How Kamala Harris's possible VP picks have been auditioning for the role

Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive favorite for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, is expected to soon select a vice presidential candidate to join her on the ticket.

And many of Harris's potential running mates have been making the rounds in television interviews, in scrums with reporters and on campaign trail — all effectively auditioning for the role by attacking Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee and their would-be adversary in the race.

Here’s what several of Harris’s possible picks have been saying in recent days.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear

"JD Vance ain't from here," Beshear said last week on MSNBC while attacking the biography Vance laid out in his best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. (While Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, he wrote thar he visited family in Jackson, Ky., each summer.)

"He claims to be from eastern Kentucky, tries to write a book about it to profit off our people, and then he calls us lazy," Vance said in a separate hit on CNN. "This makes me angry."

At a rally for Harris in Atlanta over the weekend, Beshear put it bluntly: "Just let me be clear. JD Vance ain't from Kentucky. He ain't from Appalachia. And he ain't gonna be the vice president of the United States."

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz

Like Beshear, Walz has taken aim at Vance's Hillbilly Elegy bonafides while chiding him over his Yale law school degree

"People like JD Vance know nothing about small town America," Walz said on MSNBC last week, adding: "None of my hillbilly cousins went to Yale."

Walz, who is seen as a longshot for VP, also picked up one of the Harris campaign's newest talking points about the Trump-Vance ticket.

“These are weird people on the other side," he said.

Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly

Last week, Kelly directly questioned Vance’s fitness for office when asked by reporters outside the U.S. Capitol about the Ohio senator’s comments describing Democrats as “childless cat ladies.”

“It’s utterly ridiculous and obnoxious and wrong,” Kelly told reporters about his GOP Senate colleague. “What I really worry about is what he would do being one heartbeat away from the presidency.”

On social media, Kelly went further by invoking his wife, former Sen. Gabby Giffords, who is a stepmother to Kelly's two children from a previous marriage. (Kelly and Giffords unsuccessfully tried to have children of their own through invitrofetrilization before she was shot in the head in an assassination attempt in 2011.)

“If anyone proves just how wrong JD Vance is, it’s Gabby. Gabby has served our country, sacrificing more than many ever will, and also been an amazing role model and stepmother to our daughters,” Kelly wrote on X. “I couldn’t be more grateful to her for it.”

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg

In an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Buttigieg spent no time on Vance and instead focused on former President Donald Trump's record in office.

“He didn’t keep his promise of 6% economic growth. He didn’t keep his promise to drain the swamp,” Buttigieg said. He broke his promise to pass an infrastructure bill, right? He said he would do that; he failed to do it. The Biden-Harris administration got it done. He even broke his promise to that Jan. 6 mob when he said, ‘I will be at your side when you march down to the Capitol.’”

Then during an exchange about the Republican push for a national ban on abortion, Fox News host Shannon Bream said that the effort was “disavowed completely” by Trump.

“Yeah, he’s disavowed a lot of things,” Buttigieg said. “I don’t believe him, because he lies all the time.”

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer

Whitmer says she is not being vetted as a potential vice presidential candidate by the Harris campaign. But that hasn't stopped her from sounding like one on TV.

In an interview with CBS Monday, Whitmer bristled at the suggestion that Harris must choose a white man as her VP in order to win the election.

“I don’t agree with that,” Whitmer said. “I’ll tell you this: in Michigan, myself, my secretary of state, my attorney general, all the chief executives in Michigan are women — and every one of us was told there may be too many women on the ticket. Baloney. We’ve proved that wrong in the swingiest of swing states.”