The Nicole Shanahan Announcement and RFK’s Route to the White House
When John F. Kennedy chose his running mate in 1960, he was not in the ideological check-the-box business. He was in the race to win, and to do that he needed the 26 electoral votes of Texas and to retain as many of the 101 electoral votes in the rest of the historic “Solid South” as possible.
Needless to say, leading Democrat contenders for the VP nod like Senators Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson or Minnesota Governor Orville Freeman checked the liberal boxes with fying colors. But when it came to the electoral votes of Texas or Alabama, not so much.
As it happened, JFK choose Senate Leader Lyndon Johnson. The latter delivered his home state by hook and/or crook, and also helped JFK salvage much of the Solid South before it disappeared into today’s red state wall in 1968 and afer. Still, Nixon won 43 electoral votes there, while independent Harry Byrd siphoned of another 15 votes in Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma.
That lef JFK with just 43 electoral votes in the Solid South and an overall margin in the Electoral College that was therefore far closer than suggested by his 303 to 219 win over Nixon. In fact, had Texas gone to Nixon and another 9 electoral votes in the Solid South shifed to Nixon or Byrd, JFK would have been deprived of an Electoral College majority (269 votes), thereby likely forcing the election into the US House of Representatives for the frst time since 1824.
Needless to say, in choosing his running mate RFK was in the same position his uncle had been in 64 years ago. He didn’t need to check any ideological boxes because his core platform was already crystal clear: Bobby Kennedy is the anti-Uniparty candidate who can liberate America’s constitutional democracy from the crony capitalist grip of the War Party, Wall Street, Big Pharma, Silicon Valley and the rest of the beltway bandits— all of whom have prospered mightily during decades of Forever Wars and unspeakable fnancial windfalls to the 1%, even as main street America has withered on the economic vine.
Yet while his platform is clear and solid, his route to victory as a third-party independent is murky, at best. And also, is far more complex than the strategy of salvaging the Solid South employed by JFK.
To wit, we see no practical route to an RFK victory via a standard majority of the votes in the Electoral College. But unlike 1960, the prospect of a hung jury in the Electoral College, and therefore election of the next President in the U.S. House of Representatives, is considerable, indeed.
Accordingly, RFK’s path to the White House needs to encompass three crucial objectives:
- Assurance of an Electoral College outcome in which neither Biden nor Trump get 270 votes.
- Obtaining at least a few Electoral College votes outright in order to be among the top three candidates put before the US House per the 12th Amendment procedure.
- Formation of state-by-state coalitions in the House of Representatives in January 2025 among disafected Democrats and Republicans in order to gain the requisite 26 votes under the constitutional procedure in which each state delegation gets one vote, and which vote may be cast regardless of who won the election in the state.
As it happens, we are not sure which policy boxes Nicole Shanahan checks, but we do think she might well be a brilliant choice when it comes to the three-step election strategy enumerated above. That’s because she’s young, idealistic, tech-savvy, a living embodiment of the American Dream, the spawn of a hard-scrabble immigrant family and a refugee from the Washington-based Democratic party that has lost its way.
Yes, we are not especially enamored with her bit about purifying the soil or the whackadoo district attorney in Los Angeles that she apparently supported under the banner of justice reform. But libertarians need remember that America’s jails are overfowing with victims of Washington’s idiotic War on Drugs and a whole array of other Nanny State crimes including crossing the border illegally because the Washington-prescribed legal quota for work permits for unskilled labor is laughably tiny (@ 4,500 per year).
So an ample and orderly Guest Worker program, justice reform and clearing out the jails of millions of nonviolent perpetrators of victimless crime is the very essence of shrinking Big Government and getting the state out of our lives. And that mission especially extends to the Deep State’s assault on free speech and suppression of dissent from UniParty orthodoxies.
There is no doubt that RFK is on the right side of all of these issues and that he will battle the real threat to “law and order” in America, which is the Democrat-driven weaponization of the machinery of justice and the horrible over-reach of the FBI, CIA and other Deep State institutions. And as far as we can tell, Nicole Shanahan is fully on board with that crucial agenda.
Still, RFK has to win the election frst, and a re-run of the 2020 election results with just two changes tells you why his VP pick might help make that happen. These include—
a shif of 22,300 votes in Arizona and Georgia away from Biden, representing just 0.014% of the 158.4 million votes cast in the 2020 presidential election.
a shif 15 electoral college votes from say New Hampshire, New Mexico and Nevada to a third party candidate.
The result would have been 264 electoral votes for Biden, 259 votes for Trump and 15 votes for the third-party candidate. All candidates having thus fallen short of the 270-vote requirement in the Electoral College, of course, the election would have gone to the U.S. House of representatives.
So the question recurs. Has the red state versus blue state fracture of the nation’s polity eased materially or even at all since 2020? Is it conceivable that all other things equal, RFK could capture Biden’s 22,256 vote margin of victory in Arizona and Georgia out of the 4.145 million Biden votes cast in these two states?
Actually, we’d put money on it. Biden’s razor thin margin was barely one-ffh of the 114,000 votes received in those two states by the hapless candidate of the Libertarian Party, Jo Jorgenson, and only 0.27% of the total 8.4 million votes cast for president in Arizona and Georgia
According to exit polls, Biden won overwhelming margins of 60% to 85% among young, independent, women, minority and Hispanic voters in these two lynch-pin states. These now sorely disillusioned Dem constituencies, of course, were tailor-made for RFK’s platform and appeal, and now Nicole Shanahan’s presence on the ticket adds a powerful reinforcement to that appeal.
The more compelling conclusion, therefore, is that it’s hard to see how Biden could possibly win Arizona and Georgia again in 2024 with the Kennedy/Shanahan ticket in the race and bearing down hard on Biden’s lopsided vote among traditional Dem constituencies in these (and other) states.
2020 Arizona Presidential Vote (11 Electoral Votes):
Biden: 1,672,143.
Trump: 1,666,686.
Biden margin: 10,457.
Jorgenson: 51,465.
2020 Georgia Presidential Vote (16 Electoral Votes):
Biden: 2,473,633.
Trump: 2,461,854.
Biden margin: 11,799.
Jorgenson: 62,299.
Indeed, pulling traditional Dem voters out of the Biden column in these battleground states is so crucial that the wealthy Ms. Shanahan might wish to purchase second homes in each of them and campaign there heavily for the duration! And that admonition might well extend to Wisconsin as well, where Biden won by just 20,000 votes out of the 3.2 million cast there in 2020.
Then again, if the race goes to the U. S. House RFK needs to be among the top three electoral vote getters according to the 12th Amendment, which means picking up at least a few electoral votes outright. As a matter of ultra fne-tuned targeting, there are actually two electoral votes in Maine and three in Nebraska that are awarded by Congressional district regardless of the statewide popular vote outcome.
Moreover, among these are the second district of Maine and the second district of Nebraska, which were divided nearly 50/50 on a red/ blue basis in the 2022 Congressional elections. So, possibly, some additional second homes for Nicole!
Another possibility is for the Kennedy/Shanahan ticket to pick-of 15 electoral votes on a whole state basis in New Hampshire, Nevada and New Mexico, or in other smaller states to be targeted by their campaign. The political math is not entirely prohibitive in any of these cases, either.
For instance, the message from the 2024 presidential primaries in New Hampshire was pretty straight forward. Of the state’s voting age population of 1,150,000, just 169,000 or 14.7% voted for Trump and only 134,000 or 11.7% voted for Nikki Haley. Then again, the great preponderant majority, 847,000 voters or 74%, voted in the democratic primary or didn’t vote at all, and some of these are presumably ripe for the taking in the general election.
The fact is, the Kennedy/Shanahan ticket can win legions of disillusioned voters from both the Dem and GOP columns in New Hampshire. They can also put a heavy efort into registering large numbers of previous non-voters who might be responsive to a truly formidable ticket and message in opposition to both wings of the UniParty status quo.
Assuming that the new RFK voter registrants might add say 2.5% to the state’s total, the turnout next November would be about 850,000. So the Kennedy/Shanahan ticket would likely need about 35% or 300,000 votes to win the state’s four electoral votes.
And there is no great mystery as to where these 300,000 voters might come from. That is to say, the 2020 Democrat primary proved in spades that Joe Biden is far from beloved in the Granite State.
In fact, the votes cast for Bernie Sanders (76,384), Pete Buttigieg (72,454), Amy Klobuchar (58,714) plus Elizabeth Warren, Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Michael Bloomberg and Deval Patrick totaled 269,720. That was nearly eleven times more than the 24,944 primary election votes garnered by Joe Biden. And that was even before he had become today’s 81-year old semi-incapacitated “Joe Biden”.
Furthermore, with respect to the Republican side, it only needs be remembered that during the 2012 New Hampshire GOP primary, Ron Paul got 25% of the vote against the War Party’s trio of Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman and Newt Gingrich. So there are a lot of libertarian-leaning, fscally conservative Republicans in the state that are available, too.
Afer all, the 2024 GOP candidate defled the constitution with his lockdowns and made a mockery of the Republican brand on fscal matters by adding more to the public debt ($8 trillion) than did the frst 43 US presiden
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