Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tied distrust in the nation’s healthcare system on the Left to the Make America Healthy Again movement in an interview on Thursday, saying she doesn’t think the MAHA movement is partisan.
“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. “We do have extraordinary corruption in our agricultural system, in our big corporate system as well, you know. And this is an area where both parties and our entire political system has been compromised.”
She made the comments in an episode of the leftist Majority Report radio talk show, sympathizing with the basis behind the movement popularized by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Ocasio-Cortez also argued that, politically, in the wake of the 2024 general election, the Democratic establishment focused on analyzing the voting numbers from people who follow male podcasters, and that not enough attention was placed on the MAHA vote.
“I think that after the general election, there was so much, especially in the Democratic establishment, so much hay made about bro-podcasts, and that’s where they ran up the numbers,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And I think that the media has just as much of a misogynistic blind spot as anywhere else. I mean, they are the misogynistic blind spot in many ways, but the cost of that is, I actually think a lot of it was MAHA.”
She explained how she thought there was “very little political analysis” done on how Republicans mobilized women as part of the MAHA vote.
According to a KFF poll from May, 41% of U.S. adults say they identify as part of the MAHA movement, but far more than that say they resonate with issues raised by MAHA advocates. The poll results showed that 75% of people believe there’s not enough regulation on food additives, 64% believe there’s not enough pesticide regulations, and only 36% trust the EPA and FDA to operate without outside influence. The results ran across partisan lines as well.
In the Thursday podcast, Ocasio-Cortez discussed her experience growing up in a household where her own parents had a distrust of the healthcare system, tying concerns about healthcare from progressives and socialists to the concerns of the MAHA movement.
“I see how all of these issues, that have been at their surface level expressed as right wing, are actually very much just the anxieties that we have as working people not being able to afford healthcare,” Ocasio-Cortez said, listing off questions like, “How do I stop being sick?” “How do I prevent being sick by limiting my exposure to things that I think are toxic?” and “What are the holistic and low-cost alternatives that I can turn to? Because I know that I can’t afford to see a doctor.”
DEMOCRAT DOCTORS RUN ANTI-MAHA CAMPAIGNS FOR MIDTERM ELECTIONS
The response to the MAHA movement on the Right has been playing out across the Democratic midterm elections this year as well. Several doctors and public health-background officials have run campaigns on the Left as a counterweight to MAHA’s influence on the Right. Some Democratic lawmakers, such as Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), have hopped in to suggest that the Democratic Party attempt to poach MAHA voters from the GOP electorate to the blue side of the ballot.
On the GOP side of the ballot, the MAHA movement has seen significant success in the Republican primaries so far this year. For example, in Iowa, MAHA PAC helped push farmer Zach Lahn over the finish line to beat President Donald Trump-backed Rep. Randy Feenstra (R-IA) in the state’s GOP gubernatorial primary.