MAHA leader open to working with Democrats who won’t fight RFK Jr.

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, “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.

“There are good people across the political spectrum who want to be part of this, and we’re going to find every last one of them and fight with them,” Lyons added.

Lyons previously encouraged MAHA supporters to only back Republicans to shore up Kennedy’s alliance with President Trump and MAGA. Lyons’s PACs endorsed and supported only Republicans in the run-up to the elections.

MAHA helped give Trump an important ally in Kennedy, a longtime Democrat before he endorsed Trump and joined his administration. That 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. MAHA principles, especially those that push for clean water and food at the expense of pesticides and farm profits, are often at odds with the Republican Party’s historically pro-business agenda.

Republican lawmakers have also opposed efforts to regulate ultra-processed food and ban pesticides and food dyes, siding with corporate efforts to lobby the White House to scale back those efforts.

MAHA supporters, who have historically been a loose collection of groups without a set political party, repeatedly said they felt betrayed by Republicans and the Trump administration.

On Tuesday, major MAHA-aligned Republican politicians in Iowa, Texas and Kansas lost, dealing a major blow to Kennedy and his allies in the movement.

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 Democrat 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 elected.

Some Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Michigan’s Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed, ran on a “Building a Healthier America” policy agenda that addressed major MAHA concerns like pesticide company accountability, removing toxic chemicals from food and the water supply, and breaking up “Big Ag” monopolies.

Lyons previously dismissed those attempts.

“She is not our ally,” Lyons said of Ocasio-Cortez in September. “She is just another double-talking politician, who is preparing to run for president on a platform of lies, slogans and propaganda.”

On Wednesday following the GOP’s midterm carnage, Lyons did not dismiss those outreach efforts outright.

He challenged Democrats to follow through on their words with actions and to 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.”