Former Vice President Kamala Harris told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow that she didn’t decide against choosing former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as her running mate because he is gay, but rather, she opted not to choose him as her running mate because he is gay.
Harris spoke with Maddow — who is openly gay — about her upcoming memoir “107 Days,” in which she said that she’d felt it would be difficult to win a race as a black woman if her running mate were gay. Saying that Buttigieg “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.”
Maddow asked her about the passage, clearly a bit upset by the tone of the statement. “I guess I’d ask you to just elaborate on that a little bit … it’s hard to hear with you, the first woman elected vice president … to say that he couldn’t be on the ticket effectively because he was gay, is hard to hear.”
WATCH:
Kamala wrote in her book she couldn’t pick Mayor Pete to be her vice president because he was gay. Asked about it by Maddow, she says that’s not what she said. How is she so bad at all of this? pic.twitter.com/IpT1JiC9SE
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) September 23, 2025
“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 against someone like Trump, who knows no floor,” Harris said, attempting to spin her argument as a move to protect Buttigieg from the obvious onslaught of attacks that would have come. “To be a black woman running for president, 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.”
Harris then attempted to use her record of supporting the LGBTQ community to redirect the conversation — and assure Maddow that her decision was not a personal one — saying, “You know, I’ve been an advocate and an ally of the LGBT community my entire life. So it wasn’t about any prejudice on my part, but we had such a short … we had such a short period of time. And the stakes were so high.”