From the outside, this battle is delicious. The behind-the-scenes wrangling between Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is spilling out into the open with comical results. Which one is the heir apparent to Biden’s sterling legacy, which one gets to take his mantle and run in 2028, or 2024?? At first, it seemed like Harris was basically offered this job of the successor, an assurance for signing on to a presidential ticket with a man she previously implied was racist.
Now, however, the chatter for Buttigieg is getting so loud within the White House, Harris staffers are complaining that racism and sexism are to blame. As Politico notes this morning, it’s specifically staffers of color:
“Nobody in the West Wing shuts that down,” said one person with direct knowledge of the conversations. “It’s very open.”
The chatter has frustrated some staffers of color who see it as disrespectful to Kamala Harris — the first Black woman vice president — and think senior officials should tamp it down. Some of Buttigieg’s former campaign staffers also question whether challenging Harris is feasible given how critical the Black vote is in any Democratic primary, and how Buttigieg struggled to attract those voters the last time around. But there is some existing infrastructure waiting in the wings.
With no offense to the sitting Vice President, Buttigieg is eminently better at connecting with voters and sounding more, shall we say, “presidential.” That being said, Harris is the senior politician, having already been a United States Senator, and now the next in line for the presidency. Buttigieg’s campaign in 2020 was filled with well-delivered speeches and lines, but often empty rhetoric behind it that didn’t fully build the support he needed, but voters liked him more than Harris, and likability matters. A lot of Biden voters would’ve taken Buttigieg as their second choice since he seemed to come across more moderate than most of the stark crazy Democratic primary field on certain things.
For what it’s worth, Buttigieg has played down the rivalry with an expected answer. The White House is staying out of it for now:
As for the reports of an emerging rivalry with the vice president, Buttigieg said: “We work extremely well with the vice president’s team, and I’m proud to be part of the Biden-Harris team and this administration.”
The White House declined to comment.
Given this growing rift, some Democrats fear a primary battle between Harris and Buttigieg would split the party over allegiance to one Democratic interest group or another. Instead, as Lincoln Mithcell suggests as CNN, perhaps they should run together and form a joint ticket as the Biden successors:
A primary campaign between Harris and Buttigieg could pit two key Democratic constituencies against each other: African Americans, particularly African American women, and LGBTQ voters. The impact of that fight would be even worse if it began in 2023 and took over the second half of Biden’s current term.
Fortunately, this is a problem that can be easily solved without either politician having to give up anything lasting. Harris and Buttigieg instead could agree that, if Biden does not run again, they would run together in 2024, with Harris the nominee for president and Buttigieg for vice-president. This could put an end to whatever feuding exists between them now, while giving the Democratic Party a very strong ticket in 2024 that would seem like a natural continuation of Biden’s first term.
A Harris-Buttigieg ticket would showcase two dynamic politicians and represent the breadth and diversity of the Democratic Party, and indeed the whole country, while not veering too far left and alienating key swing voters who Biden won in 2020.
The humorously observable part of this analysis is how Mitchell believes that a Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris ticket wouldn’t drift too far to the left. Both of these candidates have been fully capable of adopting left-wing idealogy. True, Harris alienated some progressives during the primary because she’s simply an inauthentic politician, usually adopting whatever position seems advantageous at the moment, but Buttigieg has a similar adaptability problem.
The difference is that Buttigieg can play whatever position he takes more convincingly than Harris. Her playbook was rather limited, whereas Buttigieg, during the 2020 primary, could keep singing past the end of the music even if he didn’t make much sense in the end, but it was a nice tune.
However, the question is whether the left-wing base of the increasingly socialist Democratic Party accept a Harris-Buttigieg ticket? Probably not without a fight:
Not every faction of the Democratic coalition would be happy with this ticket. The left wing of the party has long viewed Buttigieg as too moderate and have been wary of Harris due to her work as San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general. These concerns are legitimate, but by the time they have served four years in the Biden’s administration, what Harris did as DA almost 20 years earlier or as attorney general a decade ago will seem less relevant. Rather, the two will be seen as national leaders whose popularity will be tied to the Biden administration rather than anything they did before that.
This means that running together would make it hard to appease the base, but maybe that doesn’t matter. Perhaps the Democratic Party base doesn’t need as much appeasing as, say, voters in flyover country or the upper midwest. Perhaps those voters, now intentionally ignored and derided by Democrats, could use some attention. If Democrats chose to focus their efforts on broadening their support rather than appealing to New York and Los Angeles, they’d be better off.
There’s not much more to say on the Buttrigieg-Harris battle that’s clearly brewing in the halls of the executive branch. I’ll leave it up to comedian Bill Maher to set Democrats straight if they ever want a chance to connect with Mainstreet America in the future:
*Content Warning: Language
