Liz Cheney should be Biden’s running mate in 2024. Here’s why.

Democracy is on the ballot.

That’s what my fellow Democrats have been saying for the past two years, as Republicans attacked voting rights and elections. Behind the GOP campaign lies the Big Lie: that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 contest for the White House.

If democracy is indeed on the ballot, then I believe Biden should make a key change to his ballot as well. Specifically, he should select Liz Cheney as his vice presidential candidate.

I can almost hear you gasp, dear reader. But let me explain.

This is an out-there idea, I know. But it’s not nearly as out-there as the death cult that has seized the Republican Party, which seems bent on destroying our democratic system. And we must do everything we can to save it.

“I can almost hear you gasp, dear reader.”

Cheney, of course, is the most prominent Republican to break with the party over Trump’s election falsehoods. Serving on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, she was steadfast in denouncing Trump and the GOP sycophants who continue to back his baseless claims.

That cost Cheney her congressional seat in Wyoming, where Republican voters elected her primary challenger by a whopping 37-point margin. Since then, she has hinted at making her own run for the presidency. Last month, she said she will be doing “whatever it takes” to keep Donald Trump out of office.

» READ MORE: Liz Cheney’s lonely fight against the extremist wing of the GOP | Editorial

The best way to do that is to join hands with Biden, who has also emphasized the threats posed to democracy by the GOP. Last week, Biden told a Maryland audience that Trump-aligned Republicans were verging on “semi-fascism.” Speaking in Wilkes-Barre on Tuesday, he blasted those who refuse to condemn the Jan. 6 insurrection. And Thursday, he’ll take the stage outside Independence Hall to deliver a rare prime-time speech describing our current moment as a “battle for the soul of the nation,” according to a White House press briefing.

He’s right. This year, Republican voters nominated over 100 candidates for statewide office or Congress who have repeated Trump’s false claims of election fraud in 2020. The list includes Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, who attended the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally at the Capitol and paid for charter buses to ferry 135 supporters there. He also participated in an attempt to send a slate of bogus electors to Congress who would deliver Pennsylvania to Trump.

Other GOP leaders have avoided echoing Trump’s lies but have lined up behind candidates who spout them. That Hall of Shame includes Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely aspirant for the White House in 2024, who has appeared at campaign rallies for Mastriano and the truth-challenged Ohio Senate nominee J.D. Vance.

This is how fascism — or, as Biden called it, semi-fascism — begins. You recite the Big Lie, over and over again, until people start to think it’s true. Nearly three-quarters of the GOP think there was election fraud in 2020.

Liz Cheney refused to go along with that, placing her commitment to truth — and to democracy — over her partisan interests. Now the Democrats need to do something equally bold, by placing her on their ticket in 2024.

That would mean replacing Vice President Kamala Harris, which would surely anger progressives and people of color in the party. But if GOP election-deniers win, who will suffer the biggest losses? People of color, of course. Mastriano has proposed severely curtailing mail-in ballots, for example, which will surely make it harder for Black and brown people to vote.

Many Democrats won’t be pleased with a vice president who opposes abortion rights, gun control, and most other liberal positions. But Liz Cheney supports democracy, which should be our first priority.

And if you can’t stomach the idea of Harris getting dumped, here’s another idea: Biden steps down, the Democrats nominate Harris for president, and she makes Cheney her running mate. That would be fine by me. But it’s not fine to carry on as if these were normal times when we know they’re not.

If we truly believe that democracy is in mortal peril, we need to start acting like it. Everything else is just words.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” which was published this month in a revised 20th-anniversary edition by the University of Chicago Press.