NYT columnist floats Biden-Cheney ticket in 2024

A New York Times columnist is suggesting President Biden team up with Republican Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) for a bipartisan presidential ticket in 2024. 

“This is the democratic way of defeating a threat to democracy. Not doing it is how democracies die. I am quite aware that it is highly unlikely; America does not have the flexibility of a parliamentary, proportional-representation system,” columnist Thomas Friedman wrote Tuesday. “And yet, I still think it is worth raising. There is no precedent for how close we’re coming to an unraveling of our democracy, either.” 

Friedman pondered if the United States should borrow a page from the Israeli-Palestinian arena, where, he wrote, a diverse national unity government has recently been formed. 

“Is that what America needs in 2024 — a ticket of Joe Biden and Liz Cheney? Or Joe Biden and Lisa Murkowski, or Kamala Harris and Mitt Romney, or Stacey Abrams and Liz Cheney, or Amy Klobuchar and Liz Cheney? Or any other such combination,” Friedman wrote. 

Cheney has emerged as a leading critic of former President Trump and his allies since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Cheney, like the Democrats she serves with on the special congressional committee investigating the attack, has said Trump’s repeated false claims about the integrity of the 2020 presidential election caused the attack and continue to pose a threat to public trust in elections and increase the risk of political violence. 

“We should be ready to talk about Liz Cheney as part of a blow-your-mind Israeli-style fusion coalition with Democrats. It is a coalition that says: ‘There is only one overriding goal right now — that is saving our democratic system,'” political scientist Steven Levitsky told Friedman. 

“If we treat this as a normal election, our democracy stands a coin flip’s chance of survival. Those are odds that I don’t want to run. We need to communicate to the public and the establishment that this is not a normal donkeys-versus-elephants election. This is democracy versus authoritarians,” Levitsky continued.

Friedman is one of the figures in media Biden reportedly follows regularly. He wrote last summer that the president could win a Nobel Peace Prize if he successfully helps deescalate the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East.  

Friedman’s column published on the same day as a widely-shared op-ed in The Wall Street Journal suggesting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton running for president in 2024 is a “plausible” scenario.