Why Nicole Shanahan could be bad news for Democrats

This story was adapted from Digital Future Daily, POLITICO's afternoon newsletter about the power and politics of tech.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new running mate might not help him win an election, but she’s already highlighting a change that unsettles both parties in American politics — and shows how tech-world money might be accelerating it.

Nicole Shanahan, the 38-year-old lawyer and investor who will now be Kennedy’s running mate, provides a helpful injection of cash to the campaign, having donated more than $4.5 million to his bid thus far.

Shanahan is a longtime staple of the Silicon Valley scene as an early AI executive, an ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin and, according to the Wall Street Journal, an alleged one-time paramour of Elon Musk.

But potentially more significant than the money she delivers is the way her politics squares with Kennedy’s existing supporters, and what it means for U.S. party alignment.

Looking at Shanahan’s track record, she at first seems the paragon of a loyal Democrat: She contributed to Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg in 2020, and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), her local representative.

She was a major donor to Measure J, an anti-incarceration California ballot initiative, and her Bia-Echo Foundation names “the world’s greatest challenges” as “Reproductive Longevity & Equality, Criminal Justice Reform and a Healthy and Livable Planet” — which, whatever it actually does, manages to invoke a lot of progressive-sounding buzzwords.

That might make her selection jarring, considering RFK Jr.’s campaign has thus far appealed to a more right-leaning crowd.

But she’s also a walking manifestation of big tech’s idiosyncratic politics — a blend of “innovation”-minded libertarianism, West Coast institutional skepticism, and an interest in mysticism, alternative lifestyles and medicines.

RFK Jr., so far, has thrived by connecting all those lines in one celebrity-surname package. His highest-profile supporters so far have been the libertarian-minded Silicon Valley techno-utopianists who once flirted with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ doomed campaign. They defected en masse to Kennedy after a press conference on Twitter last summer: “He can and will” beat both Trump and DeSantis, said Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, back when Kennedy was still running as a Democrat.

Kennedy fits very neatly into the culture that produced Shanahan — one comprising tech billionaires comfortable with celebrity and suspicious of legacy institutions and their policy consensus. Kennedy has repeatedly apologized for Russia’s conduct in Ukraine; he invited the vaguely anarcho-libertarian investor Balaji Srinivasan to be his Secretary of the Treasury; he’s repeatedly spread conspiracy theories about the coronavirus vaccine.

There’s a significant amount of overlap between that world and the progressive, Whole Foods-shopping sphere of Shanahan’s influence. Take the vaccine issue: Shanahan told the New York Times last month that while she’s “not an anti-vaxxer,” she does “wonder about vaccine injuries.” (She has also voiced her concern about “electromagnetic pollution.”) Kennedy, for his part, started this campaign as a Democrat and has a long track record as an environmental activist; he’s even stated his support for the “Green New Deal.”

The two names on the RFK Jr. ticket now form a sort of Venn diagram, with Kennedy’s paranoid distrust of the establishment and Shanahan’s crunchy California progressivism joining their circles around a fair number of voters put off by what they see as calcified Republican and Democratic politics.

Samuel Hammond, senior economist at the pro-tech nonprofit Foundation for American Innovation, suggested that the ticket reflects America’s “radical center.” The term, coined by Ted Halstead and Michael Lind in a 2001 book of the same name, posited a base of disenchanted voters that includes single-issue, alienated radicals and low-information independents, willing to throw their support to whoever best courts their disaffection.

Both Republicans and Democrats fear that base could throw the election to the opposite side.

The Democratic National Committee has attacked Kennedy campaign as a “stalking horse” for Trump, while despite the Trump campaign’s professed affection for Kennedy, spokesman Steven Cheung still felt the need to lash out at him as “an environmental whack job who loves E.V. mandates, wants to end gasoline-powered engines,” and “no independent.” (Trump himself wrote on Truth Social that Kennedy is a “Radical Left Democrat, and always will be!!!”)

Shanahan’s presence on the ticket represents, then, a tentative play for the left side of the “radical center,” and an experiment in how broad a coalition it could become.

Her progressive track record is unlikely to sit well with the right-leaning venture capital crowd which first bear-hugged Kennedy’s campaign, but her yoga-mom, populist wariness of the medical establishment could entice otherwise skeptical left-leaning members of that group to take the plunge and support the ticket.

If — and it’s a big if — that ploy is successful for Kennedy’s campaign, it could chiefly hurt Biden, who is staking his re-election on retaining persuadable voters from 2020 who couldn’t, and still can’t, stomach Trump.

Marshall Kosloff, a media fellow at the Hudson Institute and co-host of the Realignment podcast, argued that the initial surge of interest in Kennedy’s campaign from the tech set obscured a more natural fit for his message and track record with disaffected liberals. “They’re dissatisfied with being Democrats because they're bored and anti-establishment… RFK’s people are people who you could have seen voting Green Party 20 years ago, but now their party identification is even weaker.”

After a 2020 presidential election that saw a steep drop in the proportion of the vote that went to third-party candidates, Democrats now worry about shedding crucial votes to candidates like Kennedy in swing states they can’t afford to lose.

“If you sat down with these voters and went through their actual views and what they actually care about, they would be a part of Joe Biden's coalition,” Kosloff said. “But there’s the uncomfortable reality that in an anti-institutional age, there’s a distinct minority of those voters that just don't like that.”