A top Republican pollster believes she has identified a surprising new demographic that could help the GOP in the 2026 midterms: women who wear weighted vests.
Christine Matthews, president of Bellwether Research and a veteran of former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s campaigns, told Politico that potential new faction of swing voters has emerged after she began noticing large numbers of women sporting the latest wellness trend in the suburbs.
While suburban women have been cited as the key demographic in elections for years, Matthews believes this bloc can be narrowed even further to well-educated, health-conscious women who are politically engaged and, conveniently, easy to spot thanks to their weighted vests.
“The people who swing elections, it always sort of comes down—in particular in midterms—to suburban women,” Matthews told Politico. “This, to me, is just a particularly interesting cohort that is a subset of that group that could swing these elections because they’re so engaged. They look like they’re definite midterm voters.”
To test her theory, Matthews commissioned a national poll of 1,000 women. The results showed that about 1 in 6 reported using a weighted vest, and, crucially, this subgroup backed Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by three points in the 2024 presidential election.
In a generic congressional ballot, the weighted vest-wearing group backs Republicans and Democrats equally at 47 percent. In the wider sample of 1,000 women, 48 percent would back a Democrat, while 35 percent said they’d vote for a Republican.
According to Matthews’ poll deck, a weighted vest-wearer is someone who “does their own research” on health matters. But Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” push—led by longtime vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—could alienate these swing voters who have children at home.
“They aren’t vaccine skeptics or seed oil opponents. They are likely to be listening to a podcast while walking with a weighted vest,” the poll deck explains.
Matthews added that vest-wearing women have a “modern diet” of information shaped by podcasts, social media, and new media outlets.
“But it doesn’t cause them to go down weird fringe rabbit holes,” she said. “It encourages them to adopt something like a weighted vest, but not, like, oppose vaccines.”
The GOP will be looking for any sort of advantage it can in the hopes of retaining both the House and the Senate in next year’s elections, as historically, the party in the White House suffers huge midterm losses.
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