Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ideas have gone mainstream, but his Make America Healthy Again movement is struggling to take root.<\/p>\n
MAHA-coded views about food and nutrition are widely popular and one-third of Americans now identify as MAHA supporters. But new results from a Politico poll show Kennedy’s movement remains unconvinced.<\/p>\n
The survey shows that his supporters are not politically fanatic and have a wide range of priorities that do not coincide with the MHA leadership.<\/p>\n
For example, despite Kennedy’s emphasis on vaccines during his first year as secretary, less than half of MHA supporters \u2013 42 percent \u2013 \u200b\u200bsay vaccines are a core issue for the movement.<\/p>\n
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Created during the 2024 presidential campaign as an offshoot of Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda, the movement backed by Kennedy’s supporters is credited with helping return Trump to the Oval Office. The survey shows that there is significant overlap between the two groups, with most MAGA respondents also describing themselves as members of the MHA movement.<\/p>\n
A year into Trump’s second term, the White House is still figuring out how Kennedy and his MHA message can help them ahead of the midterms.<\/p>\n
The health secretary is believed to be participating in the campaign to energize his base, but the White House has asked him to stay away from some of the more polarizing parts of the MAHA agenda, such as vaccine skepticism, and instead focus on issues like nutrition.<\/p>\n
That campaign would seek to re-engage nearly half of MHA supporters who say Trump and Kennedy haven’t done enough to make America healthier. Meanwhile, Democrats see an opportunity to influence voters in the midterms by using MHA’s more popular ideas, such as fighting ultraprocessed food and reducing chemicals in the environment, that have long been more closely associated with the left.<\/p>\n
In addition to gaining insight into the preferences of MHA supporters, the survey also debunked popular misconceptions about Kennedy’s supporters. Contrary to the stereotype of the vaccine-skeptical MAHA mom promoting her health routine on social media, men were more likely than women to self-identify as MAHA supporters. MAHA supporters tend to be wealthier than the general public. One in five voted for Kamala Harris in the last presidential election.<\/p>\n
And in the year and a half since Kennedy first announced his movement during the campaign, MAHA has made inroads into policy and public opinion, with a sizable portion of Americans \u2013 including MAHA supporters themselves \u2013 saying they can’t tell what MAHA is. Confusion about what the movement aims for and what its goals are may make it difficult for it to advance its agenda and mature into a permanent fixture in American politics.<\/p>\n
Here are five charts that show what we know about the Grand Alliance:<\/p>\n
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There is a lot of crossover between the MAGA and MAHA movements.<\/p>\n
The significant overlap between Trump’s and Kennedy’s bases suggests that both leaders have been at least partially successful in merging their movements to attract more Republican voters. But the differences in polling are clear: Unlike Trump’s coalition, the MHA has much in common with the Democrats.<\/p>\n
Kennedy is a former Democrat, and his views, particularly on healthy eating and environmental effects on health, have long been favored by the left, said Dr. Peter Lurie, who leads the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington-based nonprofit watchdog.<\/p>\n
Lurie said, “The welfare ideas that became part of the movement could easily be associated with hippies, who were more likely to be Democrats.” He said of MAHA and MAGA followers, “So far, they have been able to live more or less comfortably within the same movement.”<\/p>\n
But Lurie predicts the honeymoon won’t last forever. Already, tensions are rising between the two bases, with MHA loyalists rebelling against Trump’s executive order to expand manufacturing of glyphosate, a chemical herbicide that Kennedy has called “one of the likely culprits” for the country’s high chronic disease rates.<\/p>\n
Kennedy’s supporters say that some of the president’s actions weaken the MHA movement. Democrats see the growing frustration of the MHA base as a prime opportunity to win over voters in the midterms.<\/p>\n
“If any Democrat says to me, ‘Hey, we’ve got this plan.’ I would say, ‘Sure, I’ll vote for you,'” Claire Dooley, an MHA activist who worked with Kennedy, told POLITICO last month.<\/p>\n
“A lot of ordinary MHA voters don’t necessarily have a strong party affiliation. They will just choose who will get it done.”<\/p>\n
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MAHA supporters have not yet agreed on what the principles of the movement are. In the survey, only six MHA principles \u2013 those related to food, chemicals and physical fitness \u2013 were agreed upon by a majority of supporters.<\/p>\n
And he received only a modest majority of self-identified MAHA followers, who described him as having core principles, indicating significant disagreement over what, in fact, MAHA is.<\/p>\n
For example, Kennedy’s longtime vaccine skepticism does not match the issues that are central to the MHA movement, according to his rank-and-file supporters.<\/p>\n
But while vaccines may not be a main issue for MAHA supporters, they remain overwhelmingly skeptical about them, with 65 percent of MAHA respondents saying they support reducing the number of vaccines Americans get, compared to 41 percent of the general population saying the same.<\/p>\n
Instead, more MHA supporters say that the movement’s less controversial positions \u2014 such as removing ultra-processed foods and artificial colors from the American diet \u2014 are a core tenet compared to the vaccines.<\/p>\n
Removing junk food from federal nutrition programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program was also one of the principles most MHA respondents agreed upon. Kennedy is leading the way, pushing nearly two dozen states to pursue food restriction policies since taking office.<\/p>\n
Jerrold Mande, a Harvard nutritionist and former Obama-era USDA official who supports limiting sugar-sweetened beverages in SNAP, said the food restrictions and new dietary guidelines for Americans are “tied for the top MHA policy win so far.”<\/p>\n
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There is broad support among the general public for MAHA proponents’ top priorities, which include removing ultra-processed foods and artificial colors from the American diet and limiting the use of pesticides.<\/p>\n
Even MHA ideas once considered marginal are gaining popularity among everyday Americans, indicating that Kennedy’s movement has been successful in reshaping Americans’ views on topics like vaccines.<\/p>\n