MAHA Ohio 2026 Candidate Questionnaire

In this episode we go over our new MAHA Ohio 2026 Candidate Questionnaire.

If you are a candidate in Ohio and you want to take the quiz use this link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc0i5KdjY37wGFoivKWWWk8NNPli7dcRPjj5a6hJwbvUFKvNQ/viewform

Candidates who want to put together a social media strategy for announcing your score or receiving an official endorsement please send an email to mark@independentforceusa.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Mohawama Mohano podcast. My name is Elizabeth Frost. I'm here with my co-hosts Mark Harris and Daniel DeLuca. We're excited to be back with you today and to share a little bit about our endorsement process and how candidates like maybe yourself, if you're a candidate listening, or maybe you're a volunteer and you maybe you have a favorite candidate that you'd like to see Maha Ohio endorse. This episode's for you. We're going to jump into exactly what that process looks like. But first, if you're new here, a little bit about ourselves. Maha Ohio is a grassroots network that was founded after the Kennedy campaign ended in 2024. We were all either staff or volunteers on the Kennedy campaign who had just really come to build meaningful relationships with people and communities throughout our state that just made it clear to us that there was still a lot of work to do. And, you know, the health of Ohioans wasn't tied directly to whether or not the campaign that we were working on was successful. And so, you know, the mission had to continue, the show had to go on. So Maha Ohio came to be after that. We are here focusing on state-level policy and local health and environmental issues with downstream health impacts here in our state. That ranges everything from nuclear projects to train derailments to data centers, what's in our school lunches, what's approved in our SNAP program here in Ohio, as well as things like school start times and a lot, a lot of things in between. So we're excited to talk to candidates and learn a little bit more about what's driving them, where they stand on issues that are important to Maha Ohio supporters and just Ohio constituents and residents in general who are concerned about the chemicals and toxins that they interact with in their food and their daily lives. So without further ado, I'm going to pass it over to my co-host, Mark Harris, to kick into a little bit more about our endorsement process.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

Yeah. So first thing I want to mention here is we're not the only entity that's endorsing candidates in and around the Maha sphere. Obviously, you've got Maha Action at the national level that's endorsing candidates outside of the state. But even in the state of Ohio, we have other organizations that are sister or associated organizations. One of those is a grouping of our representatives in the State House, the Ohio Maha Caucus, who have their own endorsement process, very similar issues to what we have in ours, but from a slightly different perspective. And what we're hoping to do is show that candidates can be endorsed by both the grassroots organization, ourselves here, but also from the people who are actually doing the policymaking in the legislature and are trying to bring colleagues on board that can help them succeed in the Ohio legislature. So we're really hoping, in addition to the things we're going to lay out here in this episode, and we really want to encourage candidates to both be endorsed by us, Maha Ohio, and also by the Ohio Maha caucus. So we're encouraging candidates to take both quizzes and try to seek both endorsements. There is some communication back and forth. So we're hoping to catch people on both sides. But if you are interested in running for office in the state and you care about Maha issues, this will be the easiest way to get those endorsements on the state level. So that's enough about other people's endorsement process. Let me tell you a little bit about ours and we'll just go over some of the basic points here. So first off, the score is going to be out of 100 points. So that's 10 five-point questions and five 10-point questions. Obviously, some things we thought were more important than others. That's why we built this in a tiered system like that. And we'll go through each one of these questions here and give a little bit of our thought process. But basically, what we've decided is in addition to endorsing candidates that we think are, you know, the candidates we want to support, we want the numeric number there to be objective. You know, this also informs volunteers who may be voting strategically. Some candidates are better than others. That doesn't mean they are 100% lockstep with what we want to see happen in this state. And we want to be able to show, you know, here's a better candidate, but this candidate has room to grow. And that's why we need to keep putting pressure on them to do the things that we as Maha voters want to see done. So that's part of why we built it the way we did. But without further ado, uh, let's get into the first question here. And I'm gonna throw it back to you, Elizabeth.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Thank you, Mark. So I guess I'll just jump right into these questions in no certain order. We're actually not gonna be really publicizing which questions were weighting higher than others. We just want everyone to answer based on how they really feel. But that being said, we are gonna be asking questions on a range of things, starting with do you support a ban on cloud seeding or other intentional weather modification in the state? And then we're also gonna ask things like, do you support removing junk food from SNAP benefits? So obviously those two things are pretty uh wide-ranging, and that's what you're gonna find a lot of with this questionnaire. And as we go through these questions kind of one by one, then I think you'll kind of get the picture of just how wide-ranging the interests of Maha in the state of Ohio are. And so I'm gonna pass it over to Danny.

SPEAKER_02 6:02

Thanks, Elizabeth. Appreciate it. We'll go over some a couple of these questions here. One question that we have is are you committed to advocating for corporate accountability, including financial responsibility relative to industrial waste management and downstream human health impacts? Which that's a mouthful for sure for a question. Um, but it is very important for us to have a question like that because we need to know like how they feel about the corporate involvement and involved with what they're doing with their waste and how how it's gonna be affecting people, because that's a big part of like health for everyone in the state is knowing where this waste management's gonna be, uh, especially with new industries coming in that could be producing higher levels of waste. We want to make sure it's being taken care of. I mean, specifically one would be data centers and a lot of the waste that it has going on where it's gonna go. So that's kind of why it's an important question to have on our list here. And then we have also we support a thorough and transparent review of all data relative to radioactive contamination past and present at the DOE uranium enrichment site and Pike County. Another very long question, but another important one because uh Pike County has had a lot of uranium issues for years. Elizabeth's from around that area, so she knows how much uh the uranium has been an issue. So really trying to understand like what their enrichment level is and how comfortable somebody is is very important because uh uranium can be a very dangerous byproduct if it's not handled well. So both of these have a lot to do with uh human health and just kind of the oh you know ecological health of Ohio. So I I guess we'll pass it on to Mark for a couple more questions that he wants to cover.

SPEAKER_01 7:53

Yeah, a couple more questions uh were one do you support removing junk food from SNAP benefits? Uh obviously, this is important. This has been one of the things that at the national level they've really been pushing for. From you know, Maha Action has talked about this, but Kennedy also talked about this on the campaign. You know, what really the biggest problem with children's health is that they eat terrible food. And just like, you know, you learn very basically, you are what you eat. And these kids, you know, who are on Snap, the poorest amongst, you know, amongst us, are getting the poorest nutrition, you know, and it's it's not fair uh to these kids who need every benefit they can, you know, with their, you know, again, starting off from a bad start, that they're they're getting these horrible, horrible food because it's what's affordable and therefore it's what makes the snap program stretch the furthest. You've got to think about this. If you've got four kids and you gotta feed them all, and you can buy the whole, you know, the the way snap works these days is it basically acts as a cache. Um so it, you know, you go to the store, you select the item off the shelf, and you you know pay whatever the sticker price is, and it's compensated by the snap. And then it tracks by what type of purchase it is, what categories it falls into, but you're still very much limited by what's available in the market. So when you basically fill the market full of cheap crap food, and you've got these people using this program, that's the only food they can really afford and can actually stretch to feed what needs to be done. If you limit it to healthy foods, it becomes very clear very quickly that those categories that measure the items purchased and the volume of that to be consumed, it becomes very, very clear that you know that's not going to line up very well. We're gonna need to expand maybe either the accessibility or the pricing, the way that that works on Snap, or we might need to just change the markets or all of the above. But at the end of the day, we can't see that, and the system keeps turning over if Snap continues to feed kids crap through letting them buy junk food using Snap benefits. The next question here is Do you support removing ultra-processed foods from school lunches and transitioning to a more whole food dense menu for Ohio's children? This is the same thing that we're talking about with the SNAP benefits. If you give kids junk food and make that what's food available to them, you know, kids don't get to choose what they have for lunch. It's what's provided by the school or you know, what the parents pack, which takes us back to the, again, the SNAP argument we were just making a moment ago. But the same point here is we should be using our school systems to you know teach our kids about healthy foods, but part of that is providing them healthy foods. You can't teach kids how to eat a properly balanced meal, even you know, provide that for them unless you remove these ultra-processed foods. Um, they're gonna be what's cheapest. School systems are on a tight budget. Uh, they should be. Um, they're a government entity. So obviously, government entities, we want them to not, you know, be wasting money. But uh ultra-processed foods is really actually the bigger waste. But they're trapped into this by the way the market is structured because it's flooded with this cheap, horrible food that it looks like, oh, yeah, we're feeding the kids when we're feeding them cheaper. But actually, you're not even giving them, you know, the nutrients and the stuff they need to grow. You're depriving that of them. And that is not what we should be doing in public schools. So it's gonna be a process. That's why we put transitioning in there. Uh, we're not going to be able to just flick it off and on like a light switch and switch over. Um, but we need to start making conscious policy decisions to work towards that direction. But I'm going to go ahead and pass it to Elizabeth for a couple more questions.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

Thank you, Mark and Danny. So the next couple questions that we've got here to discuss are whether or not you as a candidate support Ohio patients' access to ibogaine treatment for addiction and PTSD, assuming it is prescribed and administered by a licensed medical professional. And this question, really at its core, is a right to try question. It's an informed consent question. Here in Ohio, we have a bill in the state house, not relative to ibogaine, but relative to the patient's right to try. And I think that this translates whether you're talking about the right to try with things like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin in the case of something like COVID, or whether you're talking about the right to try with something maybe a little more experimental, like psychedelic treatments for addiction and PTSD. It it really is something that Maha supporters care about to have the medical freedom to make those decisions for themselves if they're struggling with something that's really plaguing their everyday lives. It's not con it's not as consequential to them to try something as it might seem to people looking at data sets and saying, you know, well, there's there's risk here. We don't know the the answers to this question. So we felt like this was important to include because it it really is important to Maha supporters and something that we're often asked about. Um and you know, our our supporters and our volunteers often ask us for updates on any news about this in the state. So we wanted to really represent this question as well. And another question that we're hearing a lot about from our supporters and from our contacts in the state is around data centers. So we're also going to be asking would you support a moratorium on the construction of new data centers in Ohio over 25 megawatts? So this is in line with the citizen-led ballot measure that um you might be familiar with. And if not, I would really encourage you to become familiar with because it's very emblematic of how the citizens are feeling about this wave of data centers coming into Ohio. I guess I saw something today that you know showed that we had data centers popping up in almost every county in Ohio, several counties with multiple underway under construction. And it really is of great concern to the residents, even though these corporations have seem to have an answer for everything. You know, when something goes wrong, it can go majorly wrong, and it will be the residents of Ohio that suffer the consequences and pay the burden for it, just like they have with so many other industries. You know, there's really a sense from our supporters in Ohio of the Maha movement that we're really sick of footing the bill, especially with our health for industrial profit. And, you know, we of course value the economic advancement. And, you know, we we want to see the economic development come into our state, but we want to see it done in ways that suggest that, you know, the folks who are overseeing this and handing out many of these contracts at Ohio jobs and other organizations, you know, we really want to see that Health of Ohioans is at the forefront of this. And this is something that is just important to get a gauge of where our legislators are at. Um, I'm gonna pass it to you, Danny, to kick into a couple more questions for us.

SPEAKER_02 15:49

Thanks, Elizabeth. Appreciate you taking those few questions. We're gonna continue on with a couple more here. Uh one being, do you support implementing permanent standard time in Ohio, assuming neighboring states would also agree to participate? Basically, preventing a time zone island is what you would want there. So so permanent standard time in Ohio would definitely help with a more natural sleep cycle than the current way that we have it set up with daylight savings and it constantly switching back and forth. So that would be the goal of getting to a permanent standard time is to help people get better rested, which could help their immune system, which will help overall health and mental sanity for some people. But uh definitely good to get as much sleep as possible because if you don't get enough sleep and cause all kinds of issues and potential driving issues, and there's a lot of problems in uh the daylight saving time sleep system that we have now, uh, because people just aren't getting enough sleep out there. So, another question that we have is Southern Ohio is home to some of the highest cancer rates in the country. Would you support state-funded research to investigate the root causes? So, this is really important because there's a lot of areas that here in Ohio that have a very high cancer rates, like the Pike County with the uranium and other places where there were factories that are no longer there, and different dumping facilities that are there, and then people have high cancer rates, and they're not always being attributed one thing leading to the other. So, doing more research into connecting that this site has a high cancer rate because this old factory was here, or because the uranium leak, or because whatever the actual problem is, would definitely help people feel better and understand why they have cancer, how to do it, and potentially there could be a healthcare involvement if those areas are viewed as dangerous or caused by the government if there was a big long litigation for that. Which it may not happen, but doing the research will definitely give people a better understanding of why cancer rates are so high in Ohio, and that that's very important to know for just everyone's health, so that you know we understand these huge cancer rates are related to certain things. So uh we have a couple more questions that we're gonna go through and we're gonna hand that off to Mark.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

So, another couple questions here. Do you support Ohio patients' right to access off-label medications, assuming they are prescribed by a licensed medical professional, and the patient is aware of the known risks and limitations of research? So, this is directly tied to House Bill 12. And to bring it back to what I mentioned earlier in the podcast, this is another question where it is paralleled with what we know is going on with the Maha caucus, because this is a bill that has been sitting in the state legislature for years now, and it just can't seem to get through. But it is very, very important, and it goes back to the COVID days where people wanted to try the hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. And, you know, these are well-researched chemicals. And the thing that the medical establishment always tries to point back to is they supposedly don't have any positive outcomes that were found. But they also don't have very many uh negative side effects. So the idea here is when you're not sure what's going on and you know the limitations of these well-studied compounds, and there is a chance that it might help. And a patient wants to take that chance, and their doctor, you know, who looks at the patient's record, looks at the medications interactions with maybe other things that are going on with their body, and says this would be safe enough to take for the chance of a possible positive outcome. And the way the system is set up right now, that can be stopped, like it was a lot of times during COVID. And we want to change that in the state. So that is one thing that we are looking for from all candidates is basically will you help either House Bill 12 or House Bill 12 as it is, or something that you know is basically the exact same thing, uh, might get renumbered or something, depending on how the processes go. But will you be there and will you come to bet for not just as it is, but the idea and getting this over the line in whatever way that's going to be? So the other question we have here is uh, do you agree that root cause prevention is an ideal and the most cost-effective way to protect Ohioans' health? And I think this is just a pretty straightforward thing that, you know, more or less says, do you think like Maha thinks? This isn't this isn't tying you up to a policy position or anything like that as a candidate. But this is the way that people in Maha think about the world. That if we can solve the root causes of the health problems we have, instead of spending all this money trying to prop up people and keep them alive and you know dealing with these issues and chronic illness, what can we do to stop it from happening in the first place? And that's just kind of a core tenet of the movement and really just kind of how Maha thinks. So if you aren't aligned with that way of thinking, it'd be pretty hard for you to align yourself with Maha. And I'm gonna pass it back to Elizabeth.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Thank you, Mark. So the next question that we've got in front of us that you'll see on our questionnaire is do you support presumptive liability in favor of Ohio citizens in response to toxic chemical spills when their condition aligns with known chemical exposures associated with the spill? So, for example, holding Norfolk Southern presumptively liable for East Palestine residents' medical conditions associated with PFAS exposures. And then we've also got another question here Do you support moving high school start times back to 8 30 a.m. to be? In line with scientific data that suggests teenagers need more sleep for hormonal development and cognitive function. So, again, just kind of like I said at the top of this episode, um, our questions cover a lot of ground. So, we're doing a lot of work in East Palestine. You might be aware of our collaboration with Yale in their research project regarding the water quality in East Palestine. And, you know, we are also working with candidates in Ohio, encouraging adding start school later as a campaign priority and making sure that we are putting children's health not just in regard to medications or in regard to food quality, but in regards to the very fundamental things that we all understand are very important. And science very clearly suggests that, especially teenagers are vulnerable to hormonal issues and a lot of downstream health effects related to sleep disorders. So we want to be extra careful in Ohio to not set our children up to fail with extremely early start times. Throughout the state, we have many high schools that start as early as 7 a.m. It's currently, you know, something that the school districts decide. And in conditions where we know that many Ohio children live in rural areas or have complicated bus routes to get to school. When we start schools as early as 7 a.m., we are guaranteeing that they don't have the ability to get eight hours of sleep if they go to bed at a recommended time like 11 p.m. You know, we're asking our kids to wake up as early as 5:30 in the morning in some cases and stay out well past 10 p.m. with sports or well up well past 10 p.m., um, 11 p.m. doing homework and just trying to spend time with their family and be a kid. So uh we we want to support and encourage these really practical changes, as well as things that might seem a little bit more complicated or daunting, like presumptive liability, but are you know very, very important to chemically impacted communities, which unfortunately we have too many of in Ohio. So I'm gonna pass it over to you, Danny, for our final two questions.

SPEAKER_02 24:25

Thank you, Elizabeth. Appreciate you giving me the last couple of questions to go over. So, one is do you support implementing a certificate of need system for addiction treatment centers in Ohio for the purpose of mitigating the overall industrialization and disproportionate concentrations of for-profit treatment centers in the state? Which is another long question to have to read, but a very important one for sure. Yeah. So this question is addressing a few different aspects of treatment centers in Ohio. The one being that some areas are just overlogged with treatment centers. There's just too many, and they're not functioning the way that they should, or they're not exactly helping out the way that they were intended to. So it's kind of even it out, make it more uh of a realistic uh thing for it to be more effective and not so possibly damaging to communities where there's just inundated with all these different treatment centers. Um, the next question that we're gonna address here, and I think this is our last question, is do you support uh extending SNAP benefits to promote access to real food, such as adding farmers' markets to snap benefits? So this one's kind of an easier question. It's basically saying, would you allow for Snap to be used at farmers' markets, which would help out with the welfare community because they don't have access to some of these healthier foods. With SNAP, we've been trying to get rid of a lot of junk food and a lot of soda and that kind of thing. So allowing them to have access to real food in the farmers market would really help that population's health overall. So this would be a very good uh benefit for them to have. So these are a lot of our questions that we had, and these are all very important issues for Maha, Ohio and Maha in general. So this is why we uh composed all this questionnaire together, and I'm gonna pass this over to Mark.

SPEAKER_01 26:25

Yeah, thank you, Danny, and thank you all for you know giving us the time uh to explain these questions and why we chose them. I think it's really reflective of some of the stuff we've been working on and the priorities uh that we've talked to with you know grassroots volunteers, voters in the state about the things that really affect them and what they want to see the Maha movement in the state be about and address. So, like I said earlier in the podcast, we're really hoping to, you know, get these posted up as endorsements for people, very similar to what you see with like, you know, like your, I forget if it's the National Rifle Association or a few of these other organizations. They'll post their like, you know, uh Second Amendment score or their libertarian score for the libertarians out there. So I think we're trying to do a similar thing by adding this number in there. And we want to be able to use this to help candidates generate positive PR uh with Maha-minded voters. So with that in mind, we do want very much uh as many candidates who are running, you know, at the state level or below that want to take this questionnaire to do so. And then if they want us to create a graphic and do an official endorsement or like a posting on official social media, we'd hope they'd reach out to us directly and we can get something set up because we don't want this just to be a, you know, we work really hard to not make this a purity test on how whatever you are, uh, but really reflect the things that are important. We don't want this to be an arbitrary barrier. We want this to be a positive thing that helps push people along. So part of that is the social media component. So uh for you who are volunteers or just regular listeners, look out on our social media. We're going to be posting candidates and their scores in the near future here as we get people to take the quiz. But for candidates, we really want to be able to do that for you and do like collaborative posting there. So uh do feel free to reach out to us directly. Uh, probably in the show notes, I will include the proper email to email if you want to set up something like that. We don't want to just post scores without you know having a conversation with the candidate and what you know what they want us to do with that score, but we do want to encourage any candidate to take it and then encourage them to seek out a social media strategy with us.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

All right. Thank you, Mark, and thank you for listening. Whether you're a candidate or a Maha supporter that's just curious what this questionnaire looks like and the types of questions that we're asking candidates, you know, we hope that it helped you kind of understand the breadth of our priorities and what we've been working on over the past several months. And, you know, in some cases, uh, for some of these issues that are addressed here, um, you know, we've been really working on since the Kennedy campaign. You know, as we discussed at the beginning of the episode, Maha Ohio is an organization that's primarily focused at the state level. And we also hope that this is an example for everyone at, you know, to see how much of Maha's priorities really can be accomplished at the state level in Ohio. It's it's not just about medical freedom issues, there's a lot of ways that we can make people healthier here in Ohio. So we're we're really excited to share this with the world. And we hope that you enjoyed listening to this episode and that you stay updated with us on all of our other platforms. And you can learn more about us at mahaohio.com. Thank you, everyone.

SPEAKER_01 30:07

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 30:10

Thank you very much for listening. Appreciate it.