Kamala Harris is currently busy promoting her upcoming book, 107 Days, which was just released. The tell-all book drops the bombshells on what went on behind the scenes during her 2024 Presidential election campaign.
Among many other big revelations, besides criticizing Joe Biden’s late withdrawal from the election, her book also details one crucial decision she had to make.
Kamala Harris revealed why she did not pick Pete Buttigieg as her running mate for the election, which she ultimately lost to Donald Trump. The former Vice President is a close friend of the Biden-era Secretary of Transportation. Yet, she gave him a pass as her running mate, because she thought it would have been “too big of a risk.”
She noted that Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner—if I were a straight white man.” For the unversed, Pete came out as gay in 2015, and since then, he became the first openly gay person to serve in a U.S. Cabinet position through his Secretary of Transportation role.
NEW: Kamala Harris says she couldn’t pick Pete Buttigieg as her running mate because he is gay and there was only 107 days.
Maddow: To say that he couldn’t be on the ticket effectively because he was gay, it’s hard to hear.
Harris: No no no that’s not what I said… with the… pic.twitter.com/sKFGmWsg9G
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 23, 2025
In 107 Days, 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.” She added, “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.”
The former Vice President further wrote, “I love Pete. I love working with Pete. He and his husband, Chasten, are friends.” She acknowledged in her book that he was one of the top eight candidates for her running mate. “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,” Harris noted.
NEW: Kamala Harris passed on her top choice for a running mate—Pete Buttigieg—because it would’ve been “too big of a risk” for a Black woman to run with a gay man, she writes in her book, @JonLemire reports: pic.twitter.com/wa8ny1ryuW
— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) September 18, 2025
Although in her book, the Democrat pick for the 2024 election expressed how upset she was about this difficult decision, Pete Buttigieg had a very different reaction. According to Politico, he told that he was “surprised” to find out that it was considered risky to have him as Harris’ running mate.
“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,” said Buttigieg. “I wouldn’t have run for president [in 2020] if I didn’t believe that,” he further added.
