Kamala Harris watched mortified as her running mate, Tim Walz, fell into JD Vance’s trap in last year’s vice-presidential debate and “fumbled” a crucial answer, she writes in a campaign memoir.
The former Democratic presidential nominee also admits that Walz had not been her first choice for vice-president in her book 107 Days, obtained by the Guardian ahead of its publication next week. Harris writes that her “first choice” would have been the then transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, a close friend of hers who is gay.
Walz and Vance held a 90-minute debate, hosted by the CBS News network in New York, on 1 October. It was the last debate of the campaign and Harris hoped that Walz would be “the closer”.
But Vance, previously vicious in attacking Harris, came with a strategy to tone down the anger and insults that characterise his boss, Donald Trump. Instead the Ohio senator presented himself as mild-mannered and eager to find common ground with Walz.
Related: Tim Walz announces he will run for third term as Minnesota’s governor
“When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling at JD’s fake bipartisanship, I moaned to Doug, ‘What is happening?’” Harris writes.
“I told the television screen: ‘You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate.’”
While Vance twice got fact-checked by the moderators, Walz ended up defending his record as governor of Minnesota, she continues. “Then he fumbled his answer when the moderator, predictably, questioned why he had claimed to be in Hong Kong during the democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.”
Instead of simply saying he had got his dates mixed up and taking the opportunity to highlight human rights in China, Walz “talked about biking in Nebraska”.
Harris adds wryly: “The following weekend, Saturday Night Live did a sketch in which actors posed as Doug and me, sitting on our couch, watching the debate. While I did not in fact spit out wine, it was otherwise uncanny in its portrait of our evening.”
Walz “felt bad” that he had not done better, the book states, though Harris assured him that the debate would not decide the outcome of the election, and indeed it had a “negligible effect” on polling.
In 107 Days – a title that refers to the length of the campaign that Harris inherited from Joe Biden – she also describes the process of auditioning Walz, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, for the job of running mate. Her senior staff, sister Maya and 17-year-old godson Alexander all favoured Walz.
But Harris said her “first choice” for the job would have been Buttigieg, Joe Biden’s transportation secretary at the time.
“He would have been an ideal partner – if I were a straight white man. But 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.
“And I think Pete also knew that – to our mutual sadness.”
