Joe Biden was considering Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as his running mate in the summer of 2020, and she was being vetted for the job at a moment when his eventual decision was still unsettled. A former senior staffer for Whitmer said the race for the vice-presidential slot came with a clear political calculation: the situation demanded a Black running mate, but, the aide added, “But I think he wanted it to be Whitmer.”
That account, which a former senior adviser for Biden and Harris said held “some weight,” lands differently now because Whitmer has since described how she saw the choice that followed. She told The Atlantic that she did not want to run for president in 2024 and said, “It had to be [Harris]” who ran because “Joe Biden took so long to make a different decision.”
The vetting came in the middle of a turbulent period for Whitmer. In May 2020, she faced criticism over accusations that her husband had flouted Michigan’s COVID-19 restrictions, and she was already under fire for her strict response to the pandemic. She told Axios that protests against the lockdown rules were “undermining” the state’s response and said she refused to apologize for the measures, even as the backlash around them grew.
Biden ultimately chose Kamala Harris in the summer of 2020, and the decision has continued to echo through later accounts of the White House and the 2024 campaign. A 2022 book on the Biden White House said Jill Biden opposed the pick, with the first lady asking, “There are millions of people in the United States. Why … do we have to choose the one who attacked Joe?” Harris later wrote in her own book that she pressed Biden to move quickly after he dropped out in July 2024, telling him, “If you want to put me in the strongest position, you have to endorse me now.”
That July announcement came while Biden was quarantining in Delaware after testing positive for COVID-19, and he endorsed Harris about 30 minutes later in a separate post. Whitmer, meanwhile, had her own public reckoning in 2021, apologizing after she was caught dining maskless indoors with at least a dozen people and breaking her own precautions. Her account now draws a line between two moments of Democratic decision-making: the first, when Biden passed over her for Harris, and the second, when she says that same hesitation helped make Harris the unavoidable choice once Biden stepped aside.
