‘We wanted to win. We wanted a fair shot,’ Kennedy running mate Nicole Shanahan said.
The campaign of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has not received a fair chance at winning the election, according to his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, leading the campaign to consider the option of forming a new party or joining forces with Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump.
“I really wanted a fair shot at this election, and I believed in the America I as a little girl pledged allegiance to, and that is not where we are today,” Shanahan said in an interview with the Impact Theory podcast posted online on Aug. 20.
Shanahan, an entrepreneur and attorney, told the podcast host that the “tens of millions of dollars” she put into her own campaign wasn’t intended to make Kennedy a “spoiler” in the 2024 race.
“We wanted to win. We wanted a fair shot,” she said.
The challenges the campaign is facing, including what she described as being shadow-banned from social media platforms, being kept off stages, and facing legal actions, greatly diminish the chances that a third-party candidate such as Kennedy will win, Shanahan said.
The campaign is now looking into two options.
“One is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Waltz presidency because we draw votes from Trump. We draw somehow more votes from Trump,” she said.
“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. Not an easy decision.”
Shanahan said in the interview that she believes Trump “has taken genuine, sincere interest in [the Kennedy campaign’s] policies around chronic disease; he takes it seriously.”
She continued: “The question we have to ask ourselves right now is, one, do we trust Trump and his personal sincerity to really do the right thing for our country, end chronic disease, balance the budget, end these forever wars? Is he somebody that’s going to continue to invite people like Bobby and I into the conversation, or is he going to fall victim again to things that he fell victim to in his first administration?”
If Kennedy decides to drop out of the race and endorse Trump, it’s not clear whether his supporters would immediately back the former president. Some polls have suggested that the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, could be stronger against Trump if Kennedy, who last year scrapped plans to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, remains in the contest.
The Epoch Times contacted Kennedy’s campaign for comment on Aug. 20 about Shanahan’s interview, which was conducted two days before Harris is slated to formally accept her party’s nomination in Chicago along with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, her running mate.
Kennedy’s campaign has faced a number of hurdles in recent days. While the Kennedy campaign says it has obtained enough signatures to be on the ballot in every U.S. state, a judge ruled that he cannot appear on ballots in New York because of disputed claims of his residency in the state.
Kennedy, the son of Sen. Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968, dismissed the ruling as a biased attack. His campaign has vowed to appeal the ruling, describing it as “openly partisan,” according to a statement released on Aug. 12.
“They aren’t confident they can win at the ballot box, so they are trying to stop voters from having a choice,” he wrote in a statement posted on social media last week. “We will appeal and we will win.”
The campaign also highlighted that Kennedy received more than 1 million signatures to allow him to gain access to ballots nationwide.
But he faces similar legal challenges in other states, including in the key battleground states of Georgia and Pennsylvania. On Aug. 19, challengers trying to get him off the ballot in Georgia told a judge that the independent presidential candidate must be disqualified because the New York address he used on Georgia ballot access petitions is incorrect.
“The court found, by clear and convincing evidence that petitioners had shown that his New York residence was a sham used for political purposes,” lawyer Adam Sparks said after an Aug. 19 hearing in Atlanta. “He doesn’t live there. He claimed to on each and every sheet of his petition here in Georgia. That’s improper. It invalidates the petition, full stop.”
A lawyer for Kennedy presented Michael Malihi, an administrative law judge, with Kennedy’s voting history as evidence of his New York residency.
“Mr. Kennedy has been a lifelong resident of the state of New York,” lawyer Larry Otter said at the hearing.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.