Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democrat who lives on a 200-acre organic farm in Maine, regularly meets with activists associated with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement. She spoke at a MAHA rally they held last week in front of the Supreme Court and wrote an op-ed last month with a MAHA leader.
Pingree thinks other Democrats should be more like her.
“I’ve been hounding our leadership about this,” she told NOTUS.
Most Democrats in Washington, repulsed by Kennedy’s vaccine changes, have been deeply reluctant to embrace the MAHA movement. Pingree insists the party is missing an opportunity to win over more voters.
The right approach, she said, is finding ways to ally with the parts of Kennedy’s agenda they can support. She told NOTUS she is preparing to present polling to House Democrats at an upcoming meeting on how voters feel about food and pesticide regulations.
Democrats are still the party more prone toward federal regulation of food, air and water, even as Kennedy and his MAHA supporters try to claim those ideas for the Trump administration. Blue states — like some red ones — have worked to restrict food additives and define ultra-processed food.
And in the MAHA movement’s first big legislative test last week, it was Democrats who came through to defeat protections for Roundup maker Bayer and other pesticide companies in a sweeping farm bill. Roughly two-thirds of House Republicans voted against the MAHA priority.
