Latest suburban craze could create deciding factor for midterms: GOP pollster

Republican pollster Christine Matthews believes she has discovered a potential game-changing demographic for the 2026 midterms: women who wear weighted vests.

Matthews, president of Bellwether Research, told Politico that a new faction of swing voters has emerged after observing large numbers of women sporting the latest wellness trend in suburban areas.

"The people who swing elections, it always sort of comes down—in particular in midterms—to suburban women," she told Politico. "This, to me, is just a particularly interesting cohort that is a subset of that group that could swing these elections because they're so engaged."

Her national poll of 1,000 women revealed that approximately 1 in 6 women reported using a weighted vest while walking, with this subgroup backing Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by three points in the 2024 presidential election. On a generic congressional ballot, the weighted vest-wearing group split evenly between Republicans and Democrats at 47 percent.

The poll characterizes these women as "under age 45, have kids at home, and live in urban/suburban neighborhoods, well-educated, higher-income and highly engaged with politics." Matthews describes them as having a "modern diet" of information from podcasts, social media, and new media outlets.

"But it doesn't cause them to go down weird fringe rabbit holes," Matthews emphasized. "It encourages them to adopt something like a weighted vest, but not, like, oppose vaccines."

However, potential challenges exist. Trump's "Make America Healthy Again" initiative, led by vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., could potentially alienate these health-conscious swing voters, she said. The poll deck notes that these women "aren't vaccine skeptics or seed oil opponents" but are "likely to be listening to a podcast while walking with a weighted vest."