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Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris
In her upcoming book, Harris says Americans wouldn't have voted for a Black woman and a gay man. Buttigieg says they deserve more credit.
Pete Buttigieg says it wouldn’t have been too risky for Kamala Harris to choose him as her running mate in 2024, contrary to what Harris is saying in her upcoming book.
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In Harris’s book about her presidential campaign, 107 Days, she writes that Americans likely wouldn’t vote for a Black woman, married to a Jewish man, with a gay man as her vice-presidential pick. Buttigieg was her first choice for her running mate, she says, and he would have been ideal if she were a straight white man. That passage was contained in an excerpt published in The Atlantic this week.
Buttigieg, the former secretary of Transportation, told Politico Thursday that he’s for “giving Americans more credit” than that.
“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,” he said at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at Monroe County Democratic Headquarters in Indiana.
“Politics is about the results we can get for people and not about these other things,” he added. He noted his two terms as mayor of South Bend, Indiana — he was reelected after coming out — and the fact that Barack Obama won Indiana in the 2008 presidential election.
Related: What we know about Kamala Harris's upcoming memoir 107 Days & what she's been up to since leaving office
When she was considering Buttigieg, Harris writes, “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.”
She says she thinks Buttigieg “also knew that — to our mutual sadness,” but he told Politico they never talked about it.
Buttigieg and Harris both sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, which ultimately went to Joe Biden, with Harris as his running mate. Harris and Buttigieg also are considering presidential runs in 2028.
Related: Pete Buttigieg opens up on why Joe Biden should not have sought reelection
In his talk with Politico, Buttigieg responded to another passage in Harris’s book, in which she says Biden shouldn’t have run for reelection in 2024. He eventually withdrew, and Harris became the presidential nominee. Buttigieg agreed, saying Biden “should not have run, and if he had made that decision sooner, [Democrats] might have been better off.”
107 Days will be out Tuesday.
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