Nicole Shanahan paid for most of a Super Bowl ad before she was ever a candidate. Now she is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate on his independent bid for the White House.
Shanahan, 38, is a lawyer and tech entrepreneur based in the Bay Area. She holds a law degree from Santa Clara University School of Law, and ABC News reported that she has co-founded several organizations working on human and planetary health. That interest is what first pulled her toward Kennedy last year.
The Super Bowl money
The ad that ran during this year’s Super Bowl cost $7 million to make. Shanahan told ABC News she covered more than half of it, and that it upset several members of the Kennedy family. Her reason was practical: she wanted to learn whether the campaign was “unviable” or, as she put it, “the opposite, that it is very viable.” She saw “a significant shift” in support afterward.
That kind of check-writing fed speculation about why Kennedy picked her. Some suggested he was after her money to meet the steep cost of getting on the ballot in every state. Kennedy rejected that in a March 18 interview with NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo. “I would never choose a vice presidential candidate based on how much money that they have,” he said.
Health, foundation and a Democratic past
Shanahan runs a foundation, Bia-Echo, and a venture fund. She described their work to ABC as centered on funding women’s healthy fertility and on personalized medicine, in contrast to what she called “maximalist public health policies” that overlook the individual. “I think that no candidate has talked about that more than RFK has,” she said.
She married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2018, and they divorced last summer.
Her politics are less settled than the ticket suggests. Shanahan calls herself a “lifelong Democrat” and said she was disappointed when Kennedy left the party’s primary last fall to run as an independent. “I don’t [know] how to support an independent candidate. I’ve never done it,” she remembers thinking. She said she was “concerned for the [Democratic National Committee],” which she accused of not “doing a good job,” though she hopes it “can turn it around.” She is also weighing donations to Democrats further down the ballot this cycle, naming Illinois Rep. Lauren Underwood and California Rep. Ro Khanna.
The interview took place before any running-mate names were reported. Shanahan said then that she had “no idea” who Kennedy would pick. “I trust his instinct,” she said, guessing that whoever he chose would have a health background.
