As the 2026 midterm elections get closer, the Democrat Party continues to flail about like a dead fish. The dinosaurs of the party refuse to relinquish power, and the up-and-comers are basically socialists who will only make the party less viable and less popular. There are also rumblings about who the candidates for the 2028 presidential election might be. Some recent revelations from former Vice President Kamala Harris's book, and her thought process for choosing a running mate, have raised the eyebrows of one of those who was on her short list, and Democrats might want to pay attention to what he has to say.
So Kamala Harris refused to give Pete Buttigieg a chance to run for Vice President because he’s gay? Sounds kinda homophobic.
— David Marcus (@BlueBoxDave) September 18, 2025
Recently, my colleague Nick Arama reported that in her book, as she mulled over her choices for vice president, Harris stated that her first choice was former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. She says that he “would have been an ideal partner—if I (Harris) were a straight white man,” but that adding Buttigieg, who is gay, to the ticket would have been "too big of a risk." She writes in the book:
"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.”
READ MORE: Oh My: Kamala Explains Why She Didn't Pick Pete Buttigieg As Her Running Mate
On Thursday, while in Bloomington, Indiana, Buttigieg responded to Harris's passage from the book, saying:
“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. You just have to go to voters with what you think you can do for them. Politics is about the results we can get for people and not about these other things.”
On the surface, it appears that Buttigieg is blowing up Kamala Harris's assumptions that all Americans are as obsessed with identity politics as the Democrat Party is, and also for being a bit smarter than Harris gives them credit for. And he is half right on how you earn the trust of voters. It's not about what they think you are going to do for them, but what you say you are going to do and then actually do it. But like a broken clock, maybe even Pete Buttigieg is kind of right twice a day.
Kamala Harris wrote that she couldn't pick Pete Buttigieg as VP because it was "too big a risk" for a black woman to run with a gay man.
— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) September 18, 2025
So she picked Tim Walz. https://t.co/Ik1DsW9mHh pic.twitter.com/xMJT8Db284
Buttigieg may be sincere about his feelings towards voters, but he may also have another motive. Both his and Harris's names are being tossed around as possible 2028 Democratic presidential contenders, so this may be just an early swipe at Harris. But could Buttigieg, a member of one of the Democrat Party's favorite oppressed groups, be trying to get the party to think beyond the box-checking?
Back in August, a memo from a left-leaning think tank called Third Way suggested that Democrats might want to think about speaking to Americans the way those Americans actually speak, and ditch some of the woke leftist code words like "microaggression," "cultural appropriation," "birthing person," and "Latinx."
ALSO READ: Mayor Pete Shows Up 'Too Late' for the Party, and Try Not to Laugh: 'Biden Should Not Have Run'
Whether Democrats will take the suggestion to lay off the woke words is up in the air, but after the 2024 election, the growing futility of identity politics should be glaring for them by now. In 2024, Donald Trump got a 12 percent increase in the Hispanic vote, from 36 percent in 2020 to 48 percent in 2024. Among black voters, Trump won 15 percent of voters, up from just 8 percent in 2020.
Democrats need to face reality about a lot of things, and one of those things is that Americans are tired of being put into, as Pete Buttigieg put it, "categories."
PSA: For its entire history the Democratic Party has been structured around identity politics.
— Nick Freitas (@NickJFreitas) January 9, 2025
Which identities are in favor and which are not, is entirely based on whether it benefits the Democratic Party.
Once you realize that, their tactics make sense.
Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats try desperately to stop it.
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