Eight candidates with scientific backgrounds have been elected to the US Congress in last week’s mid-term elections. They were part of a significant contribution to the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives, beating Republican incumbents or winning seats that have long been held by the Republican party. The success of the first-time candidates will roughly double the number of scientifically trained members of the new Congress when it convenes in January.
From the eight candidates, four of whom are women, five trained as engineers while the remaining three have medical backgrounds as a paediatrician, dentist and nurse. “[They] definitely exceeded our expectations,” says Shaughnessy Naughton, president and co-founder of 314 Action – a pressure group founded in 2016 that recruited and trained them. Naughton notes, for example, that Joe Cunningham, a former ocean engineer who is now an environmental lawyer, became the first Democrat in more than 35 years to represent a constituency in South Carolina.
Naughton says that the candidates were successful because they used their scientific and technical backgrounds to talk about issues in their communities from a scientific, problem-solving perspective rather than a political one. “The candidates we supported have a more bipartisan view of government,” she adds.
The difference in politics is that people are out to undo you – not just do better than you. In science, it’s the evidence that counts, not the person. In politics it is indeed the person.
Rush Holt
“The reason they did so well,” says Bill Foster, the Illinois Democrat who remains the only physicist in Congress, “was the outreach against Trump and his non-factual positions.” Indeed, the candidates’ victory was not entirely unexpected according to Rush Holt, a plasma physicist and former Democratic Congressman who now heads the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “Over the past two years I’ve seen it developing,” he told Physics World. “The marches for science in 2017 and 2018 suggested that scientists felt more publicly inclined and that the non-science public was asking them to be more publicly inclined.”
Bringing scientific thinking to government
Yet the transition from science to politics is unlikely to be easy, and according to Foster, the new members will have to deal with a “very irrational place”. “It’s not what’s scientifically true,” he says, “but what you can convince people of”.
That view is backed up by Holt who says the two worlds of science and politics are very different. “Tenacity and hard work, which most scientists bring, are necessary ingredients,” he says. “An ability to frame a problem so that it can be approached effectively and efficiently is useful. But you have to learn some new skills. Holt feels that the hardest adjustment for a scientist going into politics will be psychological. “Science is competitive. But the difference in politics is that people are out to undo you – not just do better than you,” he adds. “In science, it’s the evidence that counts, not the person. In politics it is indeed the person.”
Nevertheless, Foster expects the new Representatives to bring scientific thinking to government. “You have to design logically consistent mental constructs to talk about the world and to make policy decisions,” he says. “That mental habit will bleed into the thought process of Congress generally.”
Neal Lane, a physicist at Rice University who was science adviser to President Bill Clinton, says that while their day-to-day work will be different, there are rewards. “Their fellow Congressmen and Congresswomen will have the benefit of working with colleagues who understand the value of evidence in decision-making and will, I hope, learn from them,” adds Lane.
Serving the public
The Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives will also affect the activities of its committee on science, space, and technology where Texas Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson is likely to replace Republican and fellow Texan Lamar Smith as committee chair. In contrast to Smith’s skepticism about climate change and other scientific issues, Johnson’s platform includes ensuring that “the US remains the global leader in innovation”, addressing “the challenge of climate change,” and restoring the committee as “a place where science is respected and recognised as a crucial input to good policymaking.”
