The midterms are over and the Republicans got their asses waxed. We can point to any number of reasons why the country delivered a stinging rebuke to the GOP across the union. It was a slap to Donald Trump. It was about the economy. It was the war in Iran. It was all of the ICE antics as they cosplayed as the Gestapo in major American cities.
All of those are, to one degree or another, true. You don’t get this kind of result without a panoply of valid complaints about the party in power. But part of what occurred is also a repudiation of many MAHA movement leaders that were in government.
Tuesday was a particularly brutal night for MAHA Republicans in Iowa, where several Kennedy-backed candidates were swept up in the seismic blue wave.
Republican Iowa gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn, who shared Kennedy’s concerns about pesticides in farming, lost to Democratic State Auditor Rob Sand on Tuesday. At a campaign rally last week, Kennedy described Lahn’s race as “the most important election going on in this country.”
The names keep piling up from there.
Iowa Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn, both of whom Kennedy campaigned for, also lost their re-election bids as Democrats flipped dozens of House seats. Another MAHA advocate and Kennedy pick, Joe Mitchell, lost his Iowa House race to Democratic opponent Lindsay James. The seat is being vacated by Ashley Hinson, who was among several Republican Senate candidates to lose their races in red states on Tuesday.
And, tangentially, one of the most stunning upsets of the midterms, in which Dr. Annie Andrews defeated Darline Graham, the late Lindsay Graham’s sister and handpicked Trump candidate, primarily came about because of RFK Jr.
“The day that RFK Jr. was nominated to lead HHS was the day that I really seriously started considering running for this seat,” Andrews told The New Republic in July.
“RFK Jr. has been my professional archnemesis for decades, and there are thousands of pediatricians across the country who would say the same thing.”
To be clear, nobody is claiming that opposition to Kennedy or the MAHA movement is why all of these candidates, and others, lost their races. It also isn’t some primary reason for the election results overall.
But Kennedy and MAHA was embraced by Trump because they were supposed to be a differentiator on the political landscape. Kennedy was no MAGA Republican before joining the administration. Far from it. And the MAHA movement is in many ways apolitical. The theory was that both would bring independents, and even some Democrats, into the GOP voting bloc.
As we now know, that didn’t happen. And it makes Kennedy’s continued presence in Trump’s cabinet fairly pointless.
