Pete Buttigieg at a town hall in May in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The Gazette.

In her new campaign memoir, Kamala Harris wrote that Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary and mayor of South Bend, Indiana, “would have been an ideal [running mate] — if I were a straight white man”. But, Harris wrote, “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.”

Oh, boy. As a chronicler of the Harris campaign’s missteps, I have some … thoughts about this. And they happen to dovetail with a subscriber question about Mayor Pete. In fact, this was originally going to be SBSQ #24. But I’ve learned from experience that it just doesn’t quite work to pair a long response (which this is) with a bunch of medium-sized ones. So we’ll run this today, and the rest of SBSQ tomorrow or Monday; please save your questions for SBSQ #25 for the other thread.

Every excerpt I’ve read from Harris’s book so far and every clip from her media tour seems to reflect either Veep-like clumsiness or that she’s suffering from an acute case of Demthink.

What is Demthink? It’s what you’d end up with if you trained a large language model solely on the inner monologue of people who either work in Democratic politics or watch MSNBC for eight hours a day.

Being fluent in Demthink can be helpful for navigating the internal currents of the party, something Harris is adept at. After all, she managed to become the vice presidential pick in 2020 after what was one of the worst performances relative to “expectations” in the history of the nomination process, dropping out two months before Iowa despite idiots like me having declared her to be one of the frontrunners.

The problem with Demthink is not merely that it tends toward cynical triangulation. No, it’s that it tends toward triangulation that isn’t even politically effective because it’s so finely tuned for the in-group that it comes across as uncannily out-of-tune to everyone else.

For instance, who thought it would be a good idea for Congressional Democrats to pose kneeling while wearing kente cloths when announcing police reform legislation? Who gave a thumbs up to Tim Walz playing Madden with AOC and then nonsensically tweeting out afterward that “@AOC can run a mean pick 6”? Meanwhile, Democratic messaging on the shutdown is already predictably lapsing into incoherence because of Demthink, with people like Sen. Chris Murphy wanting to check every box to appeal to different parts of the donor class rather than settle on one message.

Demthink particularly tends to lose a lot in translation surrounding issues of “identity”. Harris, despite her poor performance in the 2019/20 primary, had perfectly fine qualifications to be Biden’s running mate. But Democrats very explicitly framed her selection to be about her racial and gender identity (go back and read the contemporaneous reporting if you doubt me). Even if you did choose Harris for those reasons, it’s not smart to say the quiet part out loud.

If Harris had written in her memoir that, you know what, we looked at the question from every angle, and ultimately we concluded that a gay vice presidential nominee would cost us too many votes — that the country isn’t ready quite yet — I’d at least give her credit for honesty.

Instead, though, we got Demthink. Harris wrote of what seems to be an implicit point-scoring system: you want to stay in the Goldilocks zone of just the right amount of diversity. Of course, the conventional wisdom within Demthink is that you can’t just nominate two white guys. But Democrats already had a “Black woman married to a Jewish man,” on the ticket, dangerously close to the threshold for what the country would tolerate. Only a straight white man — and preferably not a member of a religious minority group either — could keep things in the right range.

Are there people out there who won’t vote for a gay candidate? Yes — we’ll get to that in a second. But those people are mostly conservatives, not people who would consider voting for a Democrat in the first place, and especially not those who would vote for a Black (and Asian American) woman with a Jewish husband. The marginal number of votes lost wasn’t likely to be high.

Moreover, while Harris justified her decision in terms of characteristically Demthinky risk aversion, she was in a position where she actually wanted to adopt more risk because she entered the race as an underdog to Trump. A message that we’re going to pick the best people regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation might not have worked. But it had probably more upside than making a DEI hire out of Walz.

For all that said, as something of a Mayor Pete type myself, I don’t want to be a Pollyanna about this. So let’s go behind the paywall for some RealTalk.