Whitmer, Buttigieg and the Veeps Who Might Have Been

With Vice President Kamala Harris’s announcement of her running mate only days away, I should probably be placing odds on who will get the nod.

But my thoughts dwell on three extraordinarily gifted politicians who almost certainly won’t.

They belie all the complaints until recently about the barren Democratic Party bench, constituting a whole gleaming bleachers section of their own. They expose the truth about something else: When you live in a country still staggering imperfectly down the path to full equality — a country of lingering biases, a country attached to the tested ways of the “good old days” — you sacrifice talent. You squander resources. You shrink the parameters of possibility.

You allow yourself the bounty of Josh Shapiro, Mark Kelly, Andy Beshear and Tim Walz, all of whom reportedly reached the finals of consideration to join Harris on the Democratic ticket. You deny yourself the splendor of Gretchen Whitmer, Gina Raimondo and Pete Buttigieg, all of whom have been deemed long shots or nonstarters for reasons apart from their political talents.

Whitmer, the second-term Michigan governor, publicly withdrew herself from consideration toward the start, but she surely sensed what would quickly become the conventional wisdom: Harris, potentially the first woman president, isn’t likely to test whether the country might go for a double milestone and vote for a ticket of two women. Maybe that would electrify the race to her advantage. Maybe it would do the opposite. With the stakes as high as they are in this election, risks that big are arguably unaffordable.

So Raimondo, the commerce secretary and former governor of Rhode Island, was also automatically downgraded. She appeared on some early lists of Harris’s strongest options but not near the top.

Gender didn’t factor into the ranking of Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, below the previously mentioned men. Sexual orientation did. Is America ready to have both a Black woman as president and a gay man as her No. 2? Few of the seasoned and sensible political analysts I know believe that 2024 is the year to find out.