harris admitted in a separate excerpt from 107 Days, to be released on September 23, that it was “recklessness” for herself and others to not tell Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential race earlier than he did.

“During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps. But the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup,” she wrote. “Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again.”

WATCH — The Return of Rambling Kamala:

She continued, “‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. 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. It should have been more than a personal decision.”

The former vice president even stated that Biden’s age had begun to show in “physical and verbal stumbles,” but still argued that it was not “incapacity.”

While neither Buttigieg nor Biden have publicly responded to Harris’s words, former Biden aides blasted his ex-running mate in statements to Axios last week. 

“Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job,” one former Biden White House official told the outlet. “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.”

Biden is “not the reason she struggled in office or tanked her 2019 [presidential] campaign,” the ex-official added. “Or lost the 2024 campaign, for that matter. The independent variable there is the vice president, not Biden or his aides.”

Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.