The midterms sent an unusual wave of doctors and scientists into office, and many shared the same backer: the 314 Action Fund, a political action committee dedicated to electing pro-science Democrats. As Wired’s Katie Knibbs reports, 14 of the PAC’s 17 U.S. House candidates won, along with hundreds of down-ballot candidates, a success rate topping 80 percent.
The winners include Michigan senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, pediatrician and South Carolina senator-elect Annie Andrews, and physician and Ohio governor-elect Amy Acton. Nine House races flipped from Republican to Democrat, sending an oncology nurse-practitioner, a mathematician, a microbiologist, a nuclear engineer and an agricultural scientist to Congress. The PAC spent more than $30 million this cycle.
“We really benefit by having those data-driven, fact-based decisionmakers actually in a position at the governing table,” said Shaughnessy Naughton, a chemist who founded 314 Action after losing a congressional race in 2016.
Health care workers and scientists have always held seats in Congress, notes Richard Frank, director of the Brookings Institution’s Center on Health Policy. “What is unusual,” he said, “is just how many came in one wave.” Frank links the surge to the Trump administration’s hostility toward medical and technical expertise.
Kristoffer Shields, who runs Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics, points to cuts to scientific research funding, as well as the pandemic, which pushed many health care workers to think about how politics shapes public health.
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The results also read, in part, as a rebuke of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA movement and its anti-vaccine messaging. “I am appalled seeing infectious diseases spreading through our communities that we had once declared eradicated,” Jasmine Clark, a microbiologist and incoming representative from Georgia, told The Guardian. Andrews, for her part, has called RFK Jr. her “archnemesis.”
314 Action isn’t slowing down: it’s starting its next recruitment round later this month.
