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Former President Joe Biden reportedly "had to choose" former Vice President Kamala Harris as his running mate in 2020, but actually wanted Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, according to a profile on Whitmer published by the Atlantic on Sunday (April 12).
Biden reportedly "wanted it to be Whitmer," particularly due to her pushback against President Donald Trump during his first administration, but ultimately chose Harris after the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd.
“All of this attention seemed like it might add up to something, and by summer 2020, Whitmer was being vetted for vice president,” the report claims. “She wasn’t sure about it at first, people familiar with her thinking at the time told me; she struggled to imagine herself as a creature of Washington, DC.
“She got along well with Biden, though, and by the time he asked her to fly to Delaware for an in-person chat, she was ready to say yes. Biden didn’t ask.”
A former senior staffer for Whitmer claimed that “The moment called for a Black running mate" though the Michigan governor was Biden's first choice. A former adviser to both Biden and Harris said the claim carried "some weight" in response to the Athletic.
Harris later blasted Biden's decision to run for a second term in her recently published memoir 107 Days. The former vice president wrote that she was "in the worst position" to be the one to advise Biden to drop out of the 2024 election as she would seem "incredibly self-serving" and noted that it was ultimately up to the then-president and his wife, former First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, though fearing a loss to then-former President Trump.
"And of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out," Harris wrote. "I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win.
"'It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.' We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision."
Harris said she didn't interject because she's a "loyal person" and acknowledged that “the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup" of Biden and Trump.
"During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps. But the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again," Harris wrote. "He was, by some measures, the most consistently underestimated man in Washington. He’d been right about his tactics for pushing his agenda through a resistant Congress."
Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee after he announced his decision to end his campaign in July 2024 and was defeated by President Trump after she ran the shortest presidential campaign in American history.