Former Vice President Kamala Harris blamed President Donald Trump for her decision to choose Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota over then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as her running mate in 2024 during a Monday interview with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.
Harris chose Walz to be the Democratic nominee for vice president over Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania in August 2024. Maddow questioned Harris about an excerpt from her book in which she explained she chose to pass over Buttigieg because he was gay.
“You say in the book really bluntly that your personal first choice for your running mate would have been Pete Buttigieg, and you praised him effusively. You say he would have been an ideal partner ‘If I were a straight man,’” Maddow said. “And you say effectively that demographically it was… too much to ask of the American people to ask them to elect you with him as your running mate. I wonder if his reaction to that, since this part of the book has come out, if you’ve had any reflection on that or … I guess I’d ask you to just elaborate on that a little bit. It’s hard to hear.”
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“No, no, no, that’s not what I said, that, that’s, that he couldn’t be on the ticket because he is gay,” Harris responded. “My point is, as I write in the book, is that I was clear that in 107 days, in one of the most hotly contested elections for president of the United States against someone like Donald Trump, who knows no floor, to be a black woman running for president of the United States, and as a vice presidential running mate, a gay man. With the stakes being so high, it made me very sad. But I also realized it would be a real risk.”
Trump secured the 270 electoral votes necessary to win his second presidential term in November 2024. Harris hastened to assure Maddow she supported the “LGBT community.”
“You know, I’ve been an advocate and an ally of… of the LGBT community my entire life. So it wasn’t about it wasn’t about… so it wasn’t about any, any prejudice on my part, but that we had such a short, we had such a short period of time and the stakes were so high,” Harris told Maddow.
“I think Pete is a phenomenal, phenomenal public servant and I think America is and would be ready for that,” Harris continued. “But at when I had to make that decision with two weeks to go, you know, and maybe I was being too cautious, you know, I’ll let our friends, we should all talk about that. Maybe I was, but that’s the decision I made, and I’m, and I, as with everything else in the book and being very candid about that. With a great deal of sadness about also the fact that it might have been a risk.”
Walz has stated publicly that he will not seek the presidency in 2028, opting to run for a third term as Minnesota governor.
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