Rfk Jr. Ally Says Gop Risks Losing His Supporters

Tony Lyons, a top ally of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and principle architect of his Make America Healthy Again coalition, has a message for Republicans ahead of the midterms: Don’t take Kennedy’s followers for granted.

In a new memo obtained by POLITICO, Lyons described the Republican Party as “renting MAHA voters” but not fully committed to “purchase.”

Lyons told the officials running the party’s national, Senate and House campaign arms, as well as Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson, that needed to change.

“We need to convince every Republican to buy into the MAHA movement, just like Trump has,” he wrote in a late Wednesday memo.

Using polling commissioned from Trump’s campaign pollster, Tony Fabrizio, Lyons encouraged Republicans to talk more about five of Kennedy’s policy goals:

— getting Americans to eat real food instead of ultraprocessed,

— making it more affordable to live a healthy life,

— removing toxins from food,

— limiting pesticides in agriculture, and

— addressing “overmedicalization” in children.

If Republicans own these issues, Lyons argued, they can appeal to undecided voters and Democrats who prioritize health issues.

Absent from the list of politically popular MAHA principles is vaccines, despite Kennedy’s well-documented skepticism.

Polling has repeatedly shown that voters overwhelmingly do not support reducing vaccine access or changing the recommendations for longstanding childhood vaccines — including voters who identify as “MAHA.”

Lyons, in his pitch to the Republicans, acknowledged that. The memo included data showing that “breaking up children’s vaccine schedule” was the least popular of 11 policies surveyed.

“Policies related to vaccines and vaccine safety need to be addressed carefully and with nuance,” Lyons outlined in the memo.

Lyons encouraged candidates to frame the discussion as a choice of “medical freedom.” Kennedy has said people should never be required to take a vaccine.

The memo reads like a warning to Republicans that if they don’t put their backs into the MAHA agenda, they could lose MAHA voters’ support and see the Trump-Kennedy coalition of 2024 fracture.

Lyons puts it another way. “It’s not a warning. It’s an offering of a gift,” he told POLITICO in an interview.

The memo is the first step in Lyons’ midterm plan to educate Republicans on how to embrace Kennedy’s goals and keep his supporters in the GOP column.

Lyons, who published Kennedy’s books railing against vaccines and the handling of the Covid pandemic, has made it his mission since Kennedy’s arrival in Washington to establish MAHA as a political force, co-chairing a MAHA PAC and starting the MAHA Institute to forge relationships between advocates and government officials.

“We recognize that some Republicans haven't really bought into the MAHA movement yet. But they're not far from it, and they're open to it, and they need just some education, some tools, and we're going to provide those for them,” Lyons said.

Already, Lyons has generated a role for MAHA in the midterms through the MAHA PAC. The group showed its seriousness when it endorsed GOP Rep. Julia Letlow in a Louisiana primary against incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican and doctor who has criticized Kennedy’s changes to the vaccine schedule and staffing cuts at health agencies.

Trump has also endorsed Letlow.

“We're going to be well-funded. And you know, people who are willing to discuss these things with us, who are willing to get on board with the team that the president has set up, we would really like to have discussions with them, to help them, to support them, to endorse them, to run ads for them, to do mailings for them, to send emails, to send text messages,” Lyons said.

Lyons said his PAC is focused entirely on endorsing Republican candidates, despite the history of Democrats like Michelle Obama pioneering healthy eating and the bipartisan appeal of many of the core MAHA principles.

“If you look at the votes that have been taken, and if you look at the confirmation hearings, you see that it really came down to party line votes, and so it's very hard to imagine that it would make any sense to back a Democratic candidate,” Lyons said.