Flashback to 2024: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had just ended his presidential run and pledged his support to Donald Trump. Tagging along with him were some of the most potent, passionate, uncategorizable, and quirky independent voters ever to grace the stage of American politics, soon be known as “MAHA moms.”
The largely female followers of this Make America Healthy Again movement were obsessed with toxicity—in food, water, skin products, and soil. Although they’d followed Kennedy to the GOP, they were demanding the government do more to regulate what ends up in our food and in our fields, sounding a lot like progressives, but these are strange times.
They found common cause in protesting glyphosate, the main ingredient in the weed killer Roundup. Which is where the shit hit the fan—because Trump leaned hard on the opposite foot, issuing an executive order to up production of the controversial herbicide and urging the Supreme Court to take up a case that would ultimately shield glyphosate manufacturers from liability. Meanwhile, protein, testosterone, and erectile dysfunction emerged as priorities in Kennedy’s Health and Human Services Department. As Jill Filipovic writes in the latest issue of Mother Jones, the MAHA moms may have built the movement, but now they’re being eclipsed by MAGA bros.
These are just some of the signs that the MAHA–MAGA alliance may be wearing thin—signs we explore with the Food & Environment Reporting Network in a new joint series, “MAHA and the Midterms.” In addition to Filipovic’s story, we’ve done a piece on Zach Lahn, a MAHA-backed Republican Iowa gubernatorial candidate who’s been talking a big game about regulating Big Ag. This week, we’ll profile a California Democratic lawmaker chipping away at many of the food regulations that MAHA moms have yearned for and that Kennedy has failed to deliver on.
And we’ll have more to come ahead of the midterms, the results of which should help answer some pressing questions: Is MAHA still a force? Will MAHA moms ditch the GOP? Can Democrats reclaim what used to be signature issues for their party and win back some swing voters along the way? Stay tuned.
—Maddie Oatman
