Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ideas have gone mainstream, but his Make America Healthy Again movement is struggling to find its footing.
MAHA-coded ideas about food and nutrition are broadly popular and a third of Americans now identify as MAHA supporters. But new results from The POLITICO Poll suggest Kennedy's movement is disjointed.
His supporters aren't political diehards and they have a wide array of priorities that don't neatly align with those of MAHA leadership, the poll suggests.
Despite Kennedy's emphasis on vaccines during his first year as secretary, for instance, fewer than half of MAHA supporters — 42 percent — say vaccines are a core issue for the movement.
Forged 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 propel Trump back to the Oval Office. The poll suggests significant overlap between the two groups, with most MAGA respondents also describing themselves as members of the MAHA movement.
A year into Trump's second term, the White House is still figuring out how Kennedy and his MAHA message can help them ahead of the midterms.
While the health secretary is supposed to be making campaign appearances to energize his base, he's been told by the White House to stay away from some of the more polarizing parts of the MAHA agenda, like vaccine skepticism, and focus instead on issues like nutrition.
That campaign will have to reengage the roughly half of MAHA supporters who say that Trump and Kennedy haven't done enough to make America healthier. Democrats, meanwhile, see an opening to sway voters in the midterms by harnessing MAHA's more popular ideas, such as fighting ultraprocessed food and reducing chemicals in the environment, which have long been more closely associated with the left.
In addition to distilling MAHA supporters' priorities, the poll upends popular misconceptions about who Kennedy's supporters are. In contrast to the stereotype of a vaccine-skeptical MAHA mom touting her wellness 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 5 voted for Kamala Harris in the last presidential election.
And while MAHA has made inroads in policy and public opinion in the year and a half since Kennedy first announced his movement on the campaign trail, a significant chunk of Americans — including MAHA supporters themselves — say they can't explain what MAHA is. Confusion about what the movement stands for and what its goals are could make it harder to advance its agenda and mature into a permanent fixture in American politics.
Here are five charts that explain what we know about the MAHA coalition:
The MAGA and MAHA movements have a lot of crossover.
The significant overlap between Trump and Kennedy's bases suggests that the two leaders have been at least partly successful in merging their movements to attract more Republican voters. But fractures are evident in the polling: Unlike Trump's coalition, MAHA has a lot in common with Democrats.
Kennedy is a former Democrat, and his ideas, especially on healthy eating and environmental impacts on health, have long been favored by the left, explained Peter Lurie, a doctor who leads the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington-based nonprofit watchdog.
“The wellness ideas that are part of the movement could easily be affiliated with hippies, who are more likely to be Democrats,” Lurie said. "Up until now, they've been able to live more or less comfortably within the same movement," he said of the MAHA and MAGA followers.
But Lurie predicts the honeymoon won’t last forever. Already, tensions between the two bases are rising, with MAHA loyalists revolting against Trump's executive order to increase manufacturing of glyphosate, a chemical herbicide Kennedy called “one of the likely culprits” behind the country's high chronic disease rates.
Some of the president's actions undermine the MAHA movement, Kennedy's supporters say. Democrats see the MAHA base's growing frustration as a prime opportunity to win over voters in the midterms.
“If a Democrat were to say to me, ‘Hey, we’ve got this plan.’ I would say, ‘Sure, I would vote for you,’” Claire Dooley, a MAHA activist who has worked with Kennedy, told POLITICO last month.
“A lot of general MAHA voters don’t necessarily have a strong party affiliation. They’re just going to pick who is going to get it done.”
MAHA supporters haven't reached agreement on what the movement’s principles are yet. In the poll, only six MAHA principles — related to food, chemicals and physical fitness — had majority agreement from supporters.
And those only received slight majorities of self-identified MAHA followers describing them as core principles, a sign of significant disagreement on what, exactly, MAHA is.
Kennedy's longtime vaccine skepticism, for example, doesn't align with issues his rank-and-file supporters' say are central to the MAHA movement.
But while vaccines might not be a core issue for MAHA supporters, they remain highly skeptical of 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 who said the same.
Instead, more MAHA supporters say the movement's less controversial positions — like removing ultra-processed foods and artificial dyes from American diets — are a core tenet than vaccines.
Axing junk food from federal nutrition programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, was also among the principles most MAHA respondents aligned on. That’s something Kennedy is spearheading, pushing nearly two dozen states to advance food restriction policies since taking power.
Jerold Mande, a Harvard nutritionist and former Obama-era USDA official who supports limiting sugar-sweetened beverages in SNAP, said the food restrictions and the new dietary guidelines for Americans “are tied for top MAHA policy wins so far.”
There's widespread support across the general public for MAHA supporters' top priorities, including removing ultra-processed foods and artificial dyes from American diets and limiting pesticide use.
Even MAHA ideas once considered fringe are gaining ground with everyday Americans, signaling that Kennedy's movement has been successful in reshaping Americans’ views on topics like vaccines.
Eliminating fluoride in water — something Kennedy has pushed for — has 67 percent MAHA support, and 43 percent support from the general public. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has long recommended public drinking water be fluoridized as a safe and effective method to prevent tooth decay, Kennedy has made removing fluoride from water a cornerstone of his MAHA movement, based on some evidence linking high levels of the mineral to health risks like IQ loss in children and arthritis.
Other core MAHA priorities, like reducing “forever chemicals” and microplastics in the environment and restricting junk food purchases within federal nutrition programs, are also supported by a majority of respondents.
Kennedy has upended expectations about how federal regulators operate and used his bully pulpit to bend major trade associations, food companies and vaccine policy to his will.
But that hasn't translated into winning points with his base, which is split on whether he and the Trump administration have done enough to improve Americans’ health.
His mixed approval rating comes as Kennedy has focused on securing voluntary commitments from companies to achieve his policy goals, which could be quickly reversed if Democrats win in 2028.
“[MAHA] is focused on changing individual food choice, or it's focused on getting companies to get the dyes out of their food," Marion Nestle, a food policy expert and professor emerita at New York University, who has spent five decades fighting conflicts of interest in the food system, told POLITICO.
"That's not a system change," Nestle added. “If you want a system change, then you have to have regulations that reduce the allowable limits for chemicals.”
More American adults, as well as 1 in 5 self-identifying MAHA voters, said they're more likely to trust Democrats than Republicans to make America healthier, a trend that could cut into GOP electoral margins in the upcoming midterm elections.
Trump infuriated MAHA activists when, despite campaign promises, he sided with pesticide companies in front of the Supreme Court and in a recent executive order in an effort to please farmers, a longtime GOP constituency. Some congressional Republicans have moved to protect pesticide makers from legal liability in the farm bill, further angering MAHA.
Dave Murphy, a fundraiser for Kennedy’s failed presidential bid, said that even if disgruntled GOP voters are unlikely to cast a ballot for Democrats this November, they might just sit out the midterms.
“If pesticide liability shields are the foundation of the farm bill, the Republican Party is toast,” he predicted.
The MAHA movement is now part of the establishment: Its leaders are in power and its priorities are becoming policy.
But the movement still isn’t sure how to define itself.
While two-thirds of the general public have heard of MAHA, most are fuzzy on what the movement stands for. That confusion extends even to self-identified MAHA supporters, about half of whom said they've heard of and could explain the MAHA movement.
The confusion likely reflects the wide net of priorities Kennedy and other movement leaders have cast, highlighting such a wide range of public health issues that even those who believe in it are not sure what the movement's priorities are.
MAHA’s struggle to define its raison d’être — and internal divisions about which principles to prioritize — could make it more difficult to secure wins from the Trump administration.
“It’s different groups saying they belong to the same thing, but disagreeing with each other internally,” said Lurie. “And we absolutely see that within the movement already.”
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