Democratic hopefuls for the 2028 presidential election are bashing the Trump administration’s health policies and the Make America Health Again platform as part of their early campaign strategy.
Democratic leaders, including Govs. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Josh Shapiro (D-PA), are coming out strong against the policies of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying they will not heed his public health recommendations in their jurisdictions.
Newsom, widely considered a Democratic front-runner in 2028, has built an online presence similar to Trump’s negative campaign style but on the opposite side of issues, including vaccine policy.
On his government press office account, Newsom’s team lambasted HHS’s end-of-2025 post celebrating “year one of MAHA” with a story about the U.S. breaking records with its high levels of measles cases.
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in early January that it was reducing the childhood vaccine schedule from 17 to 11 vaccinations, Newsom swiftly denounced the change and said California would follow the full list of vaccines recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics instead of the CDC.
California was also the first state last month to join the World Health Organization’s disease monitoring network after Trump’s executive order to remove the United States from the official organization took full effect.
Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL) has mirrored many of Newsom’s actions, also independently joining the WHO’s disease network and adopting the AAP’s childhood vaccine recommendations.
Pritzker was one of the first governors to thwart Kennedy’s access to his state’s autism diagnosis records last spring for studies on the connection between vaccines and autism.
Even Shapiro, who has projected more of a centrist image, has made several social media posts criticizing Kennedy after he spoke in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in January as part of his “Take Back Your Health” tour in the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections.
Shapiro has taken some actions that align with the MAHA movement, such as asking the state legislature to legalize recreational marijuana and cracking down on $11 million in Medicaid fraud in 2024.
But he has still criticized Kennedy, saying he has “made our country less healthy and less informed” and is “causing chaos and spreading misinformation.
In criticizing MAHA, though, Democrats risk alienating a bloc of voters that includes a number of people who might be winnable in other circumstances.
Corbin Trent, a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former spokesman for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), told the Washington Examiner that it would be a mistake for Democrats to dismiss MAHA outright because of its association with Trump.
“Kennedy’s crazy, you know, but that doesn’t mean that every single word Kennedy’s ever said is wrong,” Trent said. “It also doesn’t mean that everything MAHA thinks is wrong.”
Kennedy, himself a legacy Democrat until his independent presidential run in 2024, is credited with helping Trump win his second term by broadening the GOP’s tent and adding MAHA to the broader Make America Great Again platform.
While changes to vaccine policy have been Kennedy’s weakest link in terms of popular opinion, voters overwhelmingly support MAHA’s push for better nutrition and improving the food system.
A poll in October 2025 from the health policy organization KFF found that 64% of parents identified juvenile obesity as a major threat to public health. Another 68% of parents said ultraprocessed foods were a major threat, with more than one in five saying they were the biggest threat to children’s wellbeing.
A separate poll conducted by the Trump-aligned group Fabrizio Ward found that 88% of voters across the political spectrum support federal requirements for front-of-package nutritional labeling so consumers can more easily identify calories, fat, added sugar, sodium, and other ingredients.
Another 82% of voters supported requiring QR codes on food packaging that consumers can scan to find more detailed nutritional information.
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Nevertheless, Trent is not optimistic that Democrats will change their tune and start supporting MAHA.
“The problem is, the lack of willingness to take on the pharmaceutical industry, to take on the food industry, to take on all these big, big industries, and really rein them in,” Trent said. “It’s just not in the Democrats’ DNA right now.”
