Kamala Harris has admitted in her new memoir 107 Days that Pete Buttigieg was her top choice as a running mate but that she ultimately worried a Black woman at the top of the ticket paired with a gay man would be “too big of a risk” to win in 2024. That candid confession lays bare a brutal political calculation: Democrats quietly measure identity like a campaign commodity rather than stand on conviction.
When Rachel Maddow pressed Harris on MSNBC about that passage, the former vice president tried to recast it as strategic caution rather than prejudice, saying the stakes against Donald Trump were simply too high for what she called an experiment in rapid cultural change. The live exchange was uncomfortable for Democrats because it showed an elite who publicly champions progressivism privately betting against it when the ballot box mattered.
Pete Buttigieg himself said he was surprised to learn he had been Harris’s first pick and pushed back on the idea that Americans would reject such a ticket, urging Democrats to give voters more credit. His comment is a useful reminder that voters tend to judge results and leadership, not checkboxes on an ideological audit.
Conservative readers should not be shy about calling this what it is: naked identity calculus from the party that lectures the country on tolerance while privately assuming voters can’t handle two people who break left-wing demographic molds. This is hypocrisy dressed up as prudence, and it exposes the patronizing mindset at the heart of modern Democratic strategy.
Harris’s eventual choice of Tim Walz as running mate only underlines how the party folded to what it perceived as safe, midwestern familiarity rather than bold leadership that might have challenged the narrative. That kind of triangulation cost Democrats in 2024, and the memoir admission confirms the rot runs deeper than policy disagreements — it’s a worldview that treats voters as fragile and predictable.
Patriots should remember this episode when the next round of campaign slogans and sanctimony starts up: actions and admissions matter more than self-congratulatory virtue signaling. If Democrats truly believed in the readiness of the American people to embrace diverse leadership, their actions would have matched their rhetoric — instead they chose fear, and voters paid the price.
