So it turns out Joe Biden — the guy who spent four years telling us Kamala Harris was the most qualified vice president in American history — actually wanted someone else the entire time. According to a new report from The Atlantic, Biden’s real pick for VP back in 2020 was Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. He wanted the woman who locked her own state in their basements during COVID. But the Democratic Party’s identity politics machine had other plans, and Biden folded like a card table at a church picnic.
Let that marinate for a second. The man who selected the person who was one heartbeat away from the nuclear codes — and who eventually became the Democratic nominee for president — didn’t even want her. He had to choose her. Not because she was the best candidate. Not because she’d been a stellar senator. Not because she’d run a dazzling presidential campaign — remember, she dropped out before a single vote was cast in the 2020 primaries because her own party’s voters didn’t want her. No, Biden picked Kamala Harris because the summer of 2020 decided that qualifications, chemistry, and governing ability were secondary to checking the right demographic box.
Here’s what happened. It’s the summer of 2020. George Floyd protests are raging. Cities are literally on fire. And inside Biden’s VP selection bubble, the political calculation shifted overnight. One of Whitmer’s own former senior staffers told The Atlantic the quiet part out loud: “The moment called for a Black running mate.” That’s it. That’s the whole selection criteria. Not “the moment called for the sharpest policy mind” or “the moment called for someone who could actually win a national election on her own.” The moment called for a specific skin color, and Biden — the supposed moderate institutionalist — saluted and complied.
And Whitmer? She was right there. She was the first candidate to meet with Biden in person that August. She’d been vetted. She’d built a national profile during COVID — granted, that profile was “governor who threatened to arrest people for buying paint at Home Depot,” but at least it was a profile. She told Fox 2 in December 2020 that if Biden had called and asked her to be his running mate, she would have said yes. She was ready. Biden wanted her. And the party said no.
Now look, we’re not sitting here saying Gretchen Whitmer would have been some kind of conservative dream. She’s the same woman who imposed some of the most draconian lockdowns in the country, who got caught sneaking off to Florida while telling Michiganders they couldn’t visit their own families, and who would’ve governed from the left on just about every issue that matters. But that’s not the point.
The point is that the Democratic Party — the party that lectures us every single day about meritocracy, about qualifications, about trusting the process — made the single most important personnel decision of the 2020 election based on racial demographics. And a former adviser to both Biden and Harris confirmed to The Atlantic that the claim carries “some weight.” Some weight. That’s Washington-speak for “yeah, that’s exactly what happened, but please don’t quote me by name.”
And we all got to live with the consequences. We got a vice president who couldn’t keep a staff together, who word-saladed her way through every press conference like she was doing an improv bit at a community college open mic night, and who — when she finally got her shot at the top of the ticket — lost to Donald Trump so badly that Democrats are still in therapy about it. Kamala Harris was the nominee not because Democratic voters chose her in a primary, but because Biden was pushed out and she was installed. And before that, she was the VP not because Biden believed in her, but because the political moment demanded a specific racial outcome and he didn’t have the spine to push back.
This is what identity politics does, folks. It doesn’t elevate people. It turns the most consequential decisions in government into a casting call. Biden wasn’t picking a governing partner — he was filling a role in a movie that his party’s activist class was directing. And when the casting choice bombed at the box office in November 2024, they all acted stunned. Stunned! As if the audience hadn’t been telling them for four years that the lead wasn’t working.
Meanwhile, Whitmer — who “campaigned happily” for Biden-Harris and “never wavered in support” — is sitting in Lansing probably thinking about what might have been. Not that we’d have been better off, mind you. But at least the Democrats would have been honest about why they were picking someone. Instead, they spent four years gaslighting us, insisting that Kamala Harris was a brilliant pick, a historic pick, a necessary pick — when behind closed doors, the guy who made the pick wished he’d gone with Door Number Two.
The Democratic Party built an entire political theology around the idea that pointing out someone’s race or gender in a hiring decision is the highest form of bigotry — unless they’re the ones doing it, in which case it’s called “representation.” Biden wanted Whitmer. The party wanted a demographic checkbox. The checkbox won. America lost.
And now, six years later, we finally get the quiet admission that the whole thing was exactly what we said it was at the time. Not a selection based on merit. Not a partnership forged in shared vision. A political hostage situation where Joe Biden handed the keys to the number two slot in the free world to someone he didn’t actually want — because his own party would have eaten him alive if he’d picked the white woman from Michigan instead.
Remember that the next time a Democrat lectures you about hiring the most qualified person for the job. They didn’t even do it when the job was Vice President of the United States.
