MAHA moms are still up for grabs this election. They want more than cheap groceries

November is looming, and Republicans are eager to turn out every voter that propelled them to victory in 2024. A critical part of their winning coalition was the "MAHA moms," a group that doesn’t neatly fit into either party but cares deeply about food safety, public health and a clean environment.

President Trump won this group in 2024 largely by joining forces with RFK Jr., who is, according to some polls, currently the most popular member of the Trump administration. But there’s no guarantee these voters will stick with the GOP. If Republicans want to drive MAHA mom turnout, they need to champion a winning environmental-health agenda.

Ultimately, MAHA moms don’t just want to be able to afford food for their families. They want to afford good food. Because raising healthy kids shouldn’t require being rich.

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Moms across the socioeconomic spectrum have started reading ingredient labels, worrying about pesticides, cutting out food dyes and filtering water. RFK Jr. isn’t popular because he gets everything right, but because he was the first political leader in a long time to confront the chronic disease epidemic and question why half of the ingredients on the average loaf of bread were only intelligible to a small subset of food scientists.

RFK Jr. has had initial successes. The administration has proposed closing the decades-old loophole that allowed food companies to introduce new chemicals without telling the FDA.

HHS and USDA also submitted the government's first proposed definition of ultra-processed foods, which make up nearly 60% of the American diet.

And most recently, the EPA announced a cutting-edge study screening drinking water for over 1,400 emerging contaminants, including PFAS, pesticides, pharmaceuticals and the abortion-inducing mifepristone. For MAHA moms, these are tangible signs that someone in Washington is finally listening.

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But, progress on one front has come with frustration on another. The same administration that is scrutinizing food additives has moved to protect glyphosate, the herbicide found in Roundup and the most widely used weed killer in American agriculture that some fear is carcinogenic. When the Supreme Court heard arguments in a major Roundup liability case this spring, the Trump administration filed a brief on behalf of the pesticide's manufacturer. RFK Jr. largely sidestepped questions about the administration's pesticide stance when pressed by Congress.

Meanwhile, under Administrator Zeldin's deregulatory agenda, the EPA has moved to roll back drinking water standards for PFAS and weakened protections against mercury and other air pollutants.

MAHA moms are not naive about this tension. They are thankful their concerns are finally part of the national conversation. Likewise, they are wary of the left’s heavy-handed government policies that have failed to improve public health while making life unaffordable. But, they haven’t yet been convinced that the GOP actually wants to respond to their concerns rather than check a few boxes.

If Republicans want to build a sustainable coalition around MAHA, they need more than ad hoc wins. They need a distinctly conservative environmental and health agenda, one that takes the constituency's concerns seriously without defaulting to the assumption that another layer of federal regulation will fix them.

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That balance is not impossible. It starts by applying the conservative principles of private-sector initiative, deregulation, light-touch intervention to environmental concerns.

Take farmers. Many are trapped in a system that pays them to lean on pesticides and synthetic fertilizers they'd rather not use. A conservative agricultural agenda could eliminate perverse subsidies that entrench chemical dependency while creating new incentives for regenerative farming practices that produce cleaner food, healthier soil, and better farm economics, all without a Washington bureaucrat telling farmers how to do their jobs.

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The same logic extends to energy, and it leads straight back to the grocery bill. Fresh food is expensive in part because it is energy-hungry. It has to be grown, processed, refrigerated, and trucked, and kept cold the whole way to the shelf. Whole ingredients and minimally processed foods, the kind MAHA moms are trying to buy, are among the most exposed to those costs. Cheaper, more abundant power brings them down at every step.

Relatedly, the private sector, not a Green New Deal, is driving a historic solar buildout that has the technology on track to become the world's largest source of power by 2035. The Trump administration's deregulation of nuclear energy points the same direction. It’s one of the cleanest and most reliable sources available, delivering cleaner air and a steadier grid without the intermittency problems of wind and solar. For farmers, processors, and grocers alike, that means lower operating costs, and for families it means the difference between good food as a luxury and good food as the default.

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None of these things are left-wing ideas. They apply the logic of conservatism to the health and environmental issues that matter to millions of voters.

Republicans have a narrow window to win over MAHA moms with a conservative agenda that takes environmental health concerns seriously. If the GOP answers the call, it will pay dividends not just in the midterms, but in the elections to come.