Poll: Everyone Has A Different Idea Of What Counts As Maha

The “Make America Healthy Again” movement is no monolith.

The grassroots effort helped President Donald Trump get elected in 2024 and powered Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rise to Cabinet secretary — but diverging interests within MAHA dilute its power, potentially making it difficult to coalesce around policy or political candidates in the future, a new analysis of The POLITICO Poll reveals.

The movement is fractured, even as it grows more influential. Some people who support the MAHA movement disagree on some of its major principles. Meanwhile, others who say they’re outside of the movement express views in line with its greatest supporters.

This spring, the poll asked Americans 10 questions on whether they support or oppose four major pillars of MAHA: reducing the number of vaccines Americans receive; cleaning up American diets and increasing exercise; reducing exposure to pesticides or other harmful chemicals; and limiting the influence of pharmaceutical companies.

The results show that the “MAHA” umbrella includes people with opposing ideologies and different politics, even around health.

“The thing is, the MAHA movement is so much more than one issue,” said Jennifer Galardi, senior policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation and co-host of the Restoring American Wellness podcast. “I hear this all the time. It's like, ‘If we don't fix this, nothing else matters,’ and ‘If we don't fix this, then nothing else matters.’ I'm like, okay, it all matters.”

Here is what you need to know about who makes up the MAHA movement.

Vaccines divide everyone, even MAHA

Vaccine skepticism is the largest dividing force among the MAHA movement.

It’s widely considered a core principle of MAHA, and one Kennedy has pursued for decades. It’s true that about two-thirds of those who self-identify as part of the MAHA movement say they support reducing vaccinations among Americans — twice the share of non-MAHA Americans who say the same.

“I think the people who don't support a reduction in vaccines aren't really MAHA,” said Zen Honeycutt, founder and executive director of Moms Across America, a nonprofit and grassroots organization aligned with MAHA principles.

But 14 percent of MAHA adherents say they don’t support reducing vaccines, and another 20 percent remain neutral.

So while more and more Americans are expressing some doubt about vaccine safety in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccine skepticism is still far from mainstream, and highly divisive.

About a third of Americans support all four major pillars of MAHA to some degree, including reducing vaccinations — while roughly the same share express a degree of support for those pillars except reducing vaccinations, the analysis found.

Regardless of the divisions, Kennedy has moved quickly to reduce the number of vaccines Americans receive, including by updating Covid-19 vaccine recommendations to exclude healthy children and pregnant women and overhauling the childhood vaccine schedule. A federal judge has halted the update to the childhood schedule, which would have reduced the number of diseases with universally recommended immunizations from 17 to 11, for now.

Vaccine skeptics tend to be Kennedy's strongest allies: They are twice as likely as those who do not support reducing vaccines to say the secretary and the Trump administration have done enough to make the country healthy.

Overall though, they’re still dissatisfied with the administration’s progress, with about half of vaccine skeptics saying the administration has not done enough.

“Under President Trump and Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, HHS is delivering the most significant public health reforms in a generation,” HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard wrote in a statement.

A White House spokesperson said “MAHA is stronger than ever.”

“Thanks to the President and Secretary Kennedy, the Trump administration has already secured key victories for the MAHA movement — from overhauling the Dietary Guidelines to axing artificial ingredients in our food supply — and continues to work around the clock to deliver more wins for the American people,” White House spokesperson Allison Schuster wrote in a statement.

A lot of people want healthier food and less chemicals

There are also the principles of the MAHA movement that bring Americans together: People want pesticides out of their ingredients and artificial dyes out of their diets.

More than two-thirds of Americans support increasing physical activity, reducing the impact of forever chemicals, limiting pesticide use and removing artificial dyes from foods.

That support was largely bipartisan, with roughly equal shares of people who voted for Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election — a notable contrast with the partisan polarization of reducing vaccination.

But not all food- and chemical-related principles have broad public support. Majorities of Trump voters were interested in ideas like eating more meat and eliminating fluoride from water, compared with minorities of Harris voters.

Broad support for cleansing diets of artificial ingredients has changed how food industry lobbyists operate in Washington, challenging a $1 trillion industry’s influence on Capitol Hill. For his part, Kennedy gave major food companies a directive to remove artificial dyes from their products early on in his tenure, though his ultimatum has yielded mixed results more than one year later.

Some within the movement are impatient with MAHA’s progress on food policy. Health influencer Hilda Gore, known as Holistic Hilda on social media, said that while she remains optimistic, she had hoped Kennedy would eliminate food dyes within a year or two of taking office. Now, she said she understands “it’s like turning a big ship around. It’s going to take so much time.”

MAHA-curious

The MAHA label itself can be controversial — even among people who embrace some of its core pillars.

About 1 in 5 Americans say they support MAHA but don't identify as part of the movement. Another 8 percent say they support each of the four tenets included in The POLITICO Poll to some degree — reducing vaccinations, cleaning up American diets and increasing exercise, reducing chemical exposure, and limiting the influence of pharmaceutical companies — but neither identify with the movement nor support it.

Most of the group that supports the MAHA movement but say they are not part of it voted for Trump in 2024. And just as this group is not quite MAHA, most say they are not quite “MAGA” either. Still, they tend to trust Republicans over Democrats to make America healthier.

“I think it's a mistake to see MAHA as a Republican movement. It's a health movement,” said Del Bigtree, who served as the communications director for Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign. He added: “I do think in some ways the movement does get hurt by those that say ‘MAHA means MAGA.’”

Especially with the MAHA skeptics, but also across all respondents, Kennedy’s political reach is relatively mild. Roughly half adults in the secretary’s own movement said he had no influence — or even a negative one — over past or future votes.

With just four months to go until the 2026 midterms, the political organizations behind MAHA have publicly endorsed just one candidate in a battleground House district. But Kennedy has been showing up in competitive districts, making visits to health facilities and dairy farms.

As it stands, less than half of the entire MAHA contingent is pleased with the Trump administration's progress — and roughly 40 percent said they would not vote for a Republican candidate if the midterms were held tomorrow.

“Unfortunately, what I'm hearing is that there are a lot of people who are just not going to vote,” Honeycutt said.