The Make America Healthy Again movement is eyeing the 2028 field and doesn’t yet see anyone who will champion its causes.
“I haven't seen anyone that I'm excited about,” said Kelly Ryerson, a MAHA influencer who advocates for regenerative farming and eliminating pesticides. “And it's weird to me that they aren't being more vocal about it because it’s so winning, but they're not.”
Their reservations about the likely 2028 contenders stretch across party lines, Ryerson and four other MAHA movement leaders said. While they welcome recent outreach from New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the group is finding it hard to overlook Democratic sins against “medical freedom” during the pandemic, a liability for Ocasio-Cortez, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris. Republicans aren’t faring much better: Vice President JD Vance has whiffed at opportunities to embrace MAHA principles and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent joke about his beloved Pop-Tarts fell flat for a movement that’s at war with processed foods.
“When it comes to 2028, I don't think the next president is in the race yet,” said Vani Hari, a longtime ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who pushes for healthier ingredients in food.
The MAHA movement is credited with helping President Donald Trump over the finish line in 2024. The fact that none of the expected 2028 candidates has yet attracted MAHA’s attention creates an opening for an existing candidate to do so — or a new MAHA champion to emerge. But any candidate would have work to do since the Trump administration has disappointed the movement.
Kennedy, for his part, has repeatedly insisted that, after his 2024 presidential run came up short, he’s not planning to try again.
Top MAHA leaders have grown disillusioned with the Trump administration since the White House came to the defense of pesticide industry giant Bayer in February. MAHA — and Kennedy, who fought the maker of Roundup in court earlier in his career — consider pesticides a toxin that needs to be reduced or eliminated to clean up the food supply.
Other policy initiatives have disappointed too. Efforts to get artificial food dyes out of food have only involved voluntary requests from HHS, not binding regulation, and long-promised work to define ultra-processed foods is delayed.
“The torch was burning so fierce in 2024, and now it's like flickering,” said Alex Clark, a MAHA influencer who hosts a health and wellness podcast produced by the conservative Turning Point USA. “I wouldn't say it's snuffed out totally yet, but jeez Louise, we’re barely hanging on.”
Movement leaders warn that the result of the administration’s failures will be a stunted coalition for Republicans in the midterms. Unless MAHA’s issues become more central to the GOP platform again, they foresee independent and Democratic moms who joined forces with Trump in 2024 swinging back to the other side come 2028.
Vance, considered a GOP frontrunner, hasn’t shown significant interest in the movement, Clark, Hari and Ryerson said.
“He's had an opportunity for the last few years to really dig into that, be involved, speak at things, be really supportive. I mean, I've basically heard nothing. So that's a huge missed opportunity,” Clark said.
Vance’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Many of the MAHA advocates spoke favorably about Vance’s comments at a November 2025 MAHA Summit, in which he called MAHA “a critical part of our success in Washington.” But they were disappointed that it was his last significant foray into MAHA issues.
During a sit-down interview with Kennedy at the summit, Vance ran through his MAHA bonafides: his wife, Usha, fought his instinct to feed their children “cupcakes and ice cream,” opting for carrots and applesauce; he stays away from medications, even ibuprofen, unless “absolutely” necessary; and he appreciated the questions MAHA asked of conventional public health experts.
The country could only advance with the help of “weird” people willing to challenge orthodoxy, the vice president argued.
“You guys are asking the right questions: What are we putting into our bodies? Where was it sourced from?” he said. “If we’re eating animal-based protein, is it coming from a place where the animals are treated the right way?”
Vance and his wife recently installed a chicken coop at the vice president’s residence, in part to have better access to fresh eggs, said a person close to Vance, granted anonymity to discuss his MAHA efforts.
Vance also “has a very good relationship with Bobby,” said another person closely involved in the MAHA movement, granted anonymity to share candid thoughts on the landscape. The vice president recently took up Kennedy’s diet of meat and fermented vegetables, which Vance described at a Thursday White House briefing as a good way to lose weight but a bad way “to enjoy what you eat.”
“I don't think MAHA people like Rubio, so I think it's more Vance,” the person closely involved with MAHA said.
Rubio, another top Republican contender who has said he won’t run if Vance does, recently poked the bear when he called Pop-Tarts, an ultra-processed breakfast food replete with food dyes, “one of the great American innovations in the history of the world” during a joint interview with his wife, who outed him as decidedly not MAHA.
Rubio said he supports MAHA’s quest to be healthier, but dismissed Kennedy’s diet of protein and fermented foods as "crazy."
“He has to travel with coolers full of sauerkraut. I'm not going to travel the world with a cooler full of sauerkraut. It's ridiculous. I can't do it,” Rubio said.
His jokes didn’t land well with MAHA.
“I have higher hopes probably for JD Vance on that than I do on Marco,” Ryerson said.
Rubio’s office declined to comment.
Democrats, meanwhile, have an array of public health policies from the pandemic that they’d need to overcome to successfully court MAHA, the advocates said.
Newsom and Harris both endorsed masking requirements and Covid-19 vaccination mandates, which many in the MAHA movement fought and believe infringed on “medical freedom,” one of Kennedy’s key pillars for the movement.
Kennedy rejected most of the public health guidance during the pandemic. He was eventually de-platformed from Facebook and Instagram on the grounds that he spread misinformation about vaccines. It nonetheless grew his following and laid the foundation for his presidential run.
“If you are going to win the MAHA vote, you need to tell the truth about what happened during the pandemic. Period,” Hari said.
Harris and Newsom’s offices declined to comment.
Ocasio-Cortez is largely considered to share the Covid-19 albatross — but her recent outreach to MAHA groups and attention to harmful chemical exposures has not gone unnoticed.
“It's very notable that AOC is testing the waters and talking about it. I think that's very smart,” the person closely involved in the MAHA movement said.
“If AOC runs correctly, she could actually get a lot of Trump voters.”
Ocasio-Cortez has framed her MAHA curiosity as part of her fight against large corporations and their power over working-class Americans.
“I actually meet with MAHA activists. I work with MAHA advocates because a lot of them really don’t believe that their fight is partisan, and it’s not in many ways,” Ocasio-Cortez said on a recent podcast interview. “We do have extraordinary corruption in our agriculture system, our big corporate system as well, you know, and this is an area where both parties and our entire political system has been compromised.”
Zen Honeycutt, executive director of the activist group Moms Across America and a Kennedy ally, met with Ocasio-Cortez in late July. Though she said neither she nor the other moms in her organization “agree with socialism” — Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America — they do believe in “corporate responsibility.”
Honeycutt was glad to hear about Ocasio-Cortez’s work on PFAS, or “forever chemicals” linked with cancer, immune system problems, developmental effects and other health ailments, as well as her support for a data center moratorium, she said.
“We’re eager to see her platform if she runs for president and welcome continued conversations about what that might look like,” Honeycutt said.
Ocasio-Cortez’s office declined to comment.
Ryerson said the progressive Democrat is “very welcome to the conversation.”
“More Democrats should be doing the same,” Ryerson said.
For the staunch conservatives in MAHA’s ranks, like Clark, Ocasio-Cortez is a bridge too far. But she knows her listeners and followers will be open to hearing from someone willing to inflate the “deflated balloon” that she considers the current state of MAHA.
“I'm not going to give her a look, but I think a lot of these independent, normie-voting MAHA moms will, because they're not beholden to any political party,” Clark said. “Which is what my biggest fear is, you know, as a MAHA conservative, that I've been trying to warn the GOP about. It's like, how stupid can we be to let these people slip through our fingers and then go vote for AOC?”
Will Steakin contributed to this report.
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