The RFK Jr. presidential campaign must be feeling bearish about their chances, as his VP pick Nicole Shanahan just admitted on a podcast that they’re thinking of quitting and endorsing Trump.
It’s stunning to think back that at one point in the 2024 presidential elections, anti-vaxx candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was actually running as a Democrat, and was polling as high as 17%. But since then his campaign his been in complete freefall, after a Vanity Fair report that he’d groped a family babysitter in 1999, and oddly more impactfully, that same report noted that he dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park. (His bonkers explanation to Roseanne Barr did not help clean up the mess).
Kennedy is now running as an independent, and his flailing campaign is currently polling nationally at 3.2%. And as The Hill reports, RFK Jr.’s divorce-settlement-rich vice-presidential running mate, Oakland native Nicole Shanahan, said the campaign might give up and endorse Donald Trump in the near future.
RFK’s VP Nicole Shanahan says they are debating whether to stay in the race or drop out and join forces with Trump:
— End Tribalism in Politics (@EndTribalism) August 20, 2024
“There’s two options that we're looking at and one is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Waltz presidency because we… pic.twitter.com/O3HrLbbCLO
Her remarks are seen above on a Tuesday edition of yet another self-important white guy podcast called Impact Theory. The full exchange is embedded at the bottom of this post.
“There’s two options that we’re looking at and one is staying in,” Shanahan said on the podcast. “But we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Walz presidency, because we draw votes from Trump, we draw some votes from Trump. Or we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump and we walk away from that and we explain to our base why we are making this decision.”
Polling generally shows Harris winning by about one percentage point more over Trump with RFK Jr. in the race. At this point, the third-party candidate Kennedy certainly takes more share of the Trump vote than the Harris vote.
Kennedy to WaPo and NYT yesterday: “We’ve reached out” to Harris camp and “they ought to be looking” at meeting https://t.co/wPY2HrXMRE
— Meryl Kornfield (@MerylKornfield) August 15, 2024
His running mate today: Harris is “a lost cause” https://t.co/R6uyLwIknU pic.twitter.com/AwHjwn0Wvx
Kennedy has enquired with both the Harris and Trump campaigns to try to get an ambassadorship or cabinet position from them in exchange for an endorsement, which was literally the Connor Roy subplot on Succession. Shanahan denies contact with the Harris campaign in the tweet above, though Kennedy himself told the New York Times. “We’ve reached out repeatedly through the highest level intermediaries,” and that “We’ve been told that they have no interest in talking with me.”
Again, above you can watch the full Nicole Shanhan appearance on the Impact Theory podcast. It’s even more surprising with today’s Bloomberg revelation that Shanahan has now spent $15 million of her own money keeping the (now almost broke) Kennedy campaign afloat, which seems clearly why she was chosen for the VP pick.
But if Nicole Shanahan spends $15 million of her own money just to end up endorsing Donald Trump — which she could have simply done for free — well, that would be a very hilarious use of her money.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 26: Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (R) and his vice presidential pick Nicole Shanahan take the stage during a campaign event to announce his pick for a running mate at the Henry J. Kaiser Event Center on March 26, 2024 in Oakland, California. Nicole Shanahan is an attorney and tech entrepreneur based in the San Francisco Bay Area. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
