Buttigieg on Harris running mate remarks: ‘I was surprised when I read that’
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg weighed in on former Vice President Harris’s assertion in her new book that picking him as her running mate would be “too risky,” saying he was “surprised.”
“Well, I was surprised when I read that — I just believe in giving Americans more credit,” Buttigieg said Thursday in an interview with Politico. “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.”
“And I wouldn’t have run for president if I didn’t believe that. You know, I was right here in Indiana when this state turned blue for the first time since LBJ,” he continued. “And it wasn’t, wasn’t Bill Clinton who did it. It wasn’t John Kerry who did it. That happened in 2008 when Barack Obama was leading the ticket.”
Harris wrote in her forthcoming book “107 Days” that the former Democratic mayor was her first choice as a running mate for the 2024 presidential campaign, but making the choice was “too big of a risk.”
Buttigieg, who briefly ran for president in 2020, “would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man,” the former vice president added.
“But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man,” Harris wrote in the book, according to an excerpt published by The Atlantic. “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.”
Buttigieg was on Harris’s shortlist for the ticket, but she ultimately chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as her No. 2 against President Trump and Vice President Vance.
“And just again and again. My personal experience getting reelected [in] South Bend and a lot of the things have just shown me that you just have to go to voters with what you think you can do for them,” Buttigieg said on Thursday.
“And that’s why I’m here in Indiana right now. We do this big rally on redistricting, trying to make sure that we can make the case for politics,” he added. “It’s about the results we can get for people, and not about all these other things.”
In “107 Days,” which is set to go on sale Sept. 23, Harris also characterized former President Biden’s decision to run for reelection as “recklessness.”
“And of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out,” she wrote. “I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run.”