RFK Picked Nicole Shanahan as His Running Mate. Here’s Why That’s Good for Biden. 😉

The most serious third-party campaign is taking dead aim at low-information, low-propensity voters with crank views.

The money is on the ticket. (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images)

1. Bobby

There’s a cookie for everyone who gets the joke in the headline.¹ But also, it’s true. RFK was never a serious threat to win a lot of votes, but with each passing day his candidacy looks increasingly like a dagger pointed at the heart of MAGA. And his choice of running mate is wild.

Yesterday, Kennedy announced that his VP will be Nicole Shanahan, who isn’t just the least-qualified, most preposterous character ever to appear on a presidential ticket polling above 5 percent.² She’s also going to be catnip to a particular kind of low-intensity Trump voter.

Two weeks ago we went through the numbers on RFK. A quick refresher:

• Current polling shows RFK at a relatively high level of support.

• RFK currently takes more voters from Biden than Trump.

• But RFK’s primary issue is vaccine skepticism.

• Polling shows that anti-vax sentiment in America is concentrated in the MAGA wing of the Republican party.

So while the polling says that RFK is bad for Biden now, in the long run the Kennedy-Shanahan campaign will take votes disproportionately from Trump, not Biden.

So let’s talk about Nicole Shanahan, the MAGA killer.