What Went Down In The 2018 Midterms

We heard a lot this election season about scientists running for public office. But how many are actually running? That’s a question I can’t really answer. Why? Because nobody ever came to an agreement on a definition of what a science candidate is.

Check out the differences between two different counts of science candidates running for the U.S. House:

One is from the magazine Science; the other is from political scientist Matthew Motta. There are BIG differences here, obviously, and that’s in part because each counter counted totally different things. Science, which has the lower number, is limiting its count to first-time candidates who have a graduate-level degree in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field. One reason that Motta’s number is so much higher is that he included incumbents. His approach was also generally broader — including people with science undergraduate degrees and people who have no science degree at all, but are strong advocates for science.

One interesting thing to look at here is the presence of Republicans. Science originally didn’t find any Republicans who fit its definition, although it later added physician Steve Ferrara, who is running in the Arizona 9th, and neurosurgeon Jim Maxwell, who is running in the New York 25th. Motta’s count of Republicans is higher for the same reason that his overall numbers are higher, capturing incumbents like former mechanical engineer Chris Collins, who represents New York’s 27th District, and people who hold bachelor’s degrees — but not graduate degrees — in STEM fields, such as former NASA employee Rick Green, who is running in the Massachusetts 3rd.

This difference also hits on some debates about why you might want scientists elected to Congress to begin with — something I wrote about during the primaries. The Democratic Party has made science an identity factor in a way that the Republican Party hasn’t. The founder of 314 Action, a political advocacy group that is endorsing and promoting STEM candidates, once referred to hypothetical Republicans the organization would be willing to endorse as “unicorns.” It’s easy to walk away with the idea that being a scientist will, naturally, lead you to support Democratic Party values.

And, yet, the majority of doctors currently serving in Congress are Republicans. Collins was one of the first congressional Republicans to endorse Trump. Basically, if you’re a liberal looking to science backgrounds as an indicator of political stances, one big takeaway from the different definitions of a science candidate that exist is that STEM-ness might not be a clean way to measure that.