Here’s a line I didn’t think I’d wake up and write today: former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is exactly right. Vice President Kamala Harris should have given voters more credit and picked the best-qualified running mate, identity politics be damned.
In a passage from Harris’s forthcoming book 107 Days, published in the Atlantic this week, she reveals that Buttigieg topped her initial list of eight possible vice presidential nominees. But Harris went against her instincts, opting for Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), whose identity characteristics — straight, white, male — made him ostensibly less threatening to the general public.
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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,” she 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.”
This elite, woke-era thought process assumes that nonelites share their identity politics obsession and their inherent bigotry. But the electorate has never cared less about the identity of its leaders, making the selection of the bumbling Walz over the articulate Buttigieg only the latest example of identity politics gone wrong.
Buttigieg reacted with surprise to the passage, telling Politico on Thursday, “My experience in politics has been that the way that you earn trust with voters is based mostly on what they think you’re going to do for their lives, not on categories.”
That’s wisdom the Democratic Party would do well to heed moving forward.
The problem is that identity politics is deeply rooted in Democratic decision-making.
In 2008, Democratic nominee Barack Obama chose longtime Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate on the grounds that Biden would help him appeal to white, working-class voters in the Midwest. But little evidence suggested that the wildly popular Obama struggled to appeal to this cohort as compared with previous nominees — and indeed, he carried a higher percentage of working-class white voters than John Kerry four years earlier. It’s unlikely that Biden made much of a difference.
And in return for picking “Scranton Joe,” Obama got a vice president who, in his own words, has an “ability to f*** things up” that should never be underestimated. Biden’s eventual decision to seek reelection at 81 years of age following four years of failure at home and abroad was the ultimate “f***-up” and is directly responsible for President Donald Trump’s second term.
Harris, too, was an identity-politics vice presidential pick. Before securing the nomination in 2020, Biden, bowing to the identitarian fervor gripping the Left, promised to select a black woman as his running mate. No one believed that Harris was the best running mate to secure the White House, nor the most qualified to be one frail heartbeat away from leading the free world.
And the Harris pick didn’t simply saddle the country with an unqualified second-in-command — it burdened the Democratic Party with an abysmal nominee in 2024.
Walz, too, proved to be a disastrous identit-politics choice for a running mate. Almost immediately following the announcement, news of his military embellishments broke, including a video showing him talking about “carrying weapons in war” despite never seeing combat. His weird and forced portrayal as a Midwest everyman culminated in a poor debate performance against his Republican counterpart, then-Sen. JD Vance, from which the campaign seemingly never recovered. According to the RealClearPolitics national polling average, Harris had her biggest lead of the campaign the morning of the debate. But Trump’s numbers steadily rose following Walz’s debate fumble, eventually overtaking Harris in the following weeks.
One can justly criticize Buttigieg for many things, his dismal performance at the Transportation Department, above all. But he would not have let Vance do Road Runner circles around him at the debate like Walz did. Buttigieg would have put up a real fight on the debate stage and at town halls — and perhaps even on a Fox News interview or two.
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Trump won an electoral landslide against Harris-Walz, but only in the popular vote by a little over 1 percentage point. Would Buttigieg have made the difference?
Maybe not. But he would have given the ticket a better shot. And anyone not blinded by identity politics could have told Harris that from the start.