Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democrat who lives on a 200-acre organic farm in Maine, regularly meets with activists associated with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement. She spoke at a MAHA rally they held last week in front of the Supreme Court and wrote an op-ed last month with a MAHA leader.
Pingree thinks other Democrats should be more like her.
“I’ve been hounding our leadership about this,” she told NOTUS.
Most Democrats in Washington, repulsed by Kennedy’s vaccine changes, have been deeply reluctant to embrace the MAHA movement. Pingree insists the party is missing an opportunity to win over more voters.
Trending
The right approach, she said, is finding ways to ally with the parts of Kennedy’s agenda they can support. She told NOTUS she is preparing to present polling to House Democrats at an upcoming meeting on how voters feel about food and pesticide regulations.
Democrats are still the party more prone toward federal regulation of food, air and water, even as Kennedy and his MAHA supporters try to claim those ideas for the Trump administration. Blue states — like some red ones — have worked to restrict food additives and define ultra-processed food.
And in the MAHA movement’s first big legislative test last week, it was Democrats who came through to defeat protections for Roundup maker Bayer and other pesticide companies in a sweeping farm bill. Roughly two-thirds of House Republicans voted against the MAHA priority.
Still, many Democrats can’t shake the vaccine skepticism of Kennedy and some MAHA followers — which Kennedy is acting on through the Department of Health and Human Services.
“[Kennedy] should just resign from his position. He is fundamentally a threat to the public health in our country,” Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said at a Politico summit last month.
Pingree recounted a conversation in her office last year with Zen Honeycutt, the founder of the group Moms Across America, who asked Pingree whether Democrats, if they ever controlled Congress, would support food regulation.
“I said, ‘Wow,’” Pingree said. “That shows how we have really missed the opportunity if you don’t even know if Democrats care about these things.”
Democrats’ intraparty divide over how to navigate the MAHA movement is poised to become louder in coming months as they eye their prospects of taking back control of the House after November.
Democrats have overwhelmingly focused their midterm messaging on health care affordability, which a KFF poll released Wednesday found is something that voters who identify as MAHA supporters care about. MAHA voters were more likely to say lowering health care costs was their top concern rather than improving food safety. The open question is whether Democrats will make an explicit outreach to Kennedy’s base.
Sen. Cory Booker is among the Democrats who is comfortable standing side by side with MAHA activists. The New Jersey Democrat, who is on the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, last year introduced legislation expanding the ability to sue pesticide companies for health harms that was endorsed by several MAHA leaders.
“This is not about political triangulation,” Booker told reporters last week after speaking at the MAHA rally to protest a court case involving Bayer and lawsuits alleging it failed to warn Roundup users of cancer risks. “It’s about trying to reveal the stunning facts about our food system most Americans don’t know.”
Some Democrats are invoking MAHA without fully embracing it. Rep. Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat who has worked on food policy for decades, told the House Agriculture Committee’s chair, Rep. Glenn Thompson, during the fight over the pesticide language that it was a “betrayal to MAHA.”
“I don’t want people just saying, ‘Make America healthy again,’ I want people to actually do things to make America healthy again,” McGovern said on a March 20 episode of the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?”
McGovern had advocated for stripping the pesticide language from the farm bill. The scrapped provisions would have limited consumer lawsuits against makers for inadequately disclosing health risks and allowed the federal government to preempt state law requiring labeling for health risks. It’s unclear whether a Senate version will include the language.
Neither McGovern nor Pingree — nor any other House Democrats — have joined the new Make America Healthy Again Caucus in the House. Of the caucus’ 15 Republican members, seven voted with the majority of the House GOP in favor of keeping the pro-pesticide language in the farm bill.
It may be politically easier for Democrats to care about food regulations — they collect just half the donations the agricultural industry gives to Republicans. And they have a chance now to play off the fury President Donald Trump engendered among MAHA activists when he ordered the mass production of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, earlier this year citing national security concerns.
And now, leading MAHA activists are irate at some Republicans after last week’s pesticides vote.
Conservative podcaster Alex Clark, Kelly Ryerson, who goes by the online moniker “Glyphosate Girl,” and Alexandra Muñoz, a toxicologist and MAHA activist, visited congressional offices to advocate for stripping legal protections for pesticide makers.
Clark said Rep. Ralph Norman promised he’d vote to strike the pesticide-friendly legislation from the farm bill. Two days later, the South Carolina Republican did the opposite, voting with the majority of his GOP colleagues to protect pesticide makers from lawsuits.
“He just straight up lied to us,” Clark told NOTUS.
After the vote, Clark posted on X a “MAHA traitor” list of their names. Norman’s office declined to comment on the meeting.
That anger has given Democrats an even bigger opening.
“There are a lot of people who … were convinced by Robert Kennedy and others that a Trump administration would be better for health and wellness but now the mask has come off,” Rep. Seth Magaziner, a Rhode Island Democrat, said in a social media post after the farm bill fight.
MAHA’s biggest influencers say they’re willing to work with anyone who is aligned with their priorities. But just as Democrats are wary of Kennedy’s followers, MAHA true believers are giving little credit to Democrats on the pesticide win.
“I would like to see Democrats set aside their ire of Kennedy,” said Honeycutt, who said she has been talking to Democratic groups and congressional offices, including staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. “It’s just ridiculous the politics that are happening.”
Clark said Democrats “aren’t even trying” — although she acknowledged she doesn’t want them to because “I’m a conservative and I want us to keep these voters.”
“If I were advising Democrats, I would be like, ‘Are you guys out of your mind?’” she said. “You could sweep in and take hundreds of thousands of votes from these moms and it’s like you’re holding your nose and turning the other way.”
Author
