OAN Staff Blake Wolf
9:53 AM – Friday, September 19, 2025
Former Vice President Kamala Harris revealed in her upcoming book that her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, wasn’t her ideal choice to serve alongside her on the 2024 Democrat presidential ticket.
In an excerpt of Harris’s upcoming book, “107 Days,” reported by The Atlantic on Wednesday, Harris revealed that former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was her “first choice,” but ultimately decided the pick was “too risky.”
The former vice president explained that Buttigieg, a gay man, “would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight White man.”
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“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. “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.”
“And I think Pete also knew that — to our mutual sadness,” she continued.
Harris also recounts watching the final debate of the campaign between Walz and then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance, in which she hoped her running mate would be “the closer.”
Harris noted that Vance took a mild-mannered approach, in contrast to President Donald Trump’s confrontational debate style.
“When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling at JD’s fake bipartisanship, I moaned to Doug, ‘What is happening?’” she wrote.
“I told the television screen: ‘You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate,’” she continued.
Harris went on to state that Walz “fumbled his answer when the moderator, predictably, questioned why he had claimed to be in Hong Kong during the democracy protests in Tiananmen Square,” and rather than stating he misspoke, Walz instead “talked about biking in Nebraska.”
“The following weekend, Saturday Night Live did a sketch in which actors posed as Doug and me, sitting on our couch, watching the debate. While I did not in fact spit out wine, it was otherwise uncanny in its portrait of our evening,” Harris added.
Harris has since ruled out running for governor of California in 2026, leaving the door open for a potential presidential run in 2028.
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