Healthcare

Rural MAHA Voters Don’t Think Trump Admin Has Helped Health In Their Communities, New Poll Shows

Photo by Scott Goodwill via upsplash

Most backers of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement living in rural areas do not believe the Trump administration’s health policies are actually helping their communities, per a new KFF-Associated Press poll.

The survey suggests that roughly 8 in 10 rural U.S. voters said the administration’s policies have had a negative impact or no effect on the health of individuals in their local communities. Particularly, 68 percent of these rural voters who said they aligned with the MAHA movement said they felt the same way, the poll shows.

The poll found that just 10 percent of rural Democratic voters said they had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while 74 percent of rural Republicans said the same. Roughly 5 percent of rural Democrats and 69 percent of rural Republican voters reported trusting President Donald Trump a “great deal” or “fair amount” for trustworthy health information, according to the survey.

“This poll takes the views of a small subset of voters and attempts to draw sweeping conclusions about the impact of the Make America Healthy Again agenda in rural communities nationwide. The reality is that President Trump and Secretary Kennedy have made rural America a central focus of MAHA,” an HHS spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement.

The Trump administration announced Wednesday that a $20 million investment is being disbursed in an effort to bolster healthcare technology and expand patient access in rural North Carolina via the federal Rural Health Transformation Program.

“President Trump understands that every American deserves high-quality healthcare, no matter where they live,” Kennedy said in a statement. “We are putting resources directly into rural communities to strengthen the health workforce, modernize infrastructure, expand access, and bring care closer to home.”

“We are giving states the flexibility to build solutions around the people they serve, while demanding accountability for results,” he continued. “That is how we strengthen rural health, improve the lives of patients and families, and Make America Healthy Again.”

The survey of 2,241 U.S. adults registered to vote in rural areas of the nation was conducted Aug. 12-24, among a sample drawn from the probability-based SSRS Opinion Panel. The poll’s margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points.

“Under the Trump Administration, HRSA-funded health centers served 308,000 morerural patients last year than in 2024, and HHS is building on that progress with $50 billion to transform rural health care across all 50 states and $11.2 million to develop 15 new physician residency programs in rural communities across 14 states,” the HHS spokesperson added. “In just 19 months, President Trump and Secretary Kennedy have delivered historic reforms that are fundamentally changing how the federal government approaches food, nutrition, and chronic disease.”

“From putting real food back at the center of the Dietary Guidelines to investing in next-generation agricultural technologies that reduce chemical exposure and developing the first federal definition of ultra-processed food, this Administration is taking action where Washington failed to act for decades,” the spokesperson concluded.