Dozens of Democrat physicians and public health experts across the country are running for elected office in this year’s midterm elections in response to the rise of the GOP’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.
While candidates on both sides of the aisle are making healthcare costs a central part of their campaign messaging, a handful of key Democrats in high-profile races are leveraging their medical expertise to appeal to voters.
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For example, Dr. Annie Andrews is running as a Democrat against four-term Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Nearly all of Andrews’s campaign messaging emphasizes her 20 years of practice as a pediatrician, and the health and welfare of children is a central piece of her platform.
Andrews, who unsuccessfully ran against Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) in 2022, said she started her Senate campaign directly in response to the nomination of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his handling of the measles outbreak in South Carolina, as well as vaccine policy.
Some Trump supporters have credited Kennedy’s decision to drop his own presidential bid and instead endorse Trump for helping him win his second term in the White House.
The secretary last year entirely reconstituted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine safety panel, which subsequently decided not to recommend that every child receive the Hepatitis B vaccine at birth. The CDC under Kennedy’s watch also cut the childhood vaccine schedule from 17 to 11 inoculations.
But, in the lead-up to the midterm elections, Kennedy and his team have reportedly been instructed by senior advisers to lay low on vaccines because the issue does not poll well with voters.
Andrews blames Graham for confirming Kennedy, a long-term critic of vaccines, and by extension for the spike in measles cases across South Carolina.
Andrews and more than a dozen other physicians or health scientists have the support of the political action committee 314 Action, which backs Democrat candidates with STEM backgrounds.
314 Action started training and funding candidates for the 2018 midterm elections, with its main concerns pertaining to environmental and evidence-based climate change policy.
Since 2017, the organization has raised over $60 million from more than 500,000 donors. The group has been behind the victories of three senators — Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Alex Padilla (D-CA), and Chris Coons (D-DE) — as well as 15 House members and hundreds of state and local officials.
For the 2024 campaign season, 314 Action Fund spent more than $5.1 million in the 2024 campaign season on media expenses, roughly 41% of the PAC’s budget, according to the campaign finance website OpenSecrets.
Eden Giagnorio, the group’s communications director, told the Washington Examiner that 314 Action has already helped fundraise $2 million for Andrews’s campaign, calling the physician candidate “a star.”
“She’s got quite a significant online following,” Giagnorio said, “and I think that’s really helped combat a lot of online misinformation. She’s been a vocal opponent of RFK as a pediatrician and as a mom running the cycle.”
Dr. Richard Pan, also a pediatrician, is running with the help of 314 Action in the Democratic primary on June 2 to represent the greater Sacramento area in the House.
As a California state senator, Pan authored one of the country’s strictest vaccine mandate requirements for children, attracting attention from anti-vaccine activists. In 2019, an anti-vaccine protester visiting the state senate threw blood on Pan and his colleagues from the gallery.
Now, Pan told the Wall Street Journal, his goal is to “beat RFK’s lies in Washington the way I beat them in California.”
Jasmine Clark, a Ph.D. microbiologist, nursing school lecturer, and current state Georgia state representative, is also running for the House primary against incumbent Democrat David Scott.
Erik Polyak, executive director for 314 Action, told the Washington Examiner that his group recently endorsed Clark, making it the first time they have endorsed a candidate challenging a sitting Democrat.
“There’s never been a woman PhD scientist. There’s never been a black PhD scientist,” Polyak said. “She’s gonna make a lot of history here, and it’s starting to get a lot more eyeballs on this race as we get close to the Georgia primary and potential runoff.”
Clark and Scott go toe-to-toe on May 19.
The number of physicians and other healthcare professionals in Congress has dramatically risen in the past couple of years.
From 2009 to 2011, the 111th Congress only had 16 healthcare professionals in the House and Senate, including medical doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and veterinarians. Today, in the 119th Congress, there are 26.
At the state level, there is only one currently sitting physician governor, Gov. Josh Green (D-HI), an emergency medicine specialist.
But two physicians, Dr. Amy Acton, a pediatrician and preventive medicine specialist, and Dr. Nirav Shah, former Deputy CDC director under the Biden Administration, are running this year for governor in their states with the support of 314 Action.
Acton is challenging Republican former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy for Ohio’s governorship following a May 5 Democratic primary. Shah is running in a crowded Democratic field on June 9 for Maine’s open governor slot.
Recent polling commissioned by 314 Action, conducted by the left-leaning group Data for Progress, found that voters overwhelmingly trust nurses, doctors, and scientists over Trump administration officials or other public health organizations such as the World Health Organization and the pharmaceutical industry.
That’s consistent with Gallup polling from last year, which found even though confidence in doctors dipped slightly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, medical professionals still commanded significantly higher levels of public trust than other professions.
Polyak said he believes the polling shows it’s a “really strong political environment for Democrats” in general, especially those with medical backgrounds.
“Democrats with backgrounds in STEM are uniquely qualified to really lead on a lot of the most important issues of the day, like health care,” Polyak said. “They just have so much credibility.”
