Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running for president in the 2024 election as an independent, announced Tuesday at a rally in Oakland that he has selected attorney Nicole Shanahan to be his running mate as vice president.
Kennedy — the son of former U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy — is an environmental lawyer who is among the candidates competing with incumbent President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in the November election.
He came to the Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts in Oakland on Tuesday to announce that his vice president candidate will be Shanahan, who was raised in the city.
Shanahan, the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, graduated from the University of Puget Sound in Washington and received her law degree at Santa Clara University. She previously founded the patent management company ClearAccessIP and is the founder of the private Bia-Echo Foundation.
Kennedy said he chose Shanahan as his running mate because “I wanted an advocate who has seen corruption of our regulatory agencies firsthand, who shares my indignation about the way it allows regulated industries to commoditize our food, our wildlife, and our children.”
“It’s certainly an interesting pick. A third-party campaign is usually struggling to get attention drawn to it and usually goes with someone who draws media attention.” Nolan Higdon, Cal State East Bay communication professor
Kennedy has been criticized by public health officials for taking anti-vaccine stances, but Shanahan echoed Kennedy’s skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry in her speech at Tuesday’s event.
“Pharmaceutical medicine has its place, but no single safety study can assess the cumulative impact of one prescription on top of another prescription, and one shot on top of another shot on top of another shot throughout the course of childhood,” she said.
Third-party presidential candidacies have not fared well in recent American history and California State University East Bay professor of communication Nolan Higdon said the selection of Shanahan was a curious one since she is not well-known to the general public.
“It’s certainly an interesting pick,” Higdon said. “A third-party campaign is usually struggling to get attention drawn to it and usually goes with someone who draws media attention.”
He said Shanahan’s ability to help finance the campaign and her ties to Silicon Valley appear to be factors in the selection.
“The money and connections seem to be what he privileged here,” Higdon said.
