Following midterm losses, MAHA is at a crossroads

Following midterm losses, MAHA is at a crossroads

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s Make America Healthy Again movement faces an uncertain future and a shaky alliance with Republicans, after key allies were swept from office and MAHA-backed candidates lost in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

The MAHA-Republican alliance helped give Trump an important ally in Kennedy. It also gave Republicans access to a new group of voters, with the hope they would turn out for the GOP again during the midterms.

But there was tension from the start, and it boiled over in recent months.

MAHA supporters, who have historically been a loose collection of groups without a set political party, repeatedly said they felt betraye d because Republicans and the Trump administration opposed efforts to regulate ultra processed food and ban pesticides and food dyes.

On Tuesday, most of the GOP candidates endorsed by MAHA groups lost.

Kennedy visited 30 swing House districts this year as an unofficial campaign surrogate; Democrats have so far won 28 of these seats, including flips, according to a tally kept by Democratic-aligned group Protect Our Care.

The most significant defeat for Kennedy and the vaccine-skeptic wing of the MAHA movement came when Iowa GOP gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn lost in a landslide to Democratic state auditor Rob Sand.

Kennedy and MAHA groups invested significant time and money promoting Lahn, who vowed to ban COVID-19 vaccines, end school vaccine mandates, clean Iowa’s water and regulate chemicals if he was elected.

On Wednesday, Tony Lyons, a key ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who runs several MAHA political committees, said he is willing to working with Democrats if they share the MAHA vision.

To move forward, “we partner with absolutely everyone who’s willing to partner with us – companies who will listen, politicians who will work with us from any party, activists, influencers, MAHA moms in every corner of the country,” Lyons said during a virtual call with supporters.

He challenged Democrats to follow through on their words with actions, and work with Kennedy .

“They have to get out of this idea that Bobby Kennedy is somehow bad, that their job is to somehow get rid of him instead of address the points that he brought up,” Lyons said. “If they believe the things that they’ve been saying in the last month. It felt disingenuous, but I’m open … to the possibility that they mean it.”

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A top leader in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement said he is willing to work with Democrats if they share his vision, after Republicans were trounced out of power in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Tony Lyons, a key ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who runs several MAHA political committees, said Wednesday that the movement must work with anyone who shares its goals. To move forward, …

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