In April of 2017, as thousands of people Marched for Science in the streets of Washington, D.C., I spoke with Congressman Bill Foster in a hotel lobby not far from the National Mall. Foster was an anomaly at the time: as a physicist who had spent decades at Fermilab, he was Congress’s only trained scientist. But that was starting to change.
“We’re certainly getting a lot of nibbles,” he told me then, about the burgeoning number of scientists looking to jump in the political fray. “The level of political engagement of scientists is off-scale compared to what it has been previously.”
The March for Science highlighted the start of a movement to bring scientists into office, an effort that has been led in large part by a PAC called 314 Action (named after the first three digits of pi). Considering that it began as a response to Trump’s election and the more general perception of assault on scientific expertise, it seemed worth checking back in eight years later, when the nation’s leading anti-science pol is yet again a whisper away from the White House.
“I think particularly among the younger generation of scientists, they really see this as part of their portfolio,” said Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action’s founder and president, when we spoke in October. “We’re closing in on having endorsed 1,000 stem candidates.”
While scientists have not exactly taken over the halls of power, in general this movement has made steady progress over its near-decade. 314 Action says they have helped elect a total of over 400 candidates with STEM backgrounds to office — that includes 13 members of the House and four U.S. senators, and hundreds more at the state and municipal level. The movement hit a highwater mark in 2018, when seven scientists were elected to Congress.
There is evidence too that when these people actually take office, they use those backgrounds in specific and useful ways. For example, Lauren Underwood, a registered nurse, was first elected to represent Illinois’s 14th Congressional district in that 2018 STEM wave; soon after taking office she co-founded the Black Maternal Health Caucus. Naughton said Underwood was convinced at the time that she would likely work on the issue alone with her co-founder, Rep. Alma Adams of North Carolina; with more than 100 members now from across the aisle, she was wrong about that bit.
“No one [had] ever made it a priority before, and I would argue,” Naughton said, “because no one brought her unique experience as a nurse, as an African-American woman and a public health official to Congress, and it turned out to be a bipartisan, bicameral caucus.”
There are down-ballot examples as well. Monica Taylor, a professor of kinesiology with a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, ran for and won a seat on the Council of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, in 2019. She promptly set about installing a county board of health, which opened officially in 2022 — removing the ignominious distinction of being the country’s largest county without such a body.
This year, 314 Action is busier than ever. “We have over 400 that we’ve endorsed for this cycle running for down-ballot races,” Naughton said. “We’re pretty happy with the trajectory we’re on this year.”
At the House level, the PAC thinks some of their endorsed candidates are primed to flip GOP seats. That includes people like Janelle Bynum, an electrical engineer running in Oregon’s fifth district; John Mannion, a science teacher running in New York’s 22nd district; and Christina Bohannon, an engineer and law professor running in Iowa’s razor-thin first district race.
Naughton said that a few issues in particular seem to still be drawing STEM professionals toward politics. Climate change and gun violence were among the motivators back in 2017 and remain so today; more recently, the Dobbs decision was a thunderclap call to action for many.
“For the last two plus years, we’ve seen a lot of people motivated by the overturning of Roe v. Wade and what that means to public health,” Naughton said. Many scientists- or medical professionals-turned candidates are “realizing that the attacks on abortion access are not going to stop there, they are looking at IVF, contraception, lots of issues that really [speak] to privacy that people expect to to have.”
Overall, neither 314 Action nor the general push to bring science toward politics are huge movements. The PAC says they have shepherded less than $9 million in campaign funds to their candidates since 2016, obviously not a huge amount in the world of American elections; and some of their candidates didn’t last long once they made it to Congress. For example: Joe Cunningham, with a background in ocean engineering, won a seat representing South Carolina’s first district in 2018; he lost it to Nancy Mace one cycle later.
Still, it does seem like the overarching idea that scientists needed to stay clear of partisan politics has more or less disappeared, after existing as a sort of background hum basically forever. “If you’re you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” Naughton said. “And politicians have currently shown us that they are unashamed to meddle in science.” She said she sees a different sort of background hum now when she speaks at conferences and at universities, with PhD students and others pursuing STEM careers now much more interested in participating in the political process. It makes Bill Foster’s long, lonely tenure with no scientist colleagues seem unlikely to repeat.
“We had said back in 2018 that this is going to be the year of the scientists,” Naughton said. “And now we are trying to make every year the year of the scientists.”
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