Two-thirds want glyphosate banned, and almost nobody has been reading about it

Treat the headline number as 66 to 67 percent and run the weighted average backwards. MAHA supporters, 26 percent of the sample, favor a ban at 72 percent; the 40 percent who say they are not MAHA supporters favor it at 70 percent ^[3][6]. That leaves the third of respondents who were not sure whether they support MAHA at all, and to make the total land where it did they have to be sitting in the mid-to-high 50s ^[3]. The party question has the same shape: 70 percent of Republicans, 69 percent of Democrats, and fewer independents than either ^[4].

Support for banning a farm input that has been in American fields for roughly fifty years ^[8][5] is therefore highest among people who have already accepted a label and lowest among people who have not. It does not track familiarity with the chemical, because there is not much familiarity to track ^[2]. Ken Winneg, Annenberg's managing director of survey research, put the same observation in the release ^[7].

The one-point distance between the parties is not a partisan finding ^[1]. The two-point distance between MAHA supporters and MAHA decliners is not a MAHA finding ^[2]. Both are inside the rounding of Annenberg's own subgroup shares, which sum to 99 percent ^[6]. What the poll is measuring is the price of holding the opinion, and the price is zero: nothing in the answer requires the respondent to have looked at a literature that an overview by FactCheck, cited in the same release, calls inconsistent ^[14].

Cheap opinions still move policy when the route is cheap, and the routes just changed. The June ruling took the jury out of the transmission line between public suspicion of Roundup and money changing hands ^[13]. What remains is administrative and legislative, and that is where a number like this one is useful. Kelly Ryerson, the MAHA activist who posts as Glyphosate Girl, has already asked the EPA in writing for a permanent phase-out of glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides, including on agricultural land ^[16]. Zen Honeycutt of Moms Across America told an April rally she had spent fourteen years pursuing a ban ^[15].

The administration is arguing with itself in the meantime. The February order protecting glyphosate production drew an outcry from the MAHA activists whose support helped reelect Trump, which Politico summarized as MAHA unleashing on the White House ^[10]. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said for years that glyphosate causes cancer without calling for it to be banned ^[11], defended that order on the Joe Rogan Experience while saying it was not something he was happy with, and that banning glyphosate overnight would destroy the American food system ^[12].

What is durable in the Annenberg data is the alignment, not the intensity. A sponsor who wants a state glyphosate bill does not have to trade anything to get votes from both sides, since there is no partisan seam to work. And a public that reports hearing little about the subject is a public unlikely to cross-examine anyone on the toxicology.