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The Running Mate Kamala Harris Didn’t Dare Choose

September 17, 2025 · 10:30 pm ET · Leave a Comment

Jonathan Lemire reports on a passage from Kamala Harris’s soon-to-be-released book, 107 Days, that as Harris rushed to pick a running mate last year, her “first choice” was her close friend Pete Buttigieg, but she decided that it would be “too big of a risk” for a Black woman to run with a gay man.

She writes 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. 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.”

107 Days
by Kamala Harris · Simon & Schuster · 2025
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