Harris cites her Jewish husband as part of why she didn’t pick ‘first choice’ Buttigieg as running mate

Former US vice president Kamala Harris says she would have picked Pete Buttigieg as her running mate last year, but America wasn’t ready for the pairing, according to an excerpt of her new book.

Harris writes in an excerpt of “107 Days” published in The Atlantic that former president Joe Biden’s transportation secretary was her “first choice,” adding that he “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,” she writes, referring to her husband Doug Emhoff.

Her thoughts on selecting a running mate come as potential 2028 contenders begin traveling the US in the first year of the second Trump administration.

In the book excerpt, she writes about her love of working with Buttigieg and her friendship with him and his husband, but that the two of them on the Democratic ticket would have been too risky.

“And I think Pete also knew that — to our mutual sadness,” she writes.