MUSKEGON, Mich. — John Trocke is at a place he’s never been before: considering whether to vote for a Democrat. Specifically, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
The 42-year-old architect from Holland, Michigan, has been frustrated with the Trump administration’s failure to adopt the majority of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again platform.
“Republicans need to be spanked a bit in this coming midterm,” Trocke said. “I’ve become so disenchanted with the GOP that I’ve opened myself … to different possibilities.”
Trocke is one of a growing cadre of MAHA voters around the nation who say the Trump administration has failed to make good on the promises of the 2024 presidential race. He’s also part of a voting bloc that El-Sayed believes he can lure away from Republicans.
Trending
El-Sayed’s platform, which includes several policies aligned closely with MAHA priorities on food quality, pesticides and breaking apart monopolies in America’s food system, has interested Trocke, who already supported El-Sayed’s views on Iran and Israel.
“I think [RFK Jr.] has sold out his movement,” El-Sayed said in an interview with The Washington Sun on Monday. The former Wayne County health director added that he worked on and wrote about these issues before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran for president.
“I want to be talking about what we can actually do to take that mantle, [and] stand up against corporations,” El-Sayed said.
MAHA supporters never cleanly fit in either party. Kennedy, who himself was a longtime Democrat before 2023, helped Republicans expand their tent to include voters motivated by environmental and wellness causes, including anti-vaccine activists.
But the MAHA movement has been hot and cold on Republicans’ record. The administration began to phase out synthetic red food coloring and scaled back childhood vaccines, but the MAHA movement is still frustrated that President Donald Trump and Kennedy haven’t done more to go after food conglomerates and were deeply critical of Trump’s decision to loosen regulations on pesticides and other chemicals.
Whether that anger gives candidates like El-Sayed a shot at more votes depends on what these MAHA voters want to prioritize — and whether they’re willing to fully turn against Kennedy.
“RFK Jr. is kind of one of our iconic leaders,” said Rachel Atwood, an organizer in Western Michigan’s MAHA community who likes El-Sayed’s position on banning pesticides, but says she’s still likely to vote for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers. “Can [El-Sayed] win over MAHA voters based on dyes and pesticides when he has now … verbalized support of vaccine [mandates] and has attacked RFK Jr. for questioning them?”
El-Sayed has nonnegotiables. He’s adamant about vaccines and is a sharp critic of Kennedy’s. He accused the health secretary of being “bought by corporations” in his interview with The Sun, and promised to open an investigation into how the Department of Health and Human Services handled the recent cyclospora outbreak if appointed to the Senate committee overseeing HHS.
“Eight thousand Michiganders were infected, and possibly, probably many, many more,” El-Sayed said of the outbreak. “I really want to subpoena him and understand why this happened.”
El-Sayed’s position on vaccines was a deal-breaker for Atwood.
For Trocke, who is vaccinated and aligns more with the anti-pesticide side of RFK’s platform, El-Sayed could do more to soften his approach toward Kennedy.
“If he were to even express some magnanimous attitude towards RFK himself,” Trocke said, “I think that would be a positive thing, and would certainly be appealing to those of us who were in that RFK camp.”
El-Sayed told The Sun he is willing to work with the health secretary — between the subpoenas.
“Where we can work together to serve Michiganders, we will, and where I need to hold him accountable to serve Michiganders, I will,” he said.
If he makes it to Washington in January, El-Sayed said he would also reach out to HHS to probe Kennedy’s leadership.
“I know for sure that there are a lot of people who work underneath [RFK Jr.] who are so disaffected by him and his leadership style,” El-Sayed said. “I will be having those conversations.”
El-Sayed says the strongest policy overlaps between his health platform and the existing MAHA movement center on processed foods and monopolies. Monopolies in America’s food system would be his first point of attack if elected to the Senate.
But while health is a regular focus of El-Sayed’s campaign stops — his calls for single-payer Medicare received some of the loudest cheers of the night at a recent town hall in Muskegon — the Democrat’s stump speech doesn’t always champion the more MAHA-coded policies in his platform.
Tasha Schurgin, a longtime organizer with Michigan for Vaccine Choice, believes El-Sayed is simply throwing the MAHA community crumbs to gain their vote.
“If you’re going to say, ‘Hey, I support the MAHA movement,’ you’ve got to really support it wholeheartedly. You can’t pick and choose what you want to support,” said Schurgin, who lives in the greater Detroit area and considers vaccines her top issue. She is voting for Rogers, who she calls the lesser of two evils.
“By no means do I think Mike Rogers is a champion of the MAHA movement or vaccine choice,” she said. “But I don’t also see him trying to capitalize on it and be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
The Rogers campaign did not return a request for comment.
Atwood points out, however, that factions of the MAHA movement still have the potential to be swayed by El-Sayed’s policies.
Trocke falls into that category. He voted for Trump in 2016 but left the presidential race blank on his ballot in the last two elections. RFK’s support for Trump in 2024 nearly lured him back to vote for the president, but this year, he has already decided he will not vote for Mike Rogers.
He’s still undecided, though, on whether he will vote for El-Sayed or leave that part of the ballot blank.
“Policy statements are easy to print and produce,” Trocke said. “But I think it certainly appears to be a good step that he came out with something.”