Forty-eight hours before US president Joe Biden reached the conclusion that his race was run, his transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, made an appearance on Bill Maher’s HBO political talk show, Real Time.
Like JD Vance, Buttigieg comes from the Midwest, where he grew up in South Bend, Indiana, has a military past as a naval officer and is an Ivy League graduate. At 42, he is three years older than the Republican vice-presidential nominee. He is also the first openly gay US politician to serve as a member of cabinet.
During the conversation, Buttigieg was asked about the apparent contradiction of Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who also happens to be gay, having championed the rise of Vance, a vociferous opponent of same-sex marriage. Buttigieg explained that what seems like a glaring contradiction is also just old-fashioned pragmatism, before smoothly digressing into an evisceration of the new face of Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
“I think… it’s super simple. These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican Party, that tends to do good things for very rich men. And by the way, that’s kind of what you’re getting with JD, right? So, I knew a lot of people like him when I got to Harvard. I found a lot of people like him who would say whatever they needed to get ahead. And five years ago, that seemed like being the anti-Trump Republican, so that’s what he was.
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“[He] talked about how [Trump] was unfit, how he was cynical. [He] called him an opioid, which is kind of a weird thing to say about a person… But for someone whose identity is that they’re connected to Appalachia, which has an opioid crisis, that really is the darkest thing you could possibly say about Donald Trump, at least in public. But behind the scenes apparently he was actually calling him Hitler, right? Seriously. Five years later, the way he gets ahead is that [Trump] is the greatest guy since sliced bread.”
Vance, he said, reminded him of another Republican, his former Indiana governor Mike Pence, “who I watched start out as an evangelical Christian who cared about rectitude and family values, and then get on board with a guy who was mixed up with a porn star, make excuses for him so that he could get power. And he did. He got four glorious years, I guess, as vice-president of the United States. And it ended on the west front of the Capitol with Trump supporters proposing that he be hanged for using the one shred of integrity he still had to stand up to an attempt to overthrow the government. So, I guess maybe not as a politician but as a human being what I’ll say is that I hope things work out a little better for JD Vance than they did for Mike Pence.”
That clip and the words went viral for reasons that are easy to understand. After what has seemed like months of Democratic angst and concern over their president’s declining effectiveness as a public communicator, here was one of the brightest members of their party delivering a highly polished, off-the-cuff critique of an opponent. One of the reasons why Vance was considered vice-presidential material is because of his gifts as a debater and communicator – even if his nomination acceptance speech left many observers and Maga attendees at the Republican convention underwhelmed. But the thought of a Vance-Buttigieg debate was suddenly thrilling.
Just like that, the entire picture of the post-convention 2024 election has been transformed. And Buttigieg’s cameo was a timely reminder of the impressive depth of potential running mates available to Kamala Harris, so much so that he may not even make her shortlist.
One of the immediate tasks for Harris, should she be confirmed as the Democratic nominee for the White House, is to decide who best fits the bill to help her contest the Trump-Vance double act. It will be an intriguing decision and one which will add to the sudden surge of momentum of the Democratic campaign.
In addition to standout candidates such as Buttigieg and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who could form an all-female ticket with Harris, there are a number of governors of battleground states who could help her swing that crucial sector. Because of that, Mark Kelly, the Arizona senator who won the seat held by John McCain – the first Democrat to win the seatsince 1962 – has come into the picture.
As a popular senator in a border state, he could speak convincingly and authoritatively on a subject that the Republicans will seek to portray as a weakness for Harris – the border and immigration. But Harris equally has strong options in Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and Roy Cooper, the governor of North Carolina. Trump took North Carolina in the 2016 and 2020 elections but the state has been heavily targeted by the Biden-Harris campaign, with 11 field offices opened this year.
With California governor Gavin Newsom almost certainly out of the picture given that he and Harris are from the same state, Harris may nonetheless opt for another white, male candidate. JB Pritzker, the Hyatt hotel family billionaire who is governor of Illinois; or Andy Beshear, the 46-year-old, two-term governor from Kentucky who has thrived in a traditional red state, may come into the reckoning. But with the clock ticking, establishing those contenders as familiar faces and voices to voters would present its own challenges.
It is clear that Harris will not suffer from a dearth of talent in her potential running mates. Achieving the balance and optics of a plausible alternative to the Trump-Vance pairing will present the first key test of her judgment.
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