U.S. Midterm Election Results Brighten Prospects for Science
New lineup. Same challenges.
Yesterday’s midterm elections have given Democrats firm control of both chambers in the new U.S. Congress that will convene in January 2027, overturning Republican majorities. Many in the research community are hoping the pending power shift means a more sympathetic audience for their criticisms of President Donald Trump’s policies. Science advocates are eager to blunt his efforts to slash research budgets, impose political control over grantmaking, and shrink the size of the federal government. They also hope a remade Congress will push back on Trump’s efforts to restrict immigration, reduce international collaborations, and degrade federal data sets on everything from climate change to violence against the transgender community.
“We think this election bodes well for research. We just have to make sure that it stays an important priority,” says Russ Paulsen, CEO of Research!America, a coalition of major scientific organizations.
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The new Congress will include a slew of members with “first” attached to their names. Arguably the most notable is incoming House Democrat Jasmine Clark of Georgia, the first Black woman with a science Ph.D. to be seated. Trained as a microbiologist, Clark became a political activist after Trump’s election in November 2016. “I went to sleep as a scientist and woke up a mad scientist,” she says.
Daniel Biss, a newly elected House Democrat from Illinois, was an assistant professor of math at the University of Chicago before entering politics full time in 2008 and serving in the state legislature. The Illinois delegation already boasts the only Ph.D. physicist in Congress, Democratic Representative Bill Foster, who easily won reelection.
The roster of members with medical credentials will grow substantially with the election of several Democrats. The new senator from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, is an epidemiologist with a medical degree, and South Carolina voters chose pediatrician Annie Andrews for senator over appointed Republican incumbent Darline Graham.
The Democratic landslide took down the current chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, Senator Susan Collins (R–ME). Collins has been a staunch advocate for biomedical research as well as one of the few centrist Republicans who have been willing to push back on Trump’s attack on university-based research.
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