In her new memoir 107 Days, failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris reveals that Pete Buttigieg was her first choice for vice president in the 2024 campaign — but she ultimately discarded him because he is a gay man.
Harris wrote that while she admired Buttigieg, calling him “an ideal partner,” she felt that having his and her identities together on the ticket would ask “a lot of America”: “to accept a woman, a Black woman … and a gay man.”
The revelation, reported this week by outlets including The Atlantic and the Associated Press, has sparked criticism over what many see as a glaring contradiction between Harris’s rhetoric on representation and her private calculations about electability.
The admission has been seized upon by critics who argue that Harris, long a champion of diversity, effectively sidelined Buttigieg because of the very identity she insists should never be treated as a political liability.
“Kamala Harris has spent her career telling Americans to embrace representation, but when she had the power to act, she bowed to fear,” said political analyst John Harrison. “It’s hard not to see this as hypocrisy—preaching inclusion publicly while calculating against it privately.”
So much for breaking barriers—when it counted, Harris made sure the glass ceiling stayed firmly in place.