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Robert Kennedy’s vice-presidential pick will broaden his appeal in race to White House

California lawyer Nicole Shanahan, ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergei Brin, announced as independent candidate’s running mate in US election

Independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has picked California-based lawyer Nicole Shanahan as his running mate in the upcoming US presidential election.

Keith Duggan's face
Keith Duggan Washington Correspondent
Wed Mar 27 2024 - 05:00

Here it comes. The wildcard presidential campaign of Robert F Kennedy Jr took on a turbo-boost dimension on Tuesday with the announcement of Nicole Shanahan, a California attorney and entrepreneur and, like Kennedy, a former Democrat, as his running mate and potential vice-president.

Shanahan is 38 and was formerly married to Google co-founder Sergei Brin. She was described by Kennedy as someone “who overcame every daunting obstacle to achieve the highest level of the American dream.”

Tuesday’s scheduled announcement was delayed until after the major news conferences emanating from the bridge disaster in Baltimore. But the location, in Shanahan’s native Oakland, took Kennedy back to the historic 1968 Democratic primary undertaken by his father, Robert Francis Kennedy, which ended with his assassination in Los Angeles that June. Now, his son, who turned 70 in January, tapped into that fabled summer by recalling an unscheduled visit his father had made to an Oakland church with the then Raiders star Willie Brown. Kennedy was accompanied by John Glenn, the astronaut and one of his best friends.

“The meeting was so rancorous and vitriolic that at one point they advised my father to leave,” Kennedy Jr told the crowd.

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“People were insulting him. People were threatening him. My dad refused. And he heard them out. And the next day all the people at that meeting signed up to join his campaign. It’s a lesson we need to learn at this point in our history. We need to start listening to each other even when it’s difficult. We need to start coming back to one another as Americans again.”

Kennedy is positioning himself as a unifying figure unblemished by major party loyalties in a political era defined by the poisonous, mutual contempt exhibited by the Democratic and Republican parties and the national lack of enthusiasm for the returning candidates, President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump. Shanahan, he told the crowd, fitted his criteria as a potential vice-president “who shares my indignation about the participation of big tech as a partner in the censorship and the surveillance and information warfare that our government is currently waging against the American people”.

“I want a partner with strong ideas about how to reverse those dire threats to democracy and to our freedoms,” he continued before outlining his running mate’s achievements as an environmentalist and lawyer.

The announcement marks the beginning of an unlikely political union that brings together the extreme ends of the spectrum of the American life experience. Kennedy’s surname remains one of the chief calling cards of his unorthodox campaign and he belongs to one of the most famous and privileged political dynasties of the last century. Shanahan’s mother, meanwhile, emigrated from Guangzhou city, in China, in the 1980s. Her father struggled to find work and in an interview with People magazine, Shanahan recalled the reality of life in Oakland.

Silicon Valley lawyer and investor Nicole Shanahan delivers remarks after Robert F Kennedy, an independent presidential candidate, announced her as his running mate in Oakland, California, on Tuesday. Photograph: Jim Wilson/New York Times

“I grew up in a single parent household. My mother raised my brother and I. We were low income and on welfare.”

Speaking at the launch of her campaign with Kennedy on Tuesday, she said: “I do believe the Democrats have lost their way in their leadership. I have met farmers, I have met hunters that are some of the most staunch conservationists I have ever met. Yet the Republican Party, like the Democratic, are letting them down. If you are one of those disillusioned Republicans I invite you to join me, a disillusioned Democrat, in this movement to unify America. Listen to Bobby Kennedy in his own words. Take a look at his vision for America. It is a vision I share...”

Shanahan’s story is one of formidable perseverance, from recalling the shame her mother experienced when using food stamps to her amazement at the tips her daughter would bring home from waitressing jobs. After obtaining a place at the University of Puget Sound and working as a paralegal and patent specialist, she progressed to study law at Santa Clara University. A year after graduating, she met Sergei Brin, the co-founder of Google at Wanderlust, a yoga festival in Lake Tahoe. The couple married in 2018 and have a daughter, Echo. In that People interview she spoke about the struggle to balance her upbringing with exposure to the extreme new wealth of the technology era.

“When I was living as a wife of a billionaire, I was not the best version of myself,” she says. “I felt conflicted every day, like I couldn’t access the thing that made me what I am. I couldn’t access that five-year-old girl who had to figure out how to turn a 30-year-old baseball mitt into something I could go to softball practice with. It was the girl who just had endless optimism and tenacity and that fight – because I’m a fighter – and I didn’t know how to switch gears. I tried for years. I looked around me for examples of how I could adapt to this new lifestyle.”

The couple separated in 2021 and quietly divorced in September of last year. While the details of the settlement remain private, Brin’s estate, estimated at $107 billion, leaves Shanahan herself firmly planted in the class of extreme tech-related wealth. It has emerged that she was a donor to the controversial RFK Jr Superbowl advert, mirroring the famous 1960 advert aired during his uncle John F Kennedy’s presidential campaign, which upset family members.

Robert F Kennedy has apologised to his family after an advert which mirrored a John F Kennedy advert from 1960 was aired on US television during the Super Bowl.

So, Shanahan is, contradictorily, set to become the focus of a classic rags-to-riches story which speaks of the American experience, as well as one of the chief financial sources for the phenomenally expensive business of running an independent presidential campaign.

“People talk about my age,” she said at the campaign launch. “It’s true. I will be the youngest vice-president in American history. Let me tell you why so many of we young people turned away from politics. It is because we lost hope of things ever changing within the system. The other reason is that we can’t stand the phoniness anymore. We can’t stand the lies. We can’t stand the inauthenticity. And that is why Bobby Kennedy leads the polls among young people. We hear our voice in his.”

Kennedy’s decision to run as an independent has generated passionate criticism from Democratic Party grandees, including his siblings, and his anti-vaccine activism have been subject to strong criticism. But his wildly varying manifesto, which runs the gamut from environmentalism – on which he has a strong record – to an attitude of appeasement towards Vladimir Putin, has seen him attract strong polling numbers as he attempts to get his name on state ballots ahead of the election.

His choice of running mate is likely to strengthen his appeal among younger voters disenchanted with the fractiousness and sameness of the mainstream message and adds both a new dimension to the 2024 election along with arguably the most evocative surname in modern American political history.

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