The White House is hoping President Trump’s plummeting popularity won’t be enough to help Democrats take control of Congress if HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s push to reshape the American diet proves popular with voters.
According to Politico, the Trump administration and Republican political figures believe Kennedy’s work to reform America’s food supply and upend longstanding dietary guidelines is broadly popular with a wide swath of voters that don’t fit into partisan boxes. That might be enough to sway some to vote Republican out of fear that if Democrats take control of Congress it could slow those efforts.
That’s why the White House is dispatching Kennedy and a cast of characters — including Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins — on a nationwide tour that will run through the midterm elections as he touts the administration's efforts to, in his words, Make America Healthy Again.
He made his first stop in Pennsylvania last week as part of what he called a campaign to “take back” Americans’ health — which some observers see as the possible start of what could be a dark-horse bid for the 2028 Republican nomination.
But according to one White House official, Kennedy’s work on food safety could bear fruit for the GOP long before any 2028 primary fractures because it’s “not a red meat issue.”
“It’s a cross-cutting issue that most people across ages, across race, you know, political affiliation, largely agree with and support,” the official said.
But Democrats such as 3.14 Action executive director Eric Polyak, have a different view.
Polyak told Politico that Kennedy’s notorious anti-vaccine activism and work to undermine the vaccine schedule used by American parents for decades won’t be overshadowed by his healthy food initiatives.
“People want less food dyes, but at the end of the day, does it really matter when he’s doing these terrible things with vaccines and literally putting our children at risk?” Polyak said. “School lunches don’t matter when your kids die.”
Another Democrat, Pennsylvania State Rep. Bridget Kosierowski, said she agrees “100 percent” with Kennedy’s work on “healthy food choices” but stressed that the vaccine activism of the HHS secretary is far more toxic.
“We don’t want kids to have measles or mumps or Rubella or whooping cough, or certainly hepatitis. … He’s complicating, you know, our belief in science, which is really dangerous,” she said.
The White House official disagreed, noting that polling from Trump’s own campaign shows the MAHA food push to be “just more salient” to the “average person” than Kennedy’s antivaxxer history or work at HHS.
That survey, from Trump pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward, found 90 percent of voters believe the government should mandate “labeling of harmful ingredients and chemicals in ultra-processed foods” while finding the so-called MAHA agenda “widely popular across party lines” save for the anti-vaccine stuff.
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