Pete Buttigieg Rebukes Kamala Harris for Passing Him Over in Veepstakes Because He’s Gay
(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg rebuked former Vice President and Democratic Party standard-bearer Kamala Harris on Thursday for passing him over in her veepstakes because of his sexual orientation.
In her new memoir about her 2024 campaign, 107 Days, Harris revealed that Buttigieg was her “first choice” to tap to join her ticket, and that “he would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man.” Ultimately, Harris decided on Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) instead.
“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 explained.
Harris added that she believed Buttigieg agreed with her political calculation, “to our mutual sadness.”
And yet, when asked about Harris’s comments about him in her book, Buttigieg bristled — and told Politico that he was “surprised” by the sentiment she expressed.
“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,” observed the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. “You just have to go to voters with what you think you can do for them. Politics is about the results we can get for people and not about these other things.”
Buttigieg also contradicted Harris’s account by revealing that her concerns about his sexual orientation were “not something that we ever talked about.”
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