Politics
Poll: MAHA wants more. They may turn to Democrats to get it.
Republicans hope the Make America Healthy Again movement becomes a permanent fixture of a big GOP tent. But the party can’t count on its support heading into midterm elections this November.
New results from The POLITICO Poll show both broad frustration and dissatisfaction with the Trump administration on health priorities and opportunities for Democrats to make inroads with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA supporters.
A majority of Americans associate MAHA with the Republican Party, but not overwhelmingly, and most believe the Trump administration has not done enough to “Make America Healthy Again” — including a 41 percent plurality of Trump’s own 2024 voters.
The burgeoning political movement that officials in both parties credit with helping President Donald Trump win in 2024 has already begun to reshape how the GOP approaches health policy — driving everything from a redesign of the food pyramid to a rollback in vaccine recommendations.
At the same time, however, many poll respondents view Democrats as better positioned on the movement’s key health priorities. They were more likely, for example, to say the Democratic Party can be trusted to make the country healthier and are more eager to improve health in America, while fewer said the same of Republicans. The GOP, on the other hand, is seen as more likely to be influenced than Democrats by lobbyists for the food and pesticide industries, who rank among the MAHA movement’s top enemies.
These views could have real consequences in a midterm election year when razor-thin differences in turnout could determine control of Congress. And Democrats are bullish about channeling voters’ frustration with the Trump administration’s policies into a blue wave this cycle.
“The MAHA movement in the [2024] campaign cycle started with a lot of energy, and did create more energy for these types of issues that previously wouldn’t have been associated with the GOP,” said Abby McCloskey, a GOP policy adviser who has warned that Republicans are “squandering their MAHA moment.”
“Since then, I think the energy has trickled off from the perspective of, what is the federal government going to do about this?” she said.
Overall, 47 percent of poll respondents say they support the MAHA movement, including roughly a third of voters who backed former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 and about a third of Americans who plan to vote for Democrats this November. By comparison, 70 percent of Trump 2024 voters say they support the MAHA movement.
However, Americans don’t consider the nation’s health a top issue; It saw the same level of prioritization as “wokeism” and opioid abuse. When asked to choose between priorities for the U.S. government, a majority placed improving Americans’ health above stopping illegal immigration or cutting down on crime — but below affordability and concerns with cost of living.
And there are still widespread misconceptions about what MAHA is and what it does — even among people who self-identify with the movement. Just a third of Americans say they have heard of the MAHA movement and could explain what it is. Another third say they have heard of MAHA but could not explain it, including 31 percent of people who identify as part of the movement. One in four Americans had not heard of the movement at all.
The poll points to an opening for Democrats if they can effectively speak to the movement’s most popular issues and highlights that Republicans’ advantage with MAHA is far from guaranteed.
“People that we would call a ‘MAHA’ voter, they’re not partisans. They really are up for grabs,” Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.) told reporters on a recent call organized by the progressive advocacy group 314 Action, which is working to elect people with a health and science background to public office. “[Republicans] have really taken actions to alienate those folks, to break the promises that they made. They are no longer focusing on the core tenets of that Make America Healthy Again platform in order to continue to please Donald Trump, and also to advance their policy agenda.”
The Trump administration has largely pushed a deregulatory agenda, despite pressure from its MAHA supporters to crack down on pesticide companies, food manufacturers and drugmakers. Its recent choice to make it easier for Bayer to increase production of its weed killer Roundup has especially enraged MAHA supporters, who have said the move made it harder for them to continue supporting GOP candidates in the November midterms.
Kennedy’s own allies have warned Republicans that they cannot take MAHA voters for granted heading into November. Tony Lyons, the president of the MAHA Action, a political advocacy group that supports Kennedy’s agenda, said last month in a memo obtained by POLITICO that the GOP is merely “renting MAHA voters” but hasn’t been able to “purchase” them.
The Blue Light News Poll also finds that the issues self-identified MAHA supporters rank as most important are ones Democrats have championed more often than Republicans, such as halting the spread of infectious diseases, stricter regulation of “forever chemicals,” and expanding access to reproductive health care.
This is not necessarily surprising, since many voters who support MAHA’s goals have typically been Democrats, said Rodney Whitlock, a longtime GOP congressional aide turned health care strategist.
Some of the policies less popular among MAHA respondents, meanwhile, are ones the GOP has embraced: restricting abortion access and reducing the number of vaccines Americans receive.
Yet the movement still lines up with, and supports, some Republican food policies and initiatives. For example, 80 percent of MAHA respondents support removing artificial dyes from food and 72 percent support restricting junk food purchases in federal nutrition programs, both priorities the Trump administration has tackled.
Lyons has urged Republicans to talk more about Kennedy’s policy goals, including discouraging Americans from eating ultraprocessed food, on the campaign trail. If they fail to do so and disgruntled MAHA voters peel off or stay home in November, he has warned, Democrats could take control of Congress, subject Kennedy to oversight hearings, and block his policy and regulatory efforts from going forward.
Lyons did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
The Blue Light News Poll results — along with other recent polling showing declining trust in the Trump administration’s health recommendations — reveal a potential vulnerability for Republicans.
House Majority Forward, a nonprofit allied with House Democratic leadership, surveyed voters in February and March across several battleground districts the party is hoping to flip this fall. The group’s polls, shared first with POLITICO, found that more voters in Colorado, Iowa, New Jersey and Pennsylvania disapprove of Kennedy and his performance as health secretary than view him favorably.
“There’s this opportunity for Democrats to just start talking about making foods healthier and reducing the chemicals in the food that we’re giving them, … you know, limiting pesticide use, getting physical activity, removing artificial dyes,” said Carly Cooperman, a Democratic pollster and CEO of Schoen Cooperman Research.
A growing number of House and Senate Democrats — challengers and incumbents — are taking this advice to heart.
They’re beginning by focusing on pesticide use, which has become a political tension point for Trump’s GOP coalition, pitting the MAHA movement against powerful farm industry interests that have long been loyal to Republicans and hold significant sway with the administration.
Democratic lawmakers have railed against the Trump administration in social media posts, floor speeches and hearings for signing an executive order boosting domestic production of the pesticide glyphosate and siding with Bayer in a case pending before the Supreme Court that could shield the company from liability for the health impacts of its products. Democratic lawmakers, joined by a handful of Republicans, are also introducing bills and amendments that would undo or overturn these actions.
The Blue Light News Poll found that limiting pesticide use is broadly popular, with more than two-thirds of respondents in support of doing so. And MAHA’s dissatisfaction with the Trump administration’s stance has led to some leaders within the movement threatening to primary farm-state Republicans as early as August of last year — yet another opportunity Democrats can exploit.
“We’re not even sure that we even have a path forward in this administration when it comes to pesticides, because it’s very clear that they are entirely owned by Bayer and the chemical companies,” said Kelly Ryerson, a MAHA influencer who goes by the moniker Glyphosate Girl online and has publicly backed Kennedy.
Progressive advocates also say Democrats would be wise to seize on MAHA voters’ simmering frustration.
“There is a genuine concern that there is unhealthy food in our food supply, and this administration is making it worse,” said 314 Action President Shaughnessy Naughton, whose group is backing Democratic challengers around the country.
Yet even as a segment of MAHA appears to sour on the GOP — and Kennedy — some of his agenda garnered widespread support among poll respondents, from removing artificial food dyes to offering whole milk in schools. Though MAHA respondents didn’t rank Kennedy’s stances on vaccines high on their list of importance, a notable chunk of Americans are highly skeptical of existing requirements.
The Blue Light News Poll found that 41 percent of respondents across party lines support reducing how many vaccines Americans receive, with Republicans significantly more likely to hold that view. Fifty-eight percent of Trump 2024 voters support reducing how many vaccines Americans receive, compared to 29 percent of Harris 2024 voters.
Broad support for some of the key positions of MAHA — especially among Trump 2024 voters — and approval of some of the administration’s actions on health, suggest that Republicans may still be able to leverage the popular elements of the platform to win over voters in November.
Because health ranks so far down the list of Americans’ concerns, it’s unlikely to be a decisive factor in how they vote this midterm. Still, that doesn’t mean Republicans should be complacent and assume MAHA priorities won’t matter at all, Republican strategist Whitlock warned.
“Republicans have to be working from the perspective of ‘everything matters,’” he said. “To do differently is political suicide.”
Daniel Lurie is already imagining the scene at Levi’s Stadium on July 1.
The San Francisco Democrat — who, according to at least one recent poll, is the most popular mayor in America — was circulating around his city ahead of Levi’s Stadium hosting Turkey vs. Paraguay tonight, when he began to wrap his head around his good fortune.
The venue is scheduled to host the Round of 32 match featuring the Group D winner on July 1, and that’s very likely to be the U.S. team.
“It’ll be incredible,” Lurie, a no-nonsense technocrat, told Blue Light News. “It’ll be a thrilling moment for San Francisco, and for our region.”
He beamed in to a FaceTime interview from Southern Station, having already been at two watch parties that capture the new San Francisco he’s trying to build: the East Cut neighborhood, and then Fieldwork Brewing at China Basin.
And Lurie knows ball: Not only has he attended five World Cups, he is also an investor in 49ers Enterprises, which purchased Leeds in 2023.
He drew a parallel to his English club’s own turnaround this season: newly promoted and expected to go straight back down, Leeds instead finished safely mid-table. Lurie is trying to engineer a similar revival in San Francisco, using major events like the World Cup and February’s Super Bowl to project competence and attract visitors and families.
In San Francisco, such a turnaround means restoring a sense of competence to city government — and managing large events like the Super Bowl and the World Cup are key to that effort.
“We are managing for results here in San Francisco, and what’s critical about those results is keeping people safe, making sure that people want to be here in San Francisco, that they have a great time, and that they want to come back,” Lurie said.
His turnaround effort will be vastly aided by Open AI’s expected IPO, which will expand his tax base but also pose challenges.
“We got Anthropic. We got Open AI. We have a company that’s four years old in Cursor that just got acquired by Elon Musk’s company for $60 billion and hardly anyone’s talking about that,” Lurie said. “I think we want these companies here. We want them paying their taxes here, and we want them being engaged in the community. We want them involved in civic life, we want their employees involved and engaged in their neighborhoods, but we also want an economy, and we want an economy that works for everyone — that lifts up the entire community, and isn’t just for the select few.”
Lurie said he is laser-focused on affordability.
“We are every day focused on building more housing, building more affordable housing, making child care more affordable,” Lurie said. “We are the first city in the country to provide access and opportunity to free early childhood education, [age] zero to five, for any family of four making $210,000 a year or less.”
The aim? Draw more families within the city’s confines.
“We’re gonna hopefully keep more working families here in our city, and we want them to believe that they can build a life here long term, so people don’t get priced out — so we have a lot of work to do.”
Lurie largely avoids the national spotlight — the rare exception coming when he netted a jumper on “The Pat McAfee Show” early this year — and feverish culture war issues in favor of a get-shit-done approach to governing.
“Our number one industry is tourism,” Lurie said. “And when people visit our city or when they take their kids to school each day, they don’t care if their mayor is a Democrat or a Republican.”
As of Friday evening, as he prepared to watch Turkey vs. Paraguay, Lurie couldn’t fully allow himself to contemplate what it would mean for Levi’s Stadium to play host to a U.S. squad that’s rocking and rolling over opponents.
“We cannot jinx it,” Lurie said. “But it’s looking very much like we will host USA in the first knockout round. My hope: I’ll be there to root on USA.”
Brazil has won a record five World Cups, but the most important match it has ever played may have been an exhibition match against Haiti that was meaningless in sporting terms but has had a long influence on each country’s politics.
On Aug. 18, 2004, Brazil’s players drove through the streets of Port-au-Prince in armored personnel carriers, World Cup champions greeted like liberators. Two months earlier, Brazil’s military had arrived to lead a multinational peacekeeping force established by the United Nations following a bloody coup d’état.
“We’ve only seen such joy in the eyes, the exuberance of the eyes, when we paraded in Brazil after winning the World Cup,” coach Carlos Alberto Parreira said afterwards. “I will never forget this moment.”
The team was accompanied to the U.N.-hosted friendly match that followed — “They play, peace wins,” went the slogan — by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then in his first term as Brazil’s president. More than two decades later, Lula is back in office, now cemented as the most accomplished leader the world’s left has seen in the 21st century. His approach to foreign policy, say observers, was shaped partially on the soccer pitch that day in Port-au-Prince.
“It showed he was trying something different as a diplomatic tool,” said Mauricio Savarese, an Associated press political reporter in São Paulo who has researched the legacy of the 2004 game. “That match at the time was a symbol of Brazil’s soft power. You really showed how Brazil could win hearts and minds with a policy that was not exactly bowing to the United States or to the China or to Russia, but independent.”
The match, designed to build goodwill between a shell-shocked population and its benevolent occupiers, began after players from the two national teams unfurled a pre-match banner that read “Social Justice is the True Name of Peace.” The peacekeeping mission represented an early commitment to “continental solidarity,” as Lula defined it in a speech the following year to up-and-coming diplomats where he cited the Haiti mission as an example of “non-indifference.”
Lula was feeling his way toward a foreign policy centered around South-South Cooperation and the BRICS alliance of emerging markets. Lula has used that role as de-facto leader of the democratic developing world to, with mixed results, position Brazil as a leader on climate change — it hosted last year’s COP30 in the Amazon city of Belém — and a mediator when thorny international conflicts arise. It has a position of official neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine war, so as to serve a potential role as mediator, as it did when partnering with Turkey in 2010 to broker a nuclear-fuel swap with Iran.
That same year, an earthquake hit Haiti, killing over 100,000 people while injuring and displacing millions more. It also destroyed the headquarters of the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, even as Brazil led a post-disaster humanitarian relief effort. The experience further deepened ties between the two countries, as Brazil introduced a humanitarian-visa program for the first time to welcome Haitians fleeing the devastation; it has since been extended to Syrian war refugees, as well. One historically Italian neighborhood in São Paulo is now known as Little Haiti.
The broader peacekeeping mission began to resemble a military quagmire in humanitarian garb: Brazilian troops were blamed for human-rights violations and a cholera epidemic, while doing little to improve the overall security situation. For Lula and his protegée Dilma Rousseff, the Haiti project became a political liability, in both Haiti and Brazil.
As the two nations prepare to face off against one another in Philadelphia on Friday, Lula is not expected to be in attendance. Instead his travel schedule this week was built around the G7 summit in France, in which Brazil participated as one of five “partner countries” — a reflection of its increased global standing over the past few decades. If Lula shows up at one of Brazil’s matches later in the World Cup, it will likely be with a domestic audience in mind rather than a foreign one: he is in the midst of a reelection campaign for his fourth term, against a son of his longtime antagonist Jair Bolsonaro.
“I doubt that anyone is going to vote for him just because he’s recognized abroad as a key leader,” said Savarese, Brazilian political journalist who wrote the book “Dilma’s Downfall.” “But of course that helps with some moderates, which are a very thin part of Brazil’s electorate, and they’re going to be decisive in October’s election, that is also one of the things that tips the balance in his favor, as is being seen as this pragmatic leader who can also be respected even when he’s speaking about issues that clearly don’t affect as much in Brazil’s daily life.”
That day in Haiti, not yet a global figure, Lula confronted one limit on his power. He reportedly asked his team not to score too many goals, in the interests of goodwill. The players did not oblige, winning 6-0, including an astonishing solo effort from Ronaldinho.
Blue Light News has been crunching the numbers to see how all 48 of this year’s World Cup participants rank in several other off-field categories, which we’ll share more of over the weekend.
In today’s item, we look at whether GDP per capita has any connection to soccer performance. As you can see, the chart does show some positive correlation — note, for example, wealthy tournament contenders such as France, the Netherlands and Germany all in the upper right corner.
But it’s not a perfect indicator. By this metric, Qatar is the wealthiest country in the tournament — and it lost 6-0 to Canada on Thursday …
-
Politics1 year agoFormer ‘Squad’ members launching ‘Bowman and Bush’ YouTube show
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoLuigi Mangione acknowledges public support in first official statement since arrest
-
Politics1 year agoFormer Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron launches Senate bid
-
Uncategorized2 years ago
Bob Good to step down as Freedom Caucus chair this week
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoPete Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon goes from bad to worse
-
The Josh Fourrier Show2 years agoDOOMSDAY: Trump won, now what?
-
Politics1 year agoBlue Light News’s Editorial Director Ryan Hutchins speaks at Blue Light News’s 2025 Governors Summit
-
The Dictatorship9 months agoMike Johnson sums up the GOP’s arrogant position on military occupation with two words