There’s no point in asking what Bill Maher has been smoking, because he does so pretty openly on his Club Random podcast all the time. The question is, which side does he think will agree to his personal pipe dream?

Here is Bill Maher, trying to sell a “unity ticket” proposal: Joe Biden and Nikki Haley.

NEW: Bill Maher suggests that President Biden should ditch Kamala Harris and replace her with Nikki Haley to help his chances in 2024.

Nikki Haley being on the Democrat ticket is actually a perfect fit for her.

Maher also said it would be a good fit because Haley is a "woman of… pic.twitter.com/2LOHZ1KwBD

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 9, 2024

Maher’s proposal did not meet with wild approval from his guests.

During Friday’s panel discussion, Maher insisted Haley doesn’t have a future in the Republican Party “as long as Trump is ascendent” and suggested a different political path for her.

“I know it’s crazy to think that she could run with Biden, but that’s my dream, a unity ticket,” Maher said. “And then he would, I think, definitely win.”

“And of course, she’s said some crazy thing. Most politicians have- not as crazy as ‘We’ve never been a racist country.’ I mean, that’s pretty crazy,” Maher added.

Puck correspondent Tara Palmeri argued that swapping Vice President Kamala Harris for Haley would “literally destroy” the Democratic base.

“But she’s a woman of color,” Maher doubled down.

“Yeah but Black women are like the core of the Democratic Party,” Palmeri responded.

Now, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, Bill Maher has never been a Kamala Harris fan. Here he is in October of 2022 calling her a “bad politician.” Again, he isn’t wrong, but he likes Joe Biden a whole lot more than Kamala Harris.

Second, Bill Maher is overselling the appeal of Nikki Haley. Joe Biden is running right now as, and has governed as, a hard left progressive. He’s never met a dollar he didn’t want to spend or a business he didn’t want to tax. Biden is in the process of attempting to buy votes from the younger demographic with student loan debt payoffs and his new proposal of a tax credit for first-time homebuyers, or those selling a “starter home” (classified as a home selling for less than the media value in the county it is located within). Nikki Haley, despite her appeal to the “Never Trump” crowd, still ran as a moderately conservative Republican. On certain issues, Haley and Trump are very similar. But Haley isn’t Trump, and that makes Bill Maher think that she would be more palatable to Democrats, who are coming to the acceptance that despite the old man’s speedball performance on Thursday night, he’s not going to be up to the job for four more years – and that means Kamala Harris would be president at some point. They can’t keep pumping him full of Red Bull every day – his heart might explode. Which means that this is the best they can do on the rest days.
https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1766666461970338251
In that clip, Jill Biden is having to work VERY hard to restrain herself from jumping in to save Joe from himself, who looks like he is squinting hard to read the teleprompter. Could someone turn up the font size on that thing?

Bill Maher is dreaming. First of all, Nikki Haley is politically savvy enough to realize that even IF the Biden team made her this offer, it would be the end to her political career. Even if she won, and ended up taking over for Joe Biden in the course of a term, she would have no support from Democrats and likely not enough support from Republicans to be re-elected. Second, Tara Palmeri is correct that the Democrats, as much as they don’t like Kamala Harris (as the polls indicate), would not take have her being replaced by Nikki Haley sitting down. The revolt by the hard left – which Old Joe is desperately trying to appease at the moment – would probably mean a whole lot of people staying home from the polls. Biden is tacking hard to the left, and there is no way that his campaign suddenly switches gears in a grand gesture of “unity” if it would mean dropping Harris off the ticket.

The truth is that Bill Maher is looking to save Joe Biden’s presidency for him. He thinks ditching Kamala Harris and putting Nikki Haley on the ticket is the way to do that. If Joe Biden was a different kind of politician, it might be a possibility. Of course, if Joe Biden was a different kind of politician, he might have realized on his own that he needed to not run for re-election. Nikki Haley doesn’t need Joe Biden, and neither side would be open to Bill Maher’s solution. Joe Biden needs help, and more help than simply changing out a running mate can give him.

Featured image: Bill Maher via Angela George on Wikimedia Commons, cropped, Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)