Opinion: Does Kamala Harris’ Vice President Really Have to Be a White Guy? (2024)

In the contest to be Kamala Harris’ running mate, it’s raining men. And while Harris’ candidacy is a “first time in history” moment, her vice president may not be as groundbreaking. The all-male lineup of contenders is, to borrow from the White Dudes for Harris fundraising call, “a rainbow of beige.”

Harris’s first rally with her vice president pick will be held on Tuesday in Philadelphia, her campaign has said, fueling speculation that she will select Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro to be her number two. Also making the reported shortlist: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who hails from Indiana. White men are roughly 30% of the U.S. population, but apparently 100% of Harris’s potential vice presidents.

Not that one can really blame Harris or her team. The “Kamala and a cracker” lineup, as historian and writer John Ganz has coined it, is a prudent and probably necessary choice, not unlike Barack Obama’s careful selection of the moderate, familiar, and very white Joe Biden. But it’s also a revealing one.

Conservatives have long denigrated successful women and people of color as DEI hires and woke identity politics beneficiaries. Harris’s veepstakes are just another example of how successful this racist and sexist narrative has been, and how often the identity calculus actually cuts the other way–that is, to the advantage of white men. Except that when it’s white men who benefit from their racial and gender identities, it’s largely invisible.

If Harris wins, she would break the centuries-long streak of male rule in the US, which is no small feat. Her historic candidacy, and the sense that she is right for the moment, has infused the 2024 presidential race with new energy. Harris is drawing support from young voters, female voters, voters of color, and liberals more broadly – and drawing that support not just away from Trump, but from undecided and apathetic voters.

The Harris team is no doubt considering how to keep this momentum going while not alienating the white, moderate, swing state voters they realistically need in their coalition, and whose support (especially the male ones) Democrats have been hemorrhaging to Republicans. Enter a moderate white male vice president, ideally with working-class bona fides—a guy who with his very presence reassures these voters that the Harris-whoever administration won’t be too radical.

Luckily, the Democratic Party has a deep bench of talent, and each of the white men on Harris’s shortlist would bring something valuable to the ticket. But so do a whole slew of candidates who don’t fit that mold. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer may be the nation’s most talented Democratic politician at the moment; we should probably be honest and recognize that if she weren’t a woman, Whitmer would be a shoe-in. Other Democratic talents include Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth—the list goes on. It is fundamentally unfair that these candidates are not under serious consideration primarily because of their race or gender, while the white guys who already dominate U.S. politics have a leg up because Americans are simply conditioned to be more comfortable when white men are in charge.

Even among the reported final five, the Harris campaign is likely drilling down into identity politics and weighing the fact that Josh Shapiro is Jewish and Pete Buttigieg is gay. This is, to put it mildly, a response to the appalling reality that both explicit anti-Semitism and hom*ophobia remain common and that such prejudices also manifest themselves in subtle ways. (Not unlike misogyny—voters routinely say they would happily elect a female president, but when an actual woman is put in front of them, there’s always a reason why they don’t want to vote for that woman.)

The charismatic Shapiro comes off as polished and highly intelligent—characteristics that in a sane country would make him a stronger candidate, but are not nearly as beneficial in an America that has already elected Donald Trump once. A lot of voters, it seems, don’t want to vote for someone who seems smarter than they are; they want a guy another guy might want to have a beer with, and that guy, apparently, is kind of a knucklehead.

Buttigieg, too, is undeniably gifted, and inarguably the Biden administration’s strongest surrogate. He would be a talented fighter in Harris’s corner, the perfect person to send out to spread her gospel—and to shank her enemies. But anyone who has paid even an iota of attention to the MAGA movement can already see the attack ads against a Harris/Buttigieg ticket: the perilously “woke” duo of a Black woman and a gay man.

Such bad faith attacks would also be magnified for a two-woman ticket or one with two Black politicians on it. Never mind that a “woke” duo—Harris-Whitmer, Harris-Buttigieg, Harris-Moore, or any other combination of Harris and another highly-qualified Democrats—might simply be one made up of the best candidates. This is a country that still presumes competence and a right to power among white men while side-eyeing successful women and racial minorities. And many of the same conservatives who complain about affirmative action and DEI initiatives as anti-meritocratic seem to reject the idea that women and people of color may, in fact, be the most meritorious picks; the underlying assumption seems to be that white men are somehow congenitally better-qualified.

This goes a long way in explaining why so many conservatives seem to believe that racial minorities are underrepresented on college campuses because they couldn’t cut it, but that conservatives are underrepresented on those same campuses because of discrimination (and not, say, the fact that modern conservativism has veered into the realms of conspiracy-mongering, magical thinking, science-denial and other positions that don’t tend to track with intellectual rigor or academic success).

The problem in this election, though, is that the conservative movement has been stunningly successful in convincing far too many Americans that their view of the world—white men qualified, everyone else a DEI hire—holds some truth. That leaves Democrats in a bind. Do they approach the VP pick by selecting the most qualified candidate from a solid and diverse list? Or, in a country where racism and sexism remain real and pervasive, is racial and gender palatability itself an important qualification?

No one in this election has leveraged identity politics more than Donald Trump, who molded the GOP into the party of the aggrieved white man—and has now picked a vice president who embodies just that. Where his movement has been the most effective, though, is not in convincing conservatives that it’s only natural for white guys to run the show and that any deviation from that historical norm is discrimination. It’s been in convincing everyone else.