Billionaire Nicole Shanahan Will Fund Primary Challengers Against Senators Who Vote Against Bobby Kennedy.

Nicole Shanahan was on the ticket with Bobby Kennedy as his Vice Presidential candidate until they ended their campaign to support Donald Trump.

Subsequently, Trump named RFK Jr. to be his nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The nomination is very contentious. Democrats are treating Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat and the scion of a leading Democrat family, as an apostate. Democratic senators questioning him at a meeting of the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday, were generally quite hostile, asking five long questions in a row and cutting him off after the first few words of an attempted answer. They demanded “Yes or No” answers to questions that could not honestly be answered in that manner. They made many scurrilous accusations and presented as fact events that Kennedy said never happened, or words he said he had never spoken, but as soon as he began to deny an accusation, they cut him off and voiced yet another scandalous claim.

It is to be presumed that this is their playbook, as they used the same tactics on another life-long Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard, who left her party behind to join Mr. Trump on the campaign trail.

Though a life-long Demoocrat, the party of his father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, RJK Jr.’s support for Donald Trump was just too much for Democrats. They are treating him as if he had left their religion, as if he is dead to them, as if he deserves nothing but scorn and vitriol.

Into this fray stepped Nicole Shanahan, a lawyer who reportedly has over one billion dollars in weath, mostly from her former marriage to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Shanahan is pledging to fund primary campaigns against senators who vote against Bobby Kennedy.

Shanahan is a Democrat and a major Democrat-donor.

In the video below, she starts by addressing U.S. Senators Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), and reminds them that she helped finance their elections. Then she ads, “Please know that I will be watching your votes very carefully. I will make it my personal mission that you lose your seats in the Senate if you vote against the future health of America’s children.”

Then she continues by calling out eleven more U.S. Senators — McConnell, Graham, Murkowski, Collins, Cassidy, Tillis, Langford, Booker, Fetterman, Sanders, and Cortez Masto — and tells them, “While Bobby may he willing to play nice, I won’t. If you vote against him, I will personally fund challengers to primary you in your next elections and I will enlist hundreds of thousands to join me.”

She concludes, “Big Pharma and Big Ag have exploited us for far too long. It ends now. You are either on the side of transparency and accountability or you are standing in the way. The choice is yours. Please choose wisely.”

Later, Sen Warnock announced that he would be voting “No” on Kennedy’s nomination, and Shanahan shot back, “Man do I regret ever helping you.” She added, “The only reason you’re in that seat is because I sent [you] massive financial support … I’ll be correcting that massive mistake asap. You’re awful.”

In the end, the Senate Finance Committee advanced Kennedy’s nomination 14-13, sending his nomination to the Senate for a full vote on the Senate floor. In a related development, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to advance Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination for Director of National Intelligence in a 9-8 vote, also strictly along party lines. The two votes, for Kennedy and for Gabbard, were both strictly partisan, with every Democrat voting against Kennedy and Gabbard, and every Republican voting for Kennedy and Gabbard. We have very partisan politicians in Congress these days, but frankly there are many more Republicans who vote with Democrats on numerous bills than there are Democrats who vote with Republicans. While the Senate is currently controlled by Republicans 53-47, at least three of the Republican Senators cannot be relied upon to vote with their party, while on most (but not all) votes the Democrats always vote as a solid block. One can interpret these voting blocks to reach two very different and distinct conclusions: Either the Democrat position is more centrist, more reasonable, and that is why it lures some reasonable Republicans over; or it can be said that the Democrats are severely disciplined by their leadership if they stray from the party line, while the Republicans are not.

Nicole Shanahan was interviewed by Steve Bannon and said that “the line of questioning that Bobby’s had to endure the last two days … has been infuriating,” adding that these senators on the committees “have received millions and millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical companies.” She told Bannon that the MAGA-MAHA (“Make America Great Again – Make America Healthy Again”) movement “is the largest movement on the planet right now.”

Listen to her response as Steve Bannon asks her, “Were you taken back by the viciousness of the delivery of some of the questions?” to which she responds: “I don’t know where they get this self-righteous viciousness. Part of me wonders if they believe half of what they are saying. Some of it just feels like theater. … It’s not theater for us. This is our lived reality. And so, when I see that viciousness up there on Capitol Hill, these people are acting. And I think that at this point the Democratic Party chooses its candidates based on who can act, not who gives a damn. … They are so detached, and they are so removed, and the people feel it.”

Shanahan concludes her remarks by observing that, “Many of the senators we heard from that were the harshest, barely won their seats. I mean, Cortez-Masto barely won her seat by less than 1%.” Shanahan described these politicians as “low-hanging fruit,’ and added that, “We’re coming after every single one of them.”

Shanahan is correct. Catherine Cortez-Masto, a Democrat, was elected to her Senate seat in 2022 by Nevada voters over Adam Laxalt, the Republican candidate, by the thin margin of 48.81% (Cortez-Masto) to 48.04% (Laxalt). The popular vote separation was less than 8,000 votes: 498,316 votes for Cortez-Masto to 490,388 votes for Laxalt. Though Nevada’s population is low and the votes totalled less than one million, Nevada took four days to count the ballots, and as the ballot-counting continued, Laxalt’s early lead faltered. In the same 2022 election, there was evidently a significant number of ticket-splitting votes for the top candidates, as Republican challenger Joe Lombardo defeated incumbent Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak. Two years later, in 2024, President Trump won Nevada, defeating Vice President Harris in the state by about 45,000 votes. But Cortez-Masto has no reason to fear that her questioning of RFK, Jr., will have any affect on her next Senate race, as that will not be until 2028, and by then more recent issues will control the campaign. With razor-thin margins supporting her seat, significant opposition spending in both the primary or in the general election might well topple Cortez-Masto, but it’s something she doesn’t need to think about as she challenges Trump’s cabinet nominees.