The first serious effort to recall Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles after the city’s devastating fires is taking shape, with financial backing from Nicole Shanahan, who was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate in last year’s presidential election.

Shanahan’s involvement in the push to remove the mayor was disclosed on the bottom of a website for the Recall Karen Bass Committee, which listed her as the sole donor providing “major funding.” Shanahan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Shanahan, a onetime Silicon Valley lawyer, could bring financial firepower to the effort: She has a fortune in the realm of $1 billion that stems largely from her divorce settlement with Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder. She has also demonstrated a willingness to pour her wealth into politics, spending more than $15 million to support Kennedy’s campaign.

Bass Under Pressure Due to Handling Fires

Bass has come under pressure for her handling of the enormous wildfires that struck Southern California in January, destroying thousands of homes as fire hydrants ran out of water. She has also faced criticism for being out of the country when the fires hit.

Those hoping to recall Bass must first clear several hurdles, however. Once their campaign is approved, they must gather 330,282 valid signatures of Los Angeles voters to qualify the question for the ballot. Shanahan said last month that she believed it would cost $4 million to collect 400,000 signatures.

And in recent years, several attempts to remove officials in Los Angeles have failed to gather enough signatures to make the ballot. In 2022, a high-profile effort to recall George Gascón, the district attorney at the time, did not collect enough valid signatures. Attempts to recall Los Angeles City Council members have also failed.

“Generally speaking, recalls are uphill battles, because, by definition, you’re trying to fire somebody who you just hired, and you need something fairly cataclysmic to happen in order to get a successful recall,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “In this case, we did have something cataclysmic.”

The last time a recall made the ballot in Los Angeles was in 1984, and the last time voters there recalled an elected official was 1979, said Joshua Spivak, a senior research fellow at the California Constitution Center at the University of California, Berkeley’s law school and the author of a book about the history of recall elections.

Doug Herman, a Democratic strategist representing the mayor, called the recall effort “nothing more than another extreme right-wing political stunt designed to divide Los Angeles when we need to move forward.”

He added, “We should not be spending millions of dollars on a recall election when that time, money and focus can be better spent on rebuilding.”

Bass Can Blame Republicans, Trump for Attack

Shanahan’s involvement in the recall effort could help Bass frame it as an attack by Republicans and other allies of President Donald Trump, who remain unpopular in Los Angeles despite the rightward shift in November’s election. A former Democrat, Shanahan has grown disenchanted with the party and has increasingly expressed conservative views.

Paperwork filed by the recall’s fundraising committee names Sahil Nandwani, a registered Republican who lives in Beverly Hills, California, as the principal officer.

Bass is a longtime Democrat who was elected mayor in 2022 with the endorsement of former President Barack Obama. Before that, she spent many years representing Los Angeles in Congress and the state Legislature, and was a top contender to be Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020.

Shanahan, who has never held elected office, said as recently as last month that she was interested in running for governor of California in 2026, when Gov. Gavin Newsom will be unable to run for reelection because of term limits.

“I want the best person to have that seat, and if that’s me, of course I’ll step in and do it,” she told a conservative podcaster. “But there’s some good people in this state who are in line for that seat as well, and I’ve got no ego in this.”

“We’re going to make sure that the next mayor of LA is a mayor that can rebuild,” she said at another point.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Theodore Schleifer and Laurel Rosenhall/Jordan Vonderhaar
c. 2025 The New York Times Company