A “key pocket” of Republican voters is furious with GOP leaders as the party is “already facing headwinds” heading into the midterms, and many are now threatening to buck the Republicans altogether at the voting booth next month, The Hill reported Friday.
Those voters are followers of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, or MAHA, many of whom feel betrayed by Republican lawmakers who have backed a legislative provision that would delay a deadline for pesticide safety reviews.
“Do we vote for someone who supports vaccine mandates… or do we vote for someone who is actively supporting pesticides and poison in our foods that our babies and children eat on a daily basis?” asked Zen Honeycutt, the founder of Moms Across America, The Hill reported.
“It’s an impossible decision, and this is why many of our moms are saying they’re going to stay home, or vote independent, write somebody in.”
MAHA leaders were also frustrated with a recent MAHA summit in which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was spotted mingling “with executives from drug developers, artificial intelligence companies, insurers and retailers like Walmart.”
Robert Malone, who previously served as the vice chair of Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine advisory committee, declared in a scathing write-up that the recent MAHA summit was a “betrayal of what MAHA claimed to stand for.”
“The people who built this movement were promised an end to this kind of Washington influence-peddling, not a MAHA-branded version of it,” Malone wrote.
“Meanwhile, many of the physicians, scientists, patients, parents, farmers and activists who built this movement are barely represented. This is not the reform we fought for. It is the system we fought against.”
MAHA frustrations have already turned into direct calls to action. Kelly Ryerson, a prominent MAHA activist, called on MAHA-aligned voters to ditch Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) in his bid for reelection and to instead consider backing his Democratic opponent.
“[MAHA- and Kennedy-aligned voters] should not be supporting Marshall and I think they should vote for the Democrat,” Ryerson said, The Hill reported.