Kamala Harris hasn’t made up her mind about whether she’ll run for president again in 2028 — but she does seem to have made up her mind about some of the other Democrats also looking at getting in.
CNN reviewed an advance copy of her campaign memoir, “107 Days,” which is peppered with comments about many of her party’s next generation of leaders, some of whom she would almost certainly confront on a debate stage if she tries for the White House again. Some comments come from her notes from the phone calls she had in the frantic hours last July after Joe Biden dropped out and she was looking to seal up support to replace him atop the Democratic ticket.
Some get several long paragraphs. Some are brushed over in a few telling words.
Some are nice. Some are very much not.
Harris’s comments about wanting to pick Pete Buttigieg as her running mate, and what that reflects about her ultimate decision to pick Tim Walz, came as a surprise to both. She writes that Buttigieg was “my first choice,” making clear that the Minnesota governor who was so loyal to her throughout the campaign and since was not. But she also writes that while Buttigieg would have been “an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man.” While extolling the then-Biden transportation secretary for his accomplishments and political skills, Harris says his sexual orientation made him an impossible pick for America to accept, at least with her on the top of the ticket.
Walz, she recalls, “had an appealing authenticity and was genuinely self-deprecating” and “plainspoken, hardworking, strong, kind, and a fighter for what he believes is right.” She says she was impressed about how he seemed ready to appeal to rural and working-class voters. She calls him empathetic and impressive and ready to work well with her.
Then later she reflects on watching Walz’s vice presidential debate performance, which, she points out again, he had prepped for with “consummate debater” Buttigieg. She writes of seeing JD Vance gloss over Donald Trump’s rhetoric and record, “when Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling at JD’s fake bipartisanship, I moaned to Doug (Emhoff, her husband), ‘What is happening?’” Walz fumbled answers, she writes.
She says that other than Maya Rudolph’s literally spitting out wine, the “Saturday Night Live” skit about her watching the debate in horror was “uncanny in its portrait of our evening.”
Pressed for his own response to what Harris wrote, Buttigieg told 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.”
Of her other potential running-mate choices, Harris’s feelings about Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro are the roughest. Though much of what she discloses leaked in the days following their interview for the job last August, she writes in the book of clearly being annoyed with him despite being “poised, polished and personable.” Shapiro did an able job of explaining how he wouldn’t be weighed down by the attacks that were already coming at him, Harris writes, but as to his detailed questions about what his role would be and whether he would be in the room for every decision (as Biden had been for Barack Obama but she had not been for Biden), “I told him bluntly that was an unrealistic expectation. A vice president is not a co-president.”
Harris throws in a line about how Shapiro was asking what kind of artwork he could get hung in the vice president’s residence.
Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for Shapiro, told CNN, “It’s simply ridiculous to suggest that Governor Shapiro was focused on anything other than defeating Donald Trump and protecting Pennsylvania from the chaos we are living through now. The Governor campaigned tirelessly for the Harris-Walz ticket – and as he has made clear, the conclusion of this process was a deeply personal decision for both him and the Vice President.”
Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, who was the other finalist with Walz and Shapiro, gets an extensive recounting of his record in the Navy and as an astronaut. She calls him “an American hero.” She writes about his wife, Gabby Giffords, being shot and the work they had done together on gun reform. She writes that she liked how he’d handled immigration as he won in his border state though was concerned how he had delayed in backing pro-union legislation.
He was “magnetic” and “our American ideal of self-service.” But she writes that she concluded he was untested in a major political way, and worried about how he’d be torn up by the Trump campaign in a way that would leave him permanently tarnished.
No others in the 2028 conversation get many words in Harris’s book, and most of them come as she goes through her notes from her phone calls as she tried to rally their support on that first manic afternoon.
While she writes that Buttigieg and Kelly were fast to endorse her and Shapiro asked her then how she was holding up and told her she could win over Trump voters in her state, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker offered a studious rationale for why he wasn’t committing: “As governor of Illinois, I’m the convention host.” Similar hesitation came from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer: “I believe you’ll win, but I need to let the dust settle, talk to my colleagues before I make a public statement.”
Though Harris does not write about this, both briefly explored whether they could run themselves in those first few hours after Biden’s announcement.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s response, per her notes was “Hiking. Will call back.” She adds, “He never did.” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s response: “You’ve been loyal. I respect that.”