The Movement: MAHA advocates warn GOP about risks to shaky alliance 

Advocates for the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, agenda are warning that the Republican Party will lose strength unless it shores up support from the health-focused voters credited with helping put President Trump back in the White House.

Yet there are mounting signs that the MAHA-GOP alliance is on shaky ground — and they come as the coalition will be put to the test in the midterms this year. 

A March Politico poll released Monday found that 47 percent of MAHA supporters said that Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have not done enough to make America healthy.

Plus, Trump’s surgeon general nominee, Casey Means, a healthy-living influencer and former physician, is stuck in the Senate thanks in part to skepticism from Republicans who support vaccines. And the MAHA base was furious after the president signed an executive order to boost the herbicide in the weedkiller Roundup.

Alex Clark, a pro-MAHA host of the Turning Point USA podcast “Culture Apothecary,” told me that while MAHA Republicans are “crushing it” on some issues, there “could be definite improvement” in other areas. 

“We have such an opportunity and a gift of this massive coalition of voters that just basically fell out of thin air in 2024. What are we doing to keep them?” Clark said.

The Trump administration and allies of Kennedy, a former Democrat, can point to a number of initiatives that they say are delivering on the MAHA agenda, such as trying to remove artificial dyes from food, emphasizing dietary guidelines that take aim at ultraprocessed foods, and moving to study microplastics in drinking water.

Those initiatives speak to the six issues that self-identified MAHA followers said in the same Politico poll were core MAHA principles: removing ultraprocessed food from diets; removing artificial dyes from foods; increasing physical activity; reducing “forever chemicals” and microplastics; restricting junk food purchases in federal nutrition programs; and limiting pesticide use.

That last point, though, is where Clark sees risks for the MAHA-GOP coalition, due to the Trump executive order seeking to boost glyphosate, an herbicide used in the weedkiller Roundup that the president said was crucial to national security.

“I’ve never seen anger like I saw when that happened,” said Clark, who talks to MAHA-supportive voters every day. “I was very concerned about, OK, what do we need to do to win these people back?”

“The only effort that the administration has made so far when it comes to pesticides, in their eyes, is protecting them,” Clark said.

The incident demonstrated how the ideology behind MAHA is a tricky and sometimes uncomfortable fit in a Republican Party that has long been dominated by calls for less regulation, not more, and GOP districts dominated by the interests of the agricultural industry.

“I would say in the same way that the Democrats are captured by Big Pharma, Republicans are captured in Congress and the Senate by Big Ag and Big Chemical,” Clark said. “So that’s who’s pulling the strings on all of these politicians. And so we’ve got to get this corruption out of there.”

Beyond agricultural issues, MAHA figurehead Kennedy has been challenged by the anti-abortion wing of the Republican Party, which argues he has not done enough to reverse the Biden-era rule that increased the accessibility of abortion drugs by mail.

But members of the MAHA movement argue its issues are key to increasing the GOP base. A poll last year from co/efficient found 4 to 6 percent of former non-Trump voters cited MAHA as a reason to support Republicans in 2024. 

Tony Lyons, the president of the MAHA Action advocacy group, argued in a February memo to Republicans that MAHA is “a once in a generation political gift to the GOP” that can “expand the Republican base and help the GOP win future elections—in the midterms and beyond.”

The memo from Lyons estimated that 14 percent of voters are part of the “winnably middle MAHA” comprising undecided and Democratic-leaning voters who could be receptive to vote for a Republican focused on MAHA issues. On the flip side, it warned of suppressing GOP turnout by losing support from “MAHA Rentals,” an estimated 10 percent of voters who could back the generic Republican in 2026 but risk staying home if the Republican is seen as not doing enough on those issues.

Noticeably absent among MAHA voters’ top issues in both the Politico poll and MAHA Action memo was the issue for which Kennedy is most known: vaccine skepticism and policy changes. 

Kennedy’s changes to federal vaccine policy could actually be a liability for Republican candidates, as my colleague Nathaniel Weixel wrote earlier this year. A December memo from Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward warned that candidates in competitive House races who support eliminating long-standing vaccine requirements “will pay a price in the election.”

The MAHA Action memo said vaccines “need to be addressed carefully and with nuance,” and that “a slim majority of voters are not convinced there are negative health impacts from vaccines.” Clark said that while she sees MAHA gaining ground on the vaccine issue, it will take a lot of time to shift attitudes on vaccines “because the medical dogma has been so severe for so many decades” — adding that work on that should be left more to activists than to the White House. 

Raheem Kassam, editor of The National Pulse and co-owner of MAHA haunt Butterworth’s — which serves fries cooked in beef tallow rather than seed oil — recently wrote about the parallel, but not necessarily overlapping, nature of the MAHA and MAGA movements on the social platform X. 

“The patrons at my Capitol Hill restaurant (Butterworth’s, for those wondering) are predominantly from MAGA and MAHA worlds, but there is very thin overlap,” Kassam said, going on to warn: “The coalition could fracture at any time. I suspect many MAHA voters won’t turn out at the midterms this November, as most are quite ‘crunchy’ and anti-war/conflict/intervention at the same time.”

Clark told me she wants to see “a long-term committed relationship between the GOP and these MAHA voters.”

“If we screw this up, I do not have any sympathy going forward for the Republican Party when they complain about, ‘Well, why do we struggle with female voters?’” Clark said.

Further reading: The Man Holding MAHA Together, by Tom Bartlett in The Atlantic… Has MAHA made a difference? By Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Pope in City Journal…

Welcome to The Movement, a weekly newsletter looking at the influences and debates on the right in Washington. I’m Emily Brooks, House leadership reporter at The Hill. 

Send me tips, comments, and suggestions: ebrooks@thehill.com.

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DHS FUNDING PICKLE THREATENS GOP AGENDA

Congressional Republicans are in a pickle over not only how to get the Department of Homeland Security re-open, but how doing so will affect one of the few remaining opportunities they have to usher through a party-line bill, I wrote with my colleague Sudiksha Kochi yesterday.

President Trump last week endorsed a plan to pass a bipartisan Senate bill funding the bulk of DHS, and then fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol — the two areas being held up by Democrats demanding reforms — through the special budget reconciliation process that circumvents the Democratic Senate filibuster.

There’s debate, however, between the House and the Senate GOPs on the sequence in which to do that, particularly since Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) the week before had slammed that very idea before pivoting to back the Trump-endorsed plan.

But beyond that, the desire for GOP leaders to pass a reconciliation bill to fund ICE and Border Patrol quickly — by June 1, Trump called for — will throw a wrench into the GOP’s plans to use one of their remaining shots at reconciliation for party-line priorities. The budget reconciliation process can be used only once per fiscal year, but they don’t want this bill packed with other items that will take longer to pass.

Reconciliation 2.0 already seemed like a tough lift, given the slim House GOP majority and resistance from swing-seat Republicans to doing anything controversial ahead of the midterms. Now, it looks like reconciliation 2.0 will be ICE/Border Patrol this spring, and any plans for new cuts to tackle fraud and more will be part of a reconciliation 3.0 in the fall — if it comes to fruition at all.

Take it from House Budget Committee Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), who told me in March, before this two-step DHS plan was hatched: “The closer we get to November, the harder it’s going to be to wrangle these wild bulls in there. They just get wilder and less likely to do something significant when you’re getting closer to November.”

ON MY CALENDAR

• Tuesday, April 7: The Federalist Society’s D.C. Young Lawyers Chapter hosts a lunch on the Declaration of Independence featuring Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Duane Benton, U.S. Southern District of Texas Judge Charles Eskridge, and Texas Supreme Court Justice Evan Young. Details here.
• Wednesday, April 15: The Arlington Alexandria Falls Church Young Republicans and the Montgomery County Young Republicans host a Tax Day happy hour. Details here.
• Saturday, April 18 and Tuesday, April 21: Citizen’s Climate Lobby hosts a conservative conference and lobby day aimed at targeting Republicans on climate policy. Details here.
• Wednesday, April 29: Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America hosts a gala that will feature Sen. Ted Cruz.

THREE MORE THINGS

1. Candace Owens and Brett Cooper posed for a smiling Easter photo together posted by fellow Nashville-based podcaster Theo Von — sparking backlash by those outraged at Owens’ conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
   
2. Has Azealia Banks identified the darkest of dark horse 2028 Republicans? The rapper is a fan of Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.). Banks on Friday called for a “Tom Tiffany/Marco Rubio ticket on the GOP” — which is surprising given that few people outside Washington or Wisconsin, where Tiffany is running for governor, know who he is. Banks seems to have been charmed by his performance at a January House Judiciary Committee hearing about fraud in Minnesota, posting a link to one of his clips on Feb. 13 and commenting: “I like Tom Tiffany.” In another post that day, while suggesting Democrats do more to elevate Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) she also said: “I would prefer Tom Tiffany at the GOP. I like him alot hes a professional.”
   
3. After the Trump administration said it’s unable to prevent Biden-era Title X grants to Planned Parenthood, SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser slammed the decision: “This is an inexplicable slap in the face to the pro-life GOP base … SBA’s field team is in the top battlegrounds, working every day to communicate with voters unlikely to vote if they aren’t motivated. This undermines their work, and amounts to political suicide. Enough is enough.”

WHAT I’M READING

• The Atlantic’s Ali Breland: The Intellectual Right Is Mad at the Mess It’s Made
• Politico’s Sophia Cai and Finya Swai: Trump’s Online Brawler Is Trying to Keep MAGA Cool
• Washington Post’s Kadia Goba: How Trump came to re-endorse a Republican congressman he had just ditched
• The Spectator’s Daniel Hummel: Is Pete Hegseth waging a Christian Zionist war?