Would Americans Really Reject a Gay President?

A new Kamala Harris book sets off familiar fears. But those fears may be overblown.

"Pete Buttigieg" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

A new excerpt from Kamala Harris’s upcoming campaign memoir suggests that she wanted to pick former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as her vice president, but she was afraid of a backlash from American voters. She writes:

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. And I think Pete also knew that -- to our mutual sadness.

This makes me recall a moment I had after Barack Obama’s election in 2008. My friend, a Liberian American, was working for Obama’s youth wing and had put countless hours into getting him over the hurdle of election.

On the day after his victory, I encountered him at our student center at the University of Georgia and told him, “Now you could be president.”

Without missing a beat, he replied in the same fashion. (I remember thinking, hold on now, let’s not get carried away…)

That was a moment of tremendous optimism in American life, even for people who had voted for other candidates that election like the GOP nominee Bob Barr or the independent Ralph Nader.

There was a feeling that America had overcome its most ultimate prejudice: skin color was no longer an obstacle to winning even the highest office in the land.

But over the next eight years, liberals adopted a much darker tone about America. 400 years of racism had created a hegemonic system of racism that was almost impossible to overcome. And when Hillary Clinton lost the presidency, many liberals added sexism to the mix: Americans simply were unwilling to elect a woman to the White House.

I imagine that the pessimism Harris expressed in this passage is at least partly a result of the time and place where she was born and raised. She is, after all, a Baby Boomer who came of age in America. In the mid-1980s, most American adults didn't even believe it was acceptable for a black person to marry a white person. In 2004, George W. Bush campaigned on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

If those were the formative years of my life instead of the election of Obama, I might’ve been inclined to agree with Harris. But the evidence that a gay man would’ve dragged her ticket down — when combined with her own ethnic background and that of her husband’s — is actually pretty thin.

The percentage of Americans who say they’d be willing to vote for a gay president is much higher than the totals that either Harris or Buttigieg achieved in the election. It’s possible to say that these are just Americans telling pollsters things they don’t believe for social acceptability, but there’s evidence all around us in American society. Even the GOP president, Donald Trump, appointed a gay man named Rich Grenell as a senior staffer. 41% of Republicans say that gay marriage should be in the law.

What was perhaps more confusing to me was Harris zooming in on her husband, Doug Emhoff. How many Americans could even name Emhoff let alone were aware that he was Jewish? Is there some kind of widespread bias against Jewish first husbands? I am not aware of any campaign at any level using anti-Jewish rhetoric as part of their campaigns in 2024.

Ultimately, Buttigieg’s response should help put this issue to bed. When asked about Harris’s memoir, he said:

My experience in politics has been that the way that you earn trust with voters is based mostly on what they think you’re going to do for their lives, not on categories.

For many years, progressives have insisted that these skin-level categories — race, gender, sexuality — were all-consuming for Americans. Explicit and implicit bias defined our relations with each other. If you were a left-of-center person arguing that voters don’t particularly care about these categories, you were quickly treated like a pariah.

The far-right made progressive paranoia even worse, because although few Americans genuinely care about their president matching their skin color or gender, the extreme chauvinists who do are all over social media these days, giving progressives the boogeymen to justify their pessimistic view of Americans.

The consequence of all this may be progressive elites running to the first straight white Christian man they can find to run for president in 2028. That may explain the enthusiasm for California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who by all accounts is a pretty mediocre candidate given that he governs one of the most dysfunctional states in America and has next to no crossover appeal from independents.

A better idea is to realize what Buttigieg does: that Americans will vote for a Martian if they feel the alien is willing to keep them safe, make sure there’s food on their table, and give them the feeling of respect they deserve.