MAHA makes its case to Democrats as blue wave crashes GOP alliance and threatens RFK Jr.

By Sarah Owermohle, CNN

(CNN) — One day after the blue wave that swept away dozens of Republican seats, the mood among Make America Healthy Again activists was palpably glum.

On a weekly Wednesday call hosted by MAHA Action, the most prominent political fundraising group for the movement, the normally enthusiastic atmosphere was replaced by pep talks from its founder Tony Lyons and advocates active in its circles.

Zach Lahn, the losing Iowa Republican gubernatorial candidate who had been MAHA’s first endorsement of the midterms, sought to downplay the scale of the rout, putting it down to “a terrible cycle”.

In the wake of the stunning Republican defeat, some are openly asking whether to recast their message to appeal to Democrats on bipartisan issues.

“The partial fracture we’ve seen between MAHA and MAGA in some ways may be a good thing. It’s important that MAHA not be a partisan issue,” Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general and a vaccine skeptic, said on the call.

But while some Democrats have expressed an openness to courting MAHA allies whose concerns about healthy food and the environment can be common ground, a pivot would present an enormous test to a movement that for the past two years married its cause to President Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ base and his divisive Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Democratic leadership and incoming senators are promising investigations and even a possible impeachment vote for Kennedy, who they see as the face of disease outbreaks and federal upheaval over health care.

“We ought to be pursuing some corrections to the chaos, the cost, and the corruption that’s running rapid in Washington today, and we can do that by moving to make these people account for their actions,” Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina told CNN’s Pamela Brown on Friday, naming Kennedy and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as the House majority’s top two targets.

Incoming Democratic senators, including South Carolina’s Annie Andrews and Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed — both doctors — have echoed that sentiment, putting them at early odds with MAHA voters who see opportunities to work with Democrats on popular issues like access to healthier food.

Even Trump has warned that shifts should be expected, telling CBS’s 60 Minutes: “”I love my Cabinet. I think they’re good. But I’ll … be doing maybe a few changes.”

Whether Trump has Kennedy in mind or not, some Democrats have made it clear he’s in their crosshairs.

“Unless RFK Jr. is interested in spending the next two years in front of Congressional committees, he should go ahead and resign now,” Sen. Ralph Warnock of Georgia posted to X.

An HHS spokesperson said in a statement: “Secretary Kennedy has delivered the most sweeping public health reforms in modern history.”

“Threats of impeachment will not distract him from delivering for the American people.”

A tough pivot – but an opportunity?

Three tent poles make up the MAHA movement — a drive for healthier food, demand for environmental safety and advocacy for ‘medical freedom,’ or vaccine choice.

There have always been both fractures and overlaps within the movement, said David Mansdoerfer, a former deputy assistant secretary for health during the first Trump administration. But in the new political environment, these interests will more clearly diverge, he said.

“MAHA as an electoral body is an important one for both parties, but MAHA isn’t a like, single policy issue,” said Mansdoerfer, a proponent of medical freedom, which he said is “pretty staunchly built into the Republican platform” and unlikely to find Democratic allies.

Democrats swept Republican MAHA allies from office, including Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, who most notably backed the medical freedom vein of its platform and snubbed new contenders like Lahn.

But at the same time, even incoming senators who have tussled with Kennedy spot opportunities to court MAHA voters.

El-Sayed in September debuted an agenda for a ‘Healthier America’ that promises to tackle toxins in food, agriculture and water — core tenets of the grassroots movement.

El-Sayed and some other Democrats are less likely to court the “anti-vaxxers” but see important strides to be made with “organic and pesticide moms,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who worked with El-Sayed’s campaign. “That is very important because it’s a big suburban audience and there is a real possibility of making gains.”

Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democratic Maine congresswoman who has long pitched making inroads with MAHA voters, launched the Fix Our Food Caucus this fall. She said she did so “to try to give a little a little bit of perspective on the things that we think are most important to the broadest group of people.”

“I’m willing to work with anyone on the White House in this administration, when we can make some gains on things we care about, but not to support any of their negative agenda,” Pingree told CNN on Friday. “If RFK survives all this, I hope we can get the focus back on healthier foods, food is medicine, and straighten out the CDC and vaccine side of it.”

Asked in a text message if there are Democrats he is hopeful about working with, Lyons, the MAHA Action founder, replied: “I’m always hopeful!!!”

The Kennedy question

Pingree, who will assume chairmanship of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, says she is looking for accountability.

“I don’t think Democrats will have a huge impeachment agenda, but I think we have so much work — investigating, subpoenaing, getting down to records, looking for collusion,” she said.

She told CNN that when Democrats take over in January she is “absolutely” going to call in Lee Zeldin, director of the Environmental Protection Agency, over deregulation of environmental toxins and the administration’s work with Bayer, the main manufacturer of commonly used herbicide glyphosate — another major target for MAHA supporters.

In the Senate, both El-Sayed and Annie Andrews, the South Carolina Democratic senator-elect and pediatrician — who has called Kennedy a “grifter” – have said they would launch impeachment proceedings against the health secretary. His harshest critics have accused him of spreading misinformation, dismantling government grant distributions and undermining public health, arguing these are grounds for impeachment.

But it’s a delicate balance for Democrats. The common thread holding MAHA voters together is Kennedy.

“All three of those factions are still very supportive of Secretary Kennedy, and a lot of them will look at how he is treated in this process to whether they can fully feel like they can work in a bipartisan manner,” Mansdoerfer said.

Prominent MAHA advocates such as Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America, have publicly warned that impeaching Kennedy would be a “colossal mistake” for Democrats.

“Any of those independents who consider Kennedy their champion — which I would say is probably most of them — are not going to vote Democrat at all ever if they mess with Kennedy,” she argued on the MAHA Action call.

In the meantime, the Trump administration appears to be digging its heels in on some of its core priorities. On Saturday, the president called on the Justice department to investigate Democrats he said were “going around threatening” impeachment.

In a sign of the ongoing fallout from the midterms rout, Trump on Friday announced that his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was leaving and being replaced with Stephen Miller.

The announcement came within an hour of longtime MAHA advocate and former White House advisor Calley Means sharing on social media a two-hour podcast that laid most of the blame for stalled progress on Wiles and corporate interests in DC.

“Susie Wiles is the most powerful chief of staff in modern American history, and she has taken a stranglehold on any policy decision,” Means, a close Kennedy ally, said on the Joe Rogan Experience. “Every single cabinet secretary, they’re spending meetings constantly worrying about how to get on Susie’s good side.”

Kennedy swiftly praised Miller’s appointment to chief of staff, citing his bonafides as a MAHA supporter. “Next to me, Stephen Miller is the strongest MAHA supporter in the administration. It’s time to unleash the Kraken,” the health secretary wrote Friday on X.

His allies, meanwhile, issued a challenge to Democrats.

“Let’s go Bobby,” Means posted on X Friday afternoon. “Democrats said they wanted to fix these things too, We can achieve histor[ic] reform in the next year.”

Adam Cancryn contributed to this report.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.