New Republic • Feb 15, 2026
Last month, with great fanfare, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled the
new dietary guidelines for Americans. The advice was muddled—eat more meat
but not more saturated fat!—and likely shaped by the very industry
influences that Kennedy has vowed to curb. Never mind, though. Its message,
“Eat Real Food,” was a certified hit among the
faithful of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement and much of
the broader public. And Kennedy is making sure that message is heard. During the Super Bowl, a 30-second spot featuring Mike Tyson
crunching on an apple pointed 125 million viewers to the website RealFood.gov.It’s no wonder
the message is working. Today in the United States, Americans spend around $1 trillion each year on medical treatments for diet-related
chronic diseases. Poll after poll shows that Americans overwhelmingly want
policies to improve school lunches and to make fruits and vegetables more
affordable. With MAHA, Kennedy has tapped into the inescapable feeling that
something is wrong, and positioned himself as the only leader strong enough to
do something about it.Once
upon a time, though, healthy food wasn’t a Republican talking point. In fact,
“eat food”—the “real” was implied—has long been a progressive message.
Journalist Michael Pollan coined it in 2007 in his ruthlessly efficient (and still
excellent) nutrition advice: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Even RFK
Jr.’s denigration of ultra-processed foods as “food-like substances”—a term
he used at a “Take Back Your Health” event in Nashville last week—is a Pollanism,
popularized in his 2008 bestselling book In Defense of Food.But
when Michelle Obama tried to translate that advice into policy, via her “Let’s
Move” initiative, she was met by relentless accusations of nanny-statism from
Republicans and their supporters. Rush Limbaugh warned that federal agents were inspecting
lunch boxes and tried to
rebrand Obama’s initiative as “No Child’s Behind Left Alone.” On Fox, Sean
Hannity railed that he didn’t “want to be told how many calories are in my Big
Mac meal.” (Last year, in an interview with Kennedy, Hannity agreed that “we are poisoning ourselves” with ultra-processed foods.)Kennedy
has appropriated more than just the language of the liberal food reformers.
Many of the policies that have made MAHA a political force are long-held
progressive ones—like improving school lunches and limiting ultra-processed
foods—that have been repackaged with a side of rage. As Republicans
ready for the midterms, they see MAHA voters as a critical constituency. Democrats,
meanwhile, are conspicuously quiet, seemingly resigned to let RFK and the Trump
administration run off with their issue. “Democrats should be beating Republicans
over the head with the truth that we will champion cleaning up our food system,
we will champion creating healthier options for families, we will champion the
programs that provide healthy fresh foods to local farmers and schools that the
Trump administration has cut,” said Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, adding
that he has long felt out in the “wilderness” on these issues. “Everybody wants to talk about the cost of health care and
how to make health care more affordable,” he added. “That is good, but nobody
is talking about why the demand for health care is going so high.… There’s a
massive opportunity here to connect the dots between health care and the
sicknesses and the chemicals that are causing our families to be sick.”Trump
himself was the first to see the power of MAHA. After successfully pushing
Kennedy out of the presidential race, Trump offered him a place in his
administration, promising to let him “go wild on health.” Since then, he has suggested several times in
his rambling way that MAHA might be key to avoiding a midterm shellacking. “I
read an article today where they think Bobby is going to be really great for
the Republican Party in the midterms,” President Trump joked
at a Cabinet meeting last month. “So I have to be careful that Bobby likes us.” Polls
have proved Trump’s instincts correct. According to a KFF poll, 38 percent of parents support MAHA, including one-third of independents.
Even more compelling, a poll from Republican research firm co/efficient
estimated that between 4 percent and 6 percent of voters who had not previously
supported Trump backed him in 2024 specifically because of MAHA. Included in
that group were suburban women, young people, and independents—exactly the
voters that Democrats need to win back in the midterms.When
I mentioned this in conversations with Democratic strategists, their responses
were puzzling. Apparently, few people crafting the party’s electoral strategy
were even considering the issue. “A good point,” one said. “You’re making me
think about this,” said another. At a high level, the problem seems to be that
Democrats broadly dismiss MAHA supporters as a bunch of conservative crazies
and anti-vaxxers—which, to be fair, is how they appear on social media.But
a closer read suggests that is not the case. According to polling from progressive
firm Navigator Research, 20 percent of the up-for-grabs electorate is
considered “MAHA curious,” meaning they are skeptical of the U.S. health care
system but not antagonistic toward doctors or traditional medical institutions.
These voters are younger than the general population and include suburban and
non–college educated voters—and, notably, do not support vaccine restrictions. Or
to put it more simply, MAHA is a diverse group of disillusioned voters who want
more control over their health. “I look at MAHA and see a coalition of food
people without a home who are desperate to have someone in a position of power
talking about the problems in our food system,” said Sam Kass, who served as
Michelle Obama’s senior policy adviser for nutrition policy. Trump’s
own pollsters have come to the same conclusion: “Vaccine skepticism stands as
an outlier, rejected by most voters even within the MAHA movement,” according
to a December poll by Fabrizio Ward. In contrast, “food policy, a
key aspect of the MAHA policy agenda, resonates among most voters in these
[congressional swing] districts, across party lines.” In
theory, these voters could be there for the Democratic taking. But Ryan Munce,
president of co/efficient, told me that though voters will reward politicians
who deliver on MAHA’s promises, “we don’t see any real, meaningful policy and
messaging that makes us feel like [Democrats] see this as an opportunity.” Why
are Democrats ceding such a popular issue? There are a few likely reasons.
Democrats are notoriously once-bitten-twice-shy about these sorts of things, and may shrink from
policies—like championing healthy food—that were effectively mocked as elitist
and shouted down 15 years ago. Then, too, they believe they’re already winning on health care, so why talk about ultra-processed
foods or pesticides if it could be construed as support for a crank like
Kennedy? There’s
also the shortsighted tactical thinking that has plagued Democrats since Trump
rode down his golden escalator in 2016. Midterms, one insider told me, are a
referendum on the administration, not the moment to sell a new vision—even one
you’ve had for the last 20 years, apparently. But
New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has shown that populist food policy
can work for leftists. No one was talking about creating publicly funded
grocery stores in New York until he floated the idea. A March 2025 poll from the Climate and Community Institute, a
progressive think tank, revealed that two-thirds of New Yorkers, including 54
percent of Republicans, support public groceries. Mamdani’s
not the only one to see food policy as a ripe opportunity for Democrats. “I
feel like I’m on a constant crusade to engage my colleagues and say you forget
the food issue at your peril,” said Maine Representative Chellie Pingree, an
organic farmer and veteran champion of food reform. “Because you miss a whole
lot of people in your district who you can talk to in a very nonpartisan way
about issues you know people are angry about.”It’s
not too late for Democrats to win over MAHA voters. Two of their leaders—including Vani Hari, a.k.a. the Food Babe, and Zen Honeycutt,
founder of Moms Across America—have been clear that MAHA votes are up for
grabs. “We are not beholden to a political party,” Honeycutt, a former
Democrat turned independent who voted Republican in 2024, told me in an email.
“We moms vote for those who put health and safety first.”The
most obvious opening for Democrats is affordability. The message: “Eat Real
Food” sounds great, but try making it happen at the grocery store. Sixty-nine
percent of respondents in a Pew poll last year said increased costs had made it
harder for them to “eat healthy.”Democrats
I spoke with agreed that food was one piece of a broader affordability pitch,
along with housing and utilities. And to their credit, they have made some
efforts to link food prices to Trump’s tariffs. Last September, the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee launched a website, HouseRepublicanPriceHike.com, to highlight rising prices on staple items like
ground beef, sugar, coffee, and beer. But aside from Booker, Pingree, and a
handful of others, the party has confined its rhetoric on food to pointing out the hypocrisy of Republicans’ calling
for healthier food while simultaneously gutting nutrition-assistance programs
like SNAP and school lunch. Democrats
could be going a lot further. Food and food prices are among those rare
political issues that voters see (and taste) in their everyday lives. Munce,
the GOP strategist, compared food to potholes: “You know if your elected
officials are filling them or not.” A
survey last month by Navigator Research showed that 86 percent of both independents and “persuadable” voters said that the cost of groceries caused
the most strain on their budgets—above both utilities and health insurance.
“Why shy away from talking about something like food that everyone is
interacting with all the time?” said Maryann Cousens, Navigator’s senior
manager of polling and analytics. “It adds to this narrative that politicians
are out of touch.” Another
way liberals could win over some of the MAHA-curious voters would be to promise
to crack down on pesticides. Kennedy’s recent silence on the issue and the
Trump administration’s aggressive support for liability shields for the maker
of the ubiquitous pesticide Roundup—the question is now before the Supreme Court—have infuriated MAHA loyalists who view
curbing pesticides as an urgent matter for food safety. Democratic campaign
promises to rein in the international chemical companies that profit at the expense
of Americans’ health would show that Democrats are up for a fight. “Food is an
issue we haven’t been muscular enough on,” said Celinda Lake, president of
Democratic polling firm Lake Research Partners. “Democrats are seen as too
weak, not too liberal. We need to take on the villains.” There’s
still time before the midterms for Democrats to reclaim the once-progressive messages
that Trump and RFK Jr. have appropriated. A year into Trump’s second term, Republicans
don’t own healthy eating. They certainly don’t own health care. Safe and healthy
food is a winning bipartisan issue, one that Democrats have at least as much
credibility on as Republicans. As
Booker put it, “the MAHA movement is not the Trump administration,” but rather a
growing movement that Donald Trump is trying to exploit: “This is a political
opportunity to let people know who’s really fighting for them and who’s
betraying them.” The
voters are there. The policies are clear. All that’s missing is the will to get
in the fight.This story was
produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting
Network, a nonprofit investigative news organization.