The Short, Unhappy Marriage Of Maha And The Gop

Paula Obeid raced through Costco on a Wednesday afternoon in October, gathering supplies for the rally she was organizing that night in Scottsdale: sauerkraut, organic beef jerky, plastic plates without decorative trims that could contain harmful chemicals. “We got food to honor Bobby,” Obeid joked, referring to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Obeid, who used to identify as a Democrat, is a leading grassroots organizer for Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement in Arizona. Weeks before election day, she put together a rally in the state’s most populous metro area to boost the prospects of Andy Biggs, the Republican candidate for governor, and other vocal supporters of MAHA.

The movement’s ethos is straightforward: Address the chronic illness epidemic in the U.S. through food, agricultural and medical reform. The solutions, less so, with proposals ranging from ending vaccination requirements in schools to allowing raw milk sales at restaurants. What the movement can agree on, though, is a deep suspicion of the institutions and corporations shaping Americans’ health and a conviction that individual citizens should have more control over it.

The first glimpse of MAHA’s political potential came on the 2024 campaign trail, where Kennedy — the environmental lawyer and vaccine skeptic with the famous surname and a curiously premodern diet — threw his weight behind Trump with an unexpected endorsement. The former Democrat appeared to galvanize a broad, health-focused, anti-establishment constituency and give it a home within the Republican Party. After Trump’s victory, Kennedy confidant Tony Lyons formed a web of nonprofits and political action committees to give that eclectic group of mismatched interests electoral power. Nine months ago, he told Republican Party officials that it would “expand the Republican base and help the GOP win future elections — in the midterms and beyond.”

“You couldn’t dream of this,” Obeid said of Kennedy’s role as health secretary as she prepared to load her grocery haul into a car she called the Bliss Mobile. Obeid stayed up all night making the website for her MAHA nonprofit after Kennedy joined forces with Trump in 2024.

Scottsdale is fertile ground for MAHA. The number of pharmacies for custom, non-FDA-approved drugs in the city rivals CVS locations, and vaccine exemption rates for kindergarteners in the wider county are among the highest in the state. Seed-oil-free restaurants have also begun to crop up — there’s one called The Ends that is frequented by members of Turning Point USA and Kennedy advisers. And Obeid’s rally took place at Envita Medical Centers, an alternative treatment facility for patients with cancer and other chronic conditions. MAHA is the language people speak here, making it an obvious place for the Republican gubernatorial nominee to rally the adherents weeks before the election.

Except Biggs didn’t show up. Instead, he joined Trump at a rally 225 miles away, in Bullhead City, to shore up Republican support in the face of a coming Democratic wave. The Trump rally drew more than 1,000 voters geared up in Arizona state flags, sparkling red jackets and the famed attendee in his brick-wall-patterned suit. When Biggs entered to AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” he pumped his fist in the air as attendees cheered and whistled along. “We need help to win this. This is a very close race,” Biggs said in his rally speech. It included no mention of the MAHA agenda.

Back in Scottsdale, about 100 attendees were scattered among empty chairs inside a white tent in a parking lot. A live band with local kids played instruments. Biggs called in — someone held a cellphone to the mic so he could give his stump speech.

Attendees said they didn’t mind Biggs going to the Trump rally, but the mood was hardly celebratory. “I’ll probably vote, but I’m not very enthusiastic,” said John Richardson, founder of a nonprofit promoting alternative treatments for cancer who has long challenged vaccine mandates. “I am very discouraged about the top-level people that I thought were going to get things done.”

Scottsdale showed how far MAHA had traveled culturally, from its tallow-forward restaurants to alternative-medicine clinics, but how little of that reach had translated into political momentum by the midterm elections, even within Trump’s own coalition.

Despite massive early donations from Timothy Mellon and Kennedy’s former running mate Nicole Shanahan to the movement’s leading campaign vehicle — and promises from Lyons that MAHA PAC would donate $100 million to aligned Republicans — the group struggled to raise money and distribute it to candidates. Federal filings show Lyons-led committees have spent under $3.5 million on its candidates, with just over $1.2 million in competitive congressional races. Not a dollar went to support Biggs, even though he had MAHA PAC’s endorsement. The group ended up canceling two of the three rallies on an October campaign tour it had announced to help candidates.

By Election Day, many activists were accusing the Trump administration of betrayal. The presidential candidate who championed MAHA issues from his campaign podium in 2024 had not gone far enough on those policies as president, in some cases even taking them in the opposite direction, most notably by backing pesticide producer Bayer before the Supreme Court as it fought against allegations that its product causes cancer. The policy decisions were devastating to MAHA supporters who wanted to see pesticides eliminated from the food system.

“What we saw in 2024 is that MAHA issues do drive people to the ballot box. The problem is that if you drop the ball on implementing them, MAHA enthusiasts lose their enthusiasm,” said Patrick Sullivan, a MAHA supporter and co-founder of Firefly Organic Coffee and Market in Scottsdale, where patrons can order pumpkin lattes infused with collagen and topped off with raw milk.

Credited with helping to propel Trump to victory in 2024, and expected to sweep into Washington with him, MAHA issues were priorities in few federal races, and related PACs never became the kind of political money machine that could help elect movement-friendly lawmakers.

“The MAHA story is a case study and a proof point of the overarching story of the midterms, which is the rug pull,” said Calley Means, a Kennedy ally who served as a senior adviser in the Department of Health and Human Services until abruptly resigning shortly before the election and airing sharp criticism of the White House. “Voters felt rug-pulled on almost every part of the Republican agenda. MAHA is one proof point in that.”

Lyons’ early decision to align MAHA as a cultural movement with the GOP as a political party proved fateful in an election year that saw historic losses for Republicans. In the end, MAHA groups endorsed 97 candidates across federal and state races, and of the 21 endorsed candidates in federal races, 12 lost and eight won, while one race remained undeclared at press time, according to a POLITICO analysis. (In state races, 42 lost while 32 won, including two who were uncontested, with two undeclared.) The groups’ most high-profile win was Louisiana Senator-elect Julia Letlow, who received MAHA PAC’s backing to win her primary but prevailed only narrowly in the general election — winning by just 1.76 percentage points in a historically deep-red state.

Even before the votes were counted, figures across the MAHA ecosystem — from Kennedy confidants to the grassroots activists — were declaring the movement’s 2026 experiment in building a reliable Republican voting bloc a disappointment. Now, they’re looking for what’s next.

“The PAC has chosen to align themselves politically in partisanship. … I hope they get the wake-up call that they needed,” said Tiffany Cianci, a Maryland-based influencer who did volunteer work for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. This October, Cianci released a scorecardthat itemized MAHA-related promises made by Trump in 2024; of 42, she calculated that just 5 were “partially kept,” zero fully. “I hope every single politician is reminded that they didn’t buy these voters, they rented them. And the voters have said they’re moving.”

White House spokesperson Allison Schuster defended the Trump administration’s actions on MAHA, saying Trump was committed to ensuring “this powerful movement leaves a lasting impact.”

“The Trump Administration has already secured extensive victories for the MAHA Agenda, including overhauling the dietary guidelines for Americans, axing artificial ingredients in our food supply, and investing in regenerative farming,” Schuster said. ”The MAHA coalition has never been stronger or more empowered, and President Trump and Secretary Kennedy will continue to take decisive action to deliver more wins for the American people.”

One person close to the White House, granted anonymity to candidly describe why MAHA had not been an election-year focus, said the movement’s concerns did not align with voters’ priorities. “For this particular election cycle, it’s not even in the top 10,” the person said. “It might be in the top 10 to some people, but not to the masses.”

In early 2026, Lyons prepared a memo to the chair of the Republican National Committee, along with the lawmakers who head the party’s congressional campaign arms, arguing that the MAHA movement is a “once-in-a-generation political gift to the GOP.”

Lyons — a self-confident and chatty 63-year-old New Yorker who prides himself on being a contrarian — was relatively new to electoral politics. As the founder of Skyhorse Publishing, he built a reputation for publishing controversial books; Kennedy was a frequent Skyhorse author, releasing books like The Real Anthony Fauci, which attacks Fauci’s leadership during the HIV epidemic and Covid-19. He later co-founded a PAC to support the presidential bid of Kennedy, who had become a close friend and took the issues of vaccine safety and autism seriously — a personal matter for Lyons, since he describes his autistic adult daughter as vaccine-injured. (Researchers have repeatedly found that there is no link between vaccines and autism.)

After Kennedy abandoned his 2024 campaign, Lyons transformed the committee into MAHA PAC, billed as the political arm of the MAHA movement, just as its agenda was gaining ground in the Republican Party’s governing apparatus. Kennedy’s nomination as health secretary drew a show of force from activists, with supporters visiting the offices of 77 different senators, urging them to approve his confirmation. Republican lawmakers eager to harness Kennedy’s appeal began organizing around his agenda, establishing MAHA caucuses in both the House and Senate. 

The enthusiasm gave Lyons good reason to be confident when he laid out a plan to make MAHA an election-year force. Over Trump’s first year in office, Kennedy had stocked the Health department with like-minded allies, placing more political appointees than any other cabinet-level agency while cutting career staffing to multidecade lows.

Policy wins stacked up over 2025, as well. Within months of being sworn in, Kennedy established a MAHA commission to investigate the root causes of chronic disease afflicting American children. The commission drafted two reports released with the White House’s imprimatur, infuriating corporate interests by attributing rising rates of chronic disease to specific environmental toxins, vaccines and pesticides. Kennedy announced that large food producers would voluntarily remove artificial dyes from their products. Dozens of states, including those led by Democrats, had proposed plans to limit soda and candy in the nation’s largest anti-hunger program, a trend Kennedy would later call one of his biggest achievements. By fall, the Health Department had overhauled federal vaccine guidance, including for Covid-19, though the efforts have been halted by lawsuits.

“We were rocking and rolling early on,” said a former administration official who worked on MAHA policy, granted anonymity to candidly describe the progress of the movement.

Kennedy’s biggest win came at the beginning of 2026,redesigning the food pyramid to reflect a paleo-style appetite for meat and fats. Scientists criticized the guidelines for their emphasis on red meat and full-fat dairy, but it felt like the whole world was watching as Mike Tyson urged people to “eat real food” in a Super Bowl ad aired in February by MAHA Center, one of the Lyons-led nonprofits.

Three days later, Lyons sent his memo to Republican Party leaders, promising a plan to translate that cultural and policymaking momentum into durable political power, at every level, from statehouses to Congress. Lyons saw the route running solely through the Republican Party, particularly since the Democratic leaders had already rejected Kennedy when he launched a primary challenge to President Joe Biden.

The political arm of MAHA “aligned themselves [with Republicans] because Secretary Kennedy endorsed President Trump and dropped out of the election,” said Jeff Hutt, who worked on Kennedy’s campaign. “I think that was part of it — that the Republican Party would embrace MAHA,” Hutt added, and that the PAC “would be able to come in and would be able to be that political arm of that caucus.”

In his memo, Lyons showcased research he had commissioned from Trump’s top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, that showed the electoral benefits of Republicans promoting a MAHA agenda. Increased messaging around removing harmful toxins from food or preventing overmedication of kids would help win over 14% of voters who were Democratic or undecided and prioritized health issues, Fabrizio’s polling found. The research also suggested that a focus on MAHA from Republican candidates could boost turnout that would benefit the party across the board.

By March of 2026, a month after the memo to party officials, Lyons and his allies promised to spend $100 million to help elect Republicans. “The midterms are existential for the MAHA movement,” Lyons told the Daily Signal, a conservative news site. “We need Secretary Kennedy to complete the mission.”

The group set its sights on ousting Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana gastroenterologist who chaired the Senate’s health committee. Cassidy, a Republican, had helped to secure Kennedy’s confirmation after openly wrestling with whether to support him over differences on vaccines. But when Kennedy stacked a key Centers for Disease Control advisory panel with vaccine skeptics, Cassidy turned on the secretary, successfully blocking the nomination of Calley Means’ sister, wellness entrepreneur and nonpracticing doctor Casey Means, for surgeon general.

The senator was an “existential threat to every child in America” who “must be stopped,” Lyons said after Casey Means’ nomination collapsed.

MAHA PAC endorsed Cassidy’s primary opponent, Julia Letlow, and promised to spend $1 million on her behalf. The first-term congressmember wasn’t perfect on the cause’s issues — she had previously urged people to get vaccinated during the pandemic, in which her then-incoming congressman husband died of Covid-19 — but she already had Trump’s endorsement and was primed to exploit right-wing anger over Cassidy’s support for Trump’s impeachment after the January 6 riots.

Letlow enthusiastically embraced MAHA PAC’s support in her three-way primary, promising to take up its chronic-disease agenda and attacking Cassidy over his role in the Casey Means nomination. Cassidy finished outside of the top two, and Letlow moved to the general election. Lyons touted the defeat of a powerful committee chair as a victory for his movement, even though it ultimately spent only about 70% of its pledged $1 million on digital ads, mailers and texts opposing Cassidy and supporting Letlow, according to federal filings.

“This is a powerful indication that MAHA is a gift to the Republican Party,” Lyons saidin May, after Cassidy’s loss. “Candidates who accept that gift will be rewarded in the midterms.”

Lyons already had an archetypal MAHA candidate in mind: a political outsider with conservative beliefs who lives and breathes the MAHA lifestyle. July of 2025, he’d met Zach Lahn, a 40-year-old entrepreneur with staunchly conservative views on abortion and immigration who had been involved in Republican politics before co-founding a Kansas private school and reviving his family farm in Belle Plaine, Iowa. Lahn announced a bid for Iowa’s governorship in November 2025 with encouragement from Kennedy, Calley Means and Lyons, including pledges of support from the movement’s political fundraising arm.

Even though he had Kennedy’s support, Lahn did not initially land Trump’s endorsement. Instead, he had to defeat Trump’s pick, a two-decade officeholder backed by Republican officials and party committees, to win the June primary. He credited MAHA — the loudest applause Lahn’s campaign speeches drew was in response to his statement that he was the first candidate ever endorsed by the MAHA PAC.

Lahn’s win, Lyons said after the Iowan’s primary victory, was “a defining moment for the MAHA movement.”

Despite early electoral wins, fault lines were opening up within the movement, as Trump was forced to choose between the activists his party hoped to draw into Republican politics and established lobbying forces representing the chemical and agricultural industries. MAHA activists were about to learn whether Republicans were really willing to forsake their longtime allies for a grassroots movement demanding major reforms.

In February 2026, the White House issued an executive order to boost domestic production of glyphosate, the key ingredient in a weedkiller that Kennedy had spent decades demonizing as a dangerous toxin. The administration also sided with Bayer, which owns Roundup-maker Monsanto, before the Supreme Court. Kennedy registered his disappointment with the policies, but ultimately defended them as necessary tools for farmers to keep their businesses intact.

In an interview with popular podcaster Joe Rogan after the election, Means said Kennedy was kept out of policy decision-making. “Bobby was put in a really tough place,” he said.

Some of Kennedy’s most loyal backers recoiled, calling Trump’s decision to side with chemical industry lobbyists over consumers a “betrayal” and a “devastating blow.” MAHA influencers Kelly Ryerson and Alex Clark, along with another Kennedy ally, Vani Hari, organized a protest on the Supreme Court steps in April, directly calling out the Trump administration for its support in a case that could grant the pesticide company immunity against lawsuits alleging the weedkiller was linked to cancer.

The Trump administration defended its policy decisions to protect glyphosate as necessary for national security — both because elemental phosphorus, the key component in glyphosate, is also used in weapons systems, and because the food system is reliant on pesticides.

“President Trump pledged to both protect our country and Make America Healthy Again, and this Administration will never compromise on either priority,” said a White House official, granted anonymity to describe internal decision-making.

Activists who had been lured into electoral politics by Kennedy’s example felt ignored by the movement’s political leadership when they tried to get more involved.

Stephanie Stock, the president of Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom, which opposes vaccine mandates, launched a campaign for the Ohio State House on promises to protect medical freedom. Endorsed by MAHA Institute, another nonprofit under Lyons, Stock received no money from MAHA groups. Outraised tenfold by her Republican opponent, Stock lost her primary in May. She and other MAHA-endorsed candidates like her have said financial backing from the movement would have improved their prospects.

“Nobody’s coming to help us,” Stock said. “We’re on our own.”

Despite Lyons’ vows of financial support, MAHA PAC was a threadbare operation far from the $100 million political machine he had promised. It received large donations from a handful of businesses with interests before the Health Department: a compounding pharmacy with government contracts, a producer of kratom beverages and an investment firm with stakes in biotech companies.

But MAHA PAC spent only just over $1 million on federal races by the end of October, with a little more than $200,000 going to candidates in competitive House races. A separate new PAC also led by Lyons, MAHA Action PAC, also donated $1 million to Ken Paxton’s bid for the U.S. Senate in Texas. The apparatus, meanwhile, spent $155,000 over the course of the election cycle at the Republican haunt Ned’s, a private club in Washington. The party’s candidates appeared to reciprocate the lack of interest: just 0.2% of their ads in House and Senate races mentioned MAHA, according to an analysis from Wesleyan.

"It's pathetic," said MAHA influencer Clark, who also hosts a podcast produced by Turning Point USA. Clark said Lyons had waited until October to discuss election strategy with her. "What have we been doing? It's like everyone's asleep at the wheel."

Means pointed fingers at the White House and its political apparatus, which he said didn’t consider MAHA a priority. “Everything in the political strategy was based on getting enough money for the midterms, not actually doing the things that would then energize voters enough,” he told Rogan.

Even as it was having a meager impact on the election season, Lyons was attempting to cement the movement’s place in Trump’s Washington. His second-annual MAHA summit, a gathering of health and industry leaders hosted by a nonprofit Lyons runs, was held in September in a Waldorf-Astoria ballroom with crystal chandeliers and gold-trimmed mirrors. Attendees were handed swag bags with beef tallow potato chips that retail for $14.99, mouth strips for “sleep-maxxing,” a $25 coupon for a seed-oil-free restaurant and Kennedy’s biography. The program, which featured industry executives in prominent speaking spots and a long list of corporate sponsors including Anthropic, Walmart and OpenAI, left many grassroots activists aghast. (The highest level of sponsorship, quoted at $300,000 for some sponsors, gave access to a group dinner with Kennedy and Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.) MAHA supporters could guarantee an invite to the summit if they paid $6,000 a year, the highest tiered subscription for MAHA Action, one of Lyons’ nonprofits. A movement built around distrust of corporate influence appeared to have been subsumed by the very interests it had challenged, almost mocking the anti-establishment voters Republicans had hoped MAHA would bring into their coalition.

“A lot of the things in D.C. are just not reachable for families like mine,” said April Robinson, a MAHA supporter in California, who was part of her local grassroots effort during Kennedy’s presidential run. “They need more boots on the ground. They need to be serving more of the MAHA moms and the people that got them there.”

In late October, Lahn was invited to a rally in Des Moines organized by MAHA PAC. With dwindling financial resources, Lyons’ group had organized a three-stop tour to promote statewide Republican candidates. But in the run-up to the events, one rally in Texas and another in Michigan were both scratched. Lyons and his affiliated MAHA groups did not respond to a request for comment about strategy.

The tour nevertheless made it to Iowa, which had become unexpectedly welcoming turf for Lahn’s message. Despite the presence of many of the large farming interests with products and practices targeted by MAHA policies, voters were expressing anger about poor drinking water quality and rising cancer rates. (Notably the yard signs that sprouted across Des Moines this year demanding clean water made no mention of MAHA.) Lahn, who runs a family farm that is now mostly organic and reliant on regenerative farming methods, talked on the campaign trail about attending funerals for Iowans who died of cancer in their 60s when their parents lived decades longer — early deaths he attributed to pesticides.

“There’s been this effort within the Republican Party to not discuss it,” said Lahn. “I just didn’t care.”

Yet Lahn struggled to expand his reach beyond the GOP. Local-foods activist Tommy Hexter, a one-time Democratic state legislative candidate, was won over by Lahn’s rhetoric on MAHA issues in 2025. He began informally advising Lahn, helping to organize two campaign events with regenerative farmers. But as the election drew near, Lahn declined to get more specific on his commitments on local food and clean water. When Lahn appeared with Trump at two Iowa rallies, Hexter was stunned: Lahn leaned in on the “culture war” issues that animate the Republican base, and appeared to pull away from the platform that had so excited Hexter. A little over a week before the election, Hexter posted on Facebook he was planning to switch his vote to Lahn’s opponent, Democratic state auditor Rob Sand. At the MAHA rally in October, hundreds of people donned forest green “Make America Healthy Again” hats, buttons and posters, filling a cavernous room outside Des Moines to hear Lahn and Kennedy speak. They were greeted with free Steak 'n Shake, the fast-food chain that prides itself on seed-oil-free french fries and grass-fed burgers, and a table offering locally sourced raw milk, Swiss cheese and cured meats, including beef bacon. Other tables promoted Turning Point USA, a conservative youth group founded by Charlie Kirk.

There’s a reason why Lyons had taken to calling Lahn a “MAHA dream candidate”: The rally showed how much common ground Lahn could assemble.

“I think part of what I’ve been able to do is just bring this back to the foundational principles of being a conservative,” Lahn said in an interview. “I’m just, I believe, reminding Republicans that we are here to make life better for the people who live in our state, and that far too often corporate giants, special interests, they get way too much control in both parties.”

Lyons and Lahn, however, would quickly learn how hard it is to hold that coalition together.

Lyons was watching the rally from the back of the crowd when he was approached by Jon Connors, a man who told him he’d campaigned for Kennedy in Oklahoma during the 2024 presidential race; he was an early fan of the former Democrat because of his passion for regenerative agriculture and, eventually, his strong aversion to the masking and vaccine rules during the pandemic, which Connors fervently shared.

But then he delivered the message he’d come to tell Lyons: The glyphosate executive order felt like a “big fuck you.”

“We voted for you, we got you in there. You betrayed us,” he said.

With quivering hands, Connors pointed to his bright blue shirt bearing the name of Chris Jones, a water quality researcher running as a Democrat to be Iowa’s agriculture secretary — a man he asked Lyons to endorse. Connors attributed his tremor to Parkinson’s Disease, a condition he was diagnosed with at age 40, years after a cross-country cycling trip to raise awareness for regenerative agriculture that involved frequently setting up camp on farm soil that was bathed in herbicides like Paraquat. Studies link exposure to Paraquat with an increased chance of getting the disease.

Connors told Lyons he wanted to see the movement “step up” on the issues, not adhere to partisanship — and while he loved Kennedy, he wished “he had a little more balls when it came to Trump.” He wasn’t sure if he would cast his vote for Lahn.

The response from Lyons was cool — calm against Connors’ anger but nonetheless defensive. Lyons stood up for Lahn, volleying responses to Connors’ criticisms of the candidate. He also defended the Trump administration’s stance on the glyphosate policy.

“If your view of politics and of Bobby Kennedy and of the president or the governor is that you get into a position of power and you just change everything,” Lyons said, “then you’ll always be disappointed with every politician for your whole life.”

Two weeks later, Lahn lost his race.

The day after the election, Lahn told supporters on a MAHA call hosted by Lyons that MAHA has permanently elevated “issues of corruption and corporate capture” and “changed the narrative in Republican Party politics in the state completely.”

“You know, we brought these issues up, and now I just don't believe by any stretch of the imagination that they can be ignored anymore,” Lahn said.

MAHA wasn’t dead. But it was going to change.

“So, what do we do now? I say we build,” said Lyons. “We partner with absolutely everyone who’s willing to partner with us.”

Even as Lyons argued that “MAHA is here to stay,” he was conceding that one big gamble he had made over the course of the 2026 election cycle had not paid off. Choosing to define MAHA as a partisan movement and embedding it in the Republican Party ecosystem had done little to commit the Trump administration to its policy priorities.

Frustration among MAHA’s most prominent figures is now spilling into public view: Means made his most pointed public criticism of the administration on Rogan’s podcast Friday, though he took care not to criticize the president directly. “The simple reality and why I left is that there is a very concentrated group of people in the Trump administration that are antagonistic to what people voted for,” Means said.

Democrats have begun sniffing around the MAHA coalition. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, Maine Governor-elect Chellie Pingree and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker have continued or intensified outreach to MAHA voters.

But those overtures will be more challenging as other Democrats take their newfound control of Congress as a chance to go the other direction by targeting Kennedy, who still remains personally admired by many MAHA activists who have lost faith in the administration he serves.

One incoming Democratic senator, South Carolina pediatrician Annie Andrews, has vowed to impeach Kennedy, whom she calls “an absolute threat to the public health of this country.”

It is a fight that influential MAHA organizers, eager to see their movement dealigned from the Republican Party, are closely watching as they decide where to go next. Ryerson called the connection to Trump “something of a liability at this point” and it “could really potentially turn people off going forward.” Zen Honeycutt, who leads Moms Across America, backed 10 Democratic candidates on the ballot this fall. Both Ryerson and Honeycutt have rebuked Democrats calling for Kennedy’s ouster.

Back in Arizona, activists were working to safeguard against a loss in Washington. The day after the rally, Obeid picked up a pair of allies in her Bliss Mobile on her way to the state capitol in Phoenix. The mission: to lay the groundwork for the introduction of MAHA bills in 2027, regardless of who would be voted into office. Biggs eventually lost the gubernatorial race, and Obeid said she is hopeful Democrats will take on some MAHA issues.

The experiment to make MAHA a major issue in major elections may have failed, but Obeid — and others like her around the country — see promise in a return to decentralized but coordinated statehouse advocacy around issues of vaccine exemptions and food safety that took place for years before MAHA had a name. A POLITICO analysis last year found that states have introduced hundreds of MAHA-aligned bills, often with bipartisan support. Stand for Health Freedom, which attended the meeting and supports state efforts to end vaccine mandates, boasted a much higher win rate for their endorsed candidates compared to official MAHA groups.

“We don’t think it’s peaked,” said a representative from a food industry group, granted anonymity to candidly assess the deluge of state-level bills that attest to MAHA as a cultural force despite electoral missteps. “There’s still a movement that we pay close attention to.”

In the two-hour Phoenix meeting, activists and lawmakers shared talking points and discussed plans to introduce MAHA bills simultaneously in the state House and Senate and prepare experts to testify on matters spanning from water fluoridation to vaccine mandates. Notably, MAHA leadership was in attendance, including Glenn Rink, chair of MAHA Holdings, which oversees the organizations led by Lyons.

“The long term is in the states,” Amy Miller, director of states at the MAHA Institute, another nonprofit co-led by Lyons with 28 state chapters, told lawmakers. “We know it.”

For Obeid, the way forward begins with a new name. At the Phoenix meeting, she announced that her group had changed its name from the Arizona MAHA Coalition to the Arizona Healthy Always Council.“MAHA is very political now,” she said. “It’s polarizing.”