"Robert F. Kennedy Jr" By Gage Skidmore, CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Flickr.
CV NEWS FEED // Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced Tuesday that he has selected attorney and entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan, a former Democrat and donor to President Joe Biden, as running mate.
Kennedy made the announcement in Shanahan’s hometown of Oakland, CA.
FOX News reported that
the 38-year-old Shanahan is a philanthropist with a long history of donating to Democrat and left-leaning causes, including supporting President Biden in his 2020 election bid before switching to Kennedy when he launched his own run for the Democrat nomination last year.
Kennedy praised Shanahan’s “insight into ‘how Big Tech uses AI to manipulate the public,’ her athletic ability, and willingness to be a ‘partner’ in a number of policy areas, including on securing the border,” FOX added.
USA Today noted that Shanahan is the “ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin and a long-time Silicon Valley resident [who] has connections throughout the tech world.”
FOX described Shanahan’s past as an active member of the Democratic Party, which she left last year:
Shanahan initially dropped her support for Kennedy after he decided to run as an independent, but later got behind him again by giving $4 million to the super PAC that boosted his candidacy with a John F. Kennedy-themed campaign ad that ran during the Super Bowl in February.
Shanahan also previously donated to Democrat presidential candidates Marianne Williamson and Pete Buttigieg during the 2020 presidential race, and threw more than $150,000 behind progressive Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon’s 2020 election bid.
Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk called the selection of Shanahan “a far-left pick by RFK, who is apparently looking to shore up his progressive bona fides.”
Kirk pointed out that Shanahan “is a six-figure donor to… George Gascon, the pro-crime, Soros-backed prosecutor who helped wreck San Francisco and is currently wrecking LA.”
Kirk continued:
She also spent big on Measure J, a Los Angeles measure to reroute spending from law enforcement and prisons to ‘social services’ and ‘mental health treatment’ — in other words, not putting criminals and dangerous psychos behind bars.
Kennedy’s candidacy has generated a notably large amount of interest among young voters souring on Biden.
The nephew of President John F. Kennedy is polling higher than any independent or third-party presidential candidate since the late businessman Ross Perot – who received just shy of 19% of the vote in 1992.
A Harvard/Harris poll conducted last week showed 17% of respondents favored Kennedy in a three-way race with Biden and former President Donald Trump. The same poll showed Trump leading Biden by five points.
Recent polls demonstrate that Kennedy’s presence in the race likely hurts Biden’s candidacy.
Democratic political analyst Ed Kilgore wrote in New York Magazine on Sunday that
Kennedy was obviously drawing some votes from both major-party candidates, and he still is. But more recent polling has most often shown him helping Trump more than Biden, both nationally and in the battleground states.
