Malone Robert Mrna

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CNN

MAHA’s money man has built a political machine. Will it matter for midterms?

By

Sarah Owermohle

Feb 3, 2026

A sixth-generation farmer running for Iowa governor, Zach Lahn is the first MAHA-endorsed candidate of the 2026 election cycle.

Running on a platform that includes taking on “Big Agriculture” and “Big Pharma,” his visibility in a crowded field received a boost in publicity when he appeared in December on a popular weekly teleconference hosted by MAHA Action, a lobby group that has become the chief political arm of the movement.

Introducing Lahn, MAHA Action’s leader Tony Lyons declared: “This race is a national problem. It’s a national race, and it’s critical for the MAHA movement. And victory here will demonstrate that we can rebuild, you know, values that will make this country healthy.”

Over the first year of the Trump presidency, “Make America Healthy Again” advocates have issued a warning: Politicians ignore MAHA’s demands at their peril. The deep-pocketed financiers who fueled the movement’s rise have been building the machinery to take MAHA from grassroots outsiders to entrenched power players in Washington and around the country.

The most influential among these is Lyons, a long-time supporter of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has poured millions into building the political movement, first as a backer of Kennedy’s 2024 presidential run, and now as one of the key architects of MAHA’s political influence.

“We need to fight, fight, fight, and we need to keep making progress,” Lyons, whose company Skyhorse has made a name publishing the works of controversial figures, including RFK Jr., said when he introduced Lahn. “Make no mistake, this is going to be this is a real battle, and it’s endless.”

There is a lot to boast about, Lyons and MAHA leaders say: A whittled-down childhood vaccine schedule, new dietary guidelines with a reversed food pyramid, and plans to remove food artificial dyes from foods.

But there is skepticism that the movement has the momentum — and coherence — to make a difference for the Republicans running with the backing of the MAHA label.

The Trump coalition of voters, including MAHA advocates, tends to include “folks who are otherwise not voting, or not as closely attached to the political process, until sufficiently aggrieved,” said Thomas Miller, a senior fellow on health policy at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute.

“That’s harder to do in a 2026 election” because of less voter turnout during midterms, he said.

A midterm election can be a particular problem when you are the party in power, noted Miller. “Unfortunately for the folks who are running on the Republican side, they’re the incumbents now, as opposed to the other folks who were being demonized before.”

Making MAHA a DC staple

The political arm of the MAHA movement has steadily built its influence in Washington and state capitals over the past year.

The scope and depth of its reach could be seen on a cold morning in Washington, DC, last November, when the line to get into what used to be the Trump International Hotel — now the gilded Waldorf Astoria — snaked around the block.

Attending the inaugural “Make America Healthy Again Summit” that day put on by Lyons were Vice President JD Vance; Ultimate Fighting Champion boss Dana White; comedian Russell Brand, who is fighting rape and sexual assault charges; longevity and alternative medicine-obsessed tech multimillionaire Bryan Johnson; and ex-NASCAR driver Danica Patrick.

Kennedy headlined the event, which featured a series of corporate-themed panels interspersed with pop-culture discussions and reflections on how to “Make American Biotechnology Accelerate.”

Health food advocates, tech entrepreneurs and lobbyists waited, at times, for more than an hour to get in.

A week earlier, a separate conference in Austin, Texas, drew a distinctly different MAHA crowd. That gathering, organized by the Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit Kennedy founded before he entered politics, featured another longtime Kennedy associate and donor Mark Gorton, founder of the software firm LimeWire who encouraged people “to be more boldly anti-vax.”

Lyons, Gorton and a cadre of long-time Kennedy backers have been with the health secretary since the beginning, helping to propel the otherwise grassroots-based MAHA movement with their power, influence and funds.

When Kennedy entered the presidential race as a dark horse candidate in 2024, Gorton and Lyons were early donors and organizers. Gorton, a vaccine skeptic and critic of Covid-19 shutdown measures, gave $1 million to the Kennedy war chest through American Values, a political action committee he co-founded with Lyons. American Values ultimately raised more than $50 million.

After Kennedy endorsed Trump and the Republican secured a second term, Lyons founded the MAHA Action PAC, which has launched six-figure ad campaigns touting Trump and Kennedy’s work, holds weekly virtual events for supporters, and curries high-profile endorsers such as those who graced the Waldorf Astoria event.

On the state level, MAHA Action has built a website tracking legislation they urge followers to support (tougher food labels, allowing raw milk sales, health care price transparency) and those they should write lawmakers to oppose (a California bill that would shift authority over vaccine recommendations from Kennedy’s reshaped federal advisory group to the state health department).

At the start of last year, when Lyons renamed American Values PAC to become MAHA-focused, the lobby had war chest of $7.7 million. It spent $3.8 million of those funds in the first half of the year, according to federal financial disclosures, much of which went to X Corp., the Elon Musk-owned successor to Twitter; Merit Stream Media, a platform owned by Dr. Phil, who has supported MAHA agenda points; and Gavin de Becker Associates, a security firm led by Kennedy’s longtime security adviser.

The PAC’s full-year financial disclosures are expected in February.

Much of the money so far has gone to online streaming, and streaming often. For the MAHA-aligned part of the Trump administration, this has created a platform for reaching the movement. Health officials regularly appear on MAHA video calls to tout wins on food and pharmaceuticals and remind voters to keep engaging.

“We as a group, this Make America Healthy Again movement, are in a position to basically determine the outcome of the midterms,” Robert Malone, a Kennedy-appointed vaccine adviser and an early pioneer of the messenger RNA technology eventually used in Covid-19 vaccines, said during a November MAHA Action call.

“The question is: will members of the House and the Senate recognize the importance of our movement, our agenda, our initiatives, the force of the interest in this, by key constituencies,” he said.

Does it translate to votes? And does it matter?

But as Kennedy and his cohort score wins in Washington, there is growing concern that vaccine policy changes could alienate average Americans ahead of the midterms.

Most voters have extreme confidence in the childhood vaccine schedule, according to Pew Research polling from November, before HHS narrowed the recommended vaccinations for most children.

December polling from Tony Fabrizio, longtime GOP strategist and 2024 pollster for Trump, show similar trends: More than 70% of voters say the benefits of common vaccinations outweigh the risks, including 6 in 10 MAHA voters, according to his polling firm FabrizioWard.

While the MAHA agenda — food policy, particularly — is widely popular across party lines, vaccine skepticism is not, including among MAHA voters, according to pollsters.

But it’s unclear if health issues such as food or chemical safety will weigh heavily on voters’ minds this year.

“Voters are sending a loud message that their biggest concern is the economy and prices,” said Doug Heye, a GOP strategist and former RNC communications director. “Other issues just have not been registering.”

Regardless of the movement’s sway in the midterms, the MAHA industrial complex is continuing to make product endorsements, sell supplements, and put out bestselling books.

While Skyhorse does not make its sales and profits public, it has touted being one of the fastest-growing independent publishers in the country, with more than 100 bestsellers to its name. Those same authors often appear in the weekly MAHA Action streaming installments.

Several of Skyhorse’s top sellers came from Kennedy, who stands to make millions more from the publishing house. The health secretary last year reported that he is owed between $2 million and $4 million for two upcoming books, “Unsettled Science” and “A Defense for Israel,” and made $450,000 from Skyhorse for consulting on book ideas and writing forewords for authors.

Kennedy is contracted for a third book with Skyhorse that he will not write or promote while serving in government, according to his financial disclosures. But his wife, Cheryl Hines, received a $600,000 advance for her November 2025 memoir, according to those documents.

Last month, Kennedy himself made a surprise appearance on a MAHA Action call, roughly an hour after standing with Trump in the Oval Office as the president signed a bill reintroducing whole milk in schools.

Following some remarks from Kennedy on the signing, Lyons told him:

“There are 7,000 influencers watching this show, and I just want you to know that they all love you, that millions of MAHA moms, you know, have your back, are fighting for you.”

“They recognize that you’ve risked everything to fight for them,” he said.

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