Out: Soccer Moms and Security Moms. In: Health Moms.

Is RFK Jr. the secret to suburban women?

Everyone says that Donald Trump needs to recruit suburban women voters.  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. may be his secret weapon.  We used to hear about soccer moms, but RFK, Jr. may be able to mobilize a new group, the Health Moms.

Several years ago, I was eating lunch at one of the concourse “sidewalk cafes” in the Houston airport when I noticed that a guy sitting a few tables away was attracting a steady stream of attractive, middle-aged, soccer-mom types stopping by for autographs.  I had no idea who he was, but I asked my waiter who said he was a vaccine activist.  Apparently he was a rock star among yoga pants wearing moms who worried about vaccine safety and the like.  (This was pre-Covid).

In that crowd, RFK, Jr. is a much, much bigger rock star.  And the suburban Health Moms who don’t trust the establishment on health issues are numerous and don’t just fall on the right.

In fact, the crunchy, health-conscious mom shopping local and organic, avoiding high-fructose corn syrup and canola oil, and suspicious of the prescriptions and proscriptions of the medical establishment, has generally been found on the left, though that has changed in recent years to a degree.  Popular Instagram accounts like House in Habit, with over 1.2 million followers, talk about this stuff all the time to huge audiences.

Covid left a lot of people distrusting the establishments, medical and otherwise, for a lot of good reasons.  People in authority lied to us about our health, lied to us about treatments, and then, often enough, bragged about it later.  And there has been no real accountability.

Government nutrition guidelines have as much to do with what foodstuffs the government wants people to buy as what is good for them.  (As even NPR has reported, concerns about eggs and  cholesterol were made popular by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, trying to hold down food prices in a time of inflation.  Johnson told the Surgeon General to issue an alert about cholesterol in eggs, so people would buy fewer and the price would fall.)

The “food pyramid” is a joke, the FDA does a poor job  of policing foods and additives, and Americans are way too fat, and it’s not just because we aren’t exercising enough.

People care about their health, but people – especially many mothers, I suspect – care even more about their children’s health.  Personally, I think the vaccine-autism connection is bogus – it was basically made up by a since retracted study – but many moms worry about the very large number of vaccinations their kids get at an early age, and many people have noticed the increased prevalence of autism and autoimmune problems.

And what I think about it doesn’t matter.  (For the record, I get pretty much every normal vaccine that’s offered, though I’ve become a skeptic regarding the underperforming Covid vaccines, which haven’t lived up to the promises and which seem to require an endless number of boosters, even as the people I know who have been multiply boosted seem to get Covid over and over.)

What matters for the election is that RFK, Jr. is talking about that stuff — under the rubric of “Make America Healthy Again” — and the Health Moms are listening, and now he’s endorsed Trump.  This election is likely to be close.  And close elections are decided at the margins.

The Trump Campaign thinks it will get in the neighborhood of 25% of RFK’s voters; other experts think it may be more like half,  with a lot of the remaining Kennedy voters staying home rather than supporting Kamala.  I follow the RFK supporter page for my state and people there seem to be switching over in significant numbers and/or saying they won’t be voting for Harris.

I haven’t seen any public polling that has drilled down deep enough to isolate the Health Mom vote, but I’m sure the campaigns’ finer-grained internal polls will do so.  I don’t know what they’re showing, but I’d be willing to bet that it will be something significant.  Certainly the Democrats’ harsh response to Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump suggests that they’re worried; if they thought his voters would cross over to Kamala, they’d be nicer to him.

If enough Kennedy voters shift to Trump to boost his margin by 2-3 percent, that’s likely to put him over the top in a number of swing states.  And of course, Kennedy isn’t just a guy who talks about children’s health – he’s also launched powerful critiques of the Democrats’ lawlessness, support of political censorship, and general corruption, critiques that are powerful because, well, they’re true.

Will Health Moms be the difference this election?  I think they just might.

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