The Path to 2028 for Democrats Lies in the MAHA Movement | Opinion

When Americans say they don’t trust the medical establishment, Democrats have one reflexive answer: defend the science, correct the misinformation and warn about the dangers of the alternative.

There is plenty to correct. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promoted false claims about vaccines, and the Make America Healthy Again movement that formed around him has no shortage of pseudoscience. But on the left, the women drawn to MAHA have been written off as fringe or crazy: conspiracy theorists, anti-vax moms, a punchline.

Telling a woman she’s an idiot for asking what microplastics are doing to her body is not an argument for evidence-based medicine, but it is a good way to make sure she stops listening to you. That dismissal is a mistake Democrats can’t afford. These are women the party should be winning, and 2024 demonstrates many of them are women Republicans used to win. Without them, Democrats are putting Congress at risk this November, and the White House at risk in 2028.

Corporate America has already noticed. Recently, Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman joined a panel at the MAHA Summit in Washington, an event headlined by RFK and Vice President JD Vance. For a salad chain built on a largely progressive, urban customer base, the move raised eyebrows, but we think it makes complete sense. Sweetgreen has always known where its customers are, and we think the Democratic Party should, too.

We say this because we know—and are—this customer. We built two national reproductive-rights campaigns, Vote for Abortion and Hotties for Harris, from scratch, traveling the country talking to women about abortion and politics. We also teach and practice yoga and Pilates, attend wellness retreats, and do the grocery shopping for our families—the exact spaces where MAHA has found its audience.

The women in those rooms look nothing like the caricature of the gullible wellness consumer. They are highly educated professionals, activists, and women with serious scientific literacy. Some are into astrology. Some question the chemicals in the food their kids eat, or raise concerns about how little regulation governs our food. Many do all of that while vaccinating their kids and reading peer-reviewed research.

The data backs up what we hear in those rooms. In a KFF poll earlier this year, 41 percent of Americans said they supported MAHA. Asked to name their top health priority, 42 percent of MAHA supporters chose lowering healthcare costs and 21 percent chose restricting chemical additives in food. Just 10 percent chose reevaluating vaccine safety. Asked why they backed the movement, only 2 percent mentioned RFK or Donald Trump.

The movement’s core concerns reach well beyond its supporters. Large majorities of Americans told KFF there is too little regulation of food additives and agricultural pesticides.

That is not a fringe movement, and make no mistake about where these voters are being taken. RFK-aligned groups have poured millions into turning those voters out for Republican candidates. MAHA has basically become a pipeline into the Republican Party.

MAHA taps into a distrust of medicine that women rightfully have. For generations, “hysteria” turned women’s pain into evidence of instability. Midwives delivered roughly half of U.S. births in 1900, until a campaign smearing them as dirty and ignorant—aimed hardest at immigrant and Black midwives—nearly erased them within 50 years. In 1977, the FDA recommended excluding women who could become pregnant from early drug trials—a policy that stood until 1993. It took until 2024 for federal regulators to tell hospitals they needed consent before trainees performed pelvic exams on anesthetized patients. Nearly every woman we meet—us included—has a story about a doctor waiving away her symptoms.

There’s a reason why “trust the experts” isn’t landing anymore.

Two Democrats are already showing the party what the alternative looks like.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said that she meets and works with MAHA advocates, tying the movement’s appeal to real anxiety about a broken health care system. And she publicly documented the process of freezing her eggs, arguing that women need more open conversations about reproductive health. She’s meeting women where they are.

In Michigan, Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and former public-health director, released a health agenda that takes on pesticides, corporate influence, environmental contaminants and food, while holding firm on vaccines, arguing that the forces making Americans sick are too important to surrender to RFK.

Neither has traded away science, and both are proving that Democrats can take voters’ concerns seriously without endorsing the movement’s worst ideas.

Neither party owns these issues yet. KFF found voters trust Democrats over Republicans on vaccine policy, 41 percent to 25 percent. But on the safety of food additives and pesticides, it is essentially a tie.

That matters most with the voters Democrats have struggled to hold. In 2020, Joe Biden won women by 12 points. In 2024, Kamala Harris won them by seven. Trump carried a majority of white women for the third straight election, including more than six in ten white women without college degrees. In a presidential race decided by a few points in a few states, a five-point slide among women is the difference between winning and losing the White House.

Yet those same women keep voting for abortion rights. In 2024, abortion-rights measures passed in Arizona, Missouri, Montana and Nevada—all states Trump won. These women aren’t confused. A woman can support abortion rights, distrust drug companies, worry about pesticides, take an herbal tincture, resent the way a doctor treated her pain, and still vote Republican.

Democrats have a choice, and they have to make it now. Every time a party strategist mocks a “wellness mom” or rolls their eyes when a woman questions what’s in her food, the right gains a recruit. This contempt for concern and curiosity is a gift to RFK, and Democrats have been handing it over for years.

The women drifting toward MAHA are not a lost cause. They are voters waiting for someone to take their concerns seriously, and the party that does it will win them. Ocasio-Cortez and El-Sayed have shown it can be done without giving an inch on science.

The rest of the party must follow them and win back the women MAHA has pulled to the right—women who have voted for Democrats before and would again if the party gave them a reason. Or it can keep lecturing them until they stop listening for good.

Jenny Kay is a media and communications strategist. Liz Walsh is an editorial advisor and strategist.

View expressed in this article are the writers’ own.