Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s fan club in Silicon Valley just got a little bit bigger. One person bigger at the very least, in the form of Nicole Shanahan, the 38-year-old lawyer and investor who will now be his running mate as the independent presidential candidate continues to seek ballot access for this November’s election. She’ll provide a helpful injection of cash, having donated more than $4.5 million to Kennedy’s bid thus far, although he denies this was the reason for her selection. Potentially more significant than the money Shanahan brings to Kennedy’s ticket is how she made it. 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, a one-time paramour of Elon Musk. Shanahan is 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. So what does it mean that someone from the highest echelons of Silicon Valley is now supporting Kennedy’s longshot bid for the presidency? The move knits together two seemingly disparate strains of American politics, that come together in the enclaves of coastal California. Looking at Shanahan’s political track record, she’s 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 they actually mean, manage to invoke a lot of progressive-sounding buzzwords. This makes her selection somewhat jarring at first, considering RFK Jr.’s campaign has thus far appealed to a more right-leaning crowd. The libertarian-minded Silicon Valley techno-utopians who once flirted with Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis’ doomed campaign 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 this group — billionaires, and their fans, who are comfortable with celebrities and suspicious of legacy institutions and policy consensus. He’s 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. But 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, as 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 figures 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 this morning 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. In the eyes of a not-insignificant number of independent voters, even the past decade’s political convulsions have left a Biden-Trump (yes, really) “uniparty” still standing — and adding the progressive Californian Shanahan to the ticket means that RFK’s bid might draw more from Biden than Trump. “[Shanahan] represents what [Kennedy’s] actual constituency should be,” said Marshall Kosloff, a media fellow at the Hudson Institute and co-host of the Realignment podcast. Kosloff 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.” Still, the tech world loves to see itself as disruptive, and RFK’s campaign is nothing if not that: 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. And 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”: 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 Halstead and Lind’s “radical center” to take the plunge and support the ticket. That might ultimately split Silicon Valley politics along familiar lines, with big tech’s biggest disruptors put off by a progressive-coded feint toward the center and ultimately coming home to Donald Trump — the 21st century’s political disruptor-in-chief. Although Elon Musk has spoken warmly of Kennedy, even conducting an interminable interview with the candidate on X, he posted several days ago that “we need a red wave or America is toast.”
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