Donald Trump has changed the way scientists engage with presidential elections.
After he was voted president in 2016, tens of thousands attended the March for Science around the country the following year. When he was running for reelection against Joe Biden in 2020, several journals, including Nature and The Lancet Oncology, took the historic step of endorsing a candidate in a presidential race for the first time.
This fall, scientists and scientific journals are facing a new reality. Covid-19 is no longer the driving issue of the election, and Americans’ trust in science has declined since 2020.
STAT asked editors and contributors to a range of scientific journals about the thinking behind their approaches to the election, and spoke with experts on science communications about the role of science in politics today. One overriding concern became clear: While the outcome of the election will have major consequences for health issues like abortion, the opioid epidemic, and global health policy, people in the field are increasingly concerned about how wading into partisan politics might further erode trust in scientific institutions.
“We have a lot of really difficult societal conversations ahead of us,” said Dietram Scheufele, a communication scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Entering the room as a perceived partisan player for those conversations will be absolutely detrimental to evidence-based policy-making down the road.”
To endorse or not to endorse
In October, the journal Science published a special edition on democracy that included news stories and an editorial about the U.S. election. Science decided not to endorse either candidate because of its status as a nonprofit organization, which prohibits it from engaging with campaigns. Science editor-in-chief Holden Thorp also said the journal can have more impact in other ways.
“We think the facts are so crystal clear around this kind of thing that our readers can easily take from what we report and what we comment on everything that they need to make their decision,” he said. “We don’t think we would add anything to that by making an endorsement.”
One popular journal that did choose to make an endorsement was Nature, which published an editorial with the headline: “The world needs a US president who respects evidence.” This is the second time the journal has chosen to endorse in a U.S. presidential election.
“The fate of scientific research, evidence-based lawmaking and the government’s receptiveness to independent science-policy advice will be key determinants of the country’s future course and long-term well-being,” the journal wrote in its endorsement this week.
Nature’s 2020 endorsement was controversial. The journal Nature Human Behavior later published a study on the decision that found when Trump supporters were told about the endorsement, they trusted the journal less, were less likely to read Nature articles on Covid-19, and were less trusting of science in general.
Scheufele raised a separate concern over Nature’s choice to endorse.
“To which degree a British journal owned by a German publishing house telling Americans who to vote for is a particularly strategically good idea, is a question that I think is open for debate,” he said.
Nature declined to respond to questions about its decision to endorse.
Also worth noting is that Scientific American, a magazine that covers science for a popular audience and is owned by Springer Nature, decided to endorse Kamala Harris this election — a decision that opened it up to both praise and criticism. “We have a lot of knowledge, and we have, I think, the opportunity and the responsibility to explain how science is at stake in the election,” editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth said on STAT’s First Opinion Podcast. “And not just science, of course — health care, the environment, education, technology.”
JAMA and its network journals did not make an endorsement, instead opting to publish 111 articles pertaining to the election and various policies on the ballot along with an editorial summarizing the results. The papers focused on four areas: Prescription drug costs, women’s health, public health policy, and the opioid epidemic.
“We’re not trying to take a position or do an endorsement, but we’re really just trying to really underscore the high stakes for health and health care in this and every election, but particularly this upcoming election,” said Linda Brubaker, a deputy editor at the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The New England Journal of Medicine similarly aimed to lay out comparisons between the two parties on health issues, publishing a series of four articles in October on overall health policy, health equity, affordability of health care and insurance coverage.
Marcella Alsan, a health economist at the Harvard Kennedy School who was an author on the paper covering health equity, said the goal was to cover epidemics that are uniquely prevalent in the United States, with disparate levels of prevalence tied to factors like race and socioeconomic privilege: opioid overdoses, deaths by firearms, childhood obesity, and maternal mortality.
When compared to other high-income countries, “We’re kind of off the charts,” she said.
Benjamin Mason Meier, a professor of global health policy at the University of North Carolina, contributed to two academic commentaries on the election. One, for Cambridge University Press, laid out the stakes of the election for his field; the other, for The Lancet Regional Health, made comparisons between the two candidates.
Rather than compiling information comparing the two candidates, his goal was to “develop non-partisan teaching resources that could support classroom discussions on the global health impacts of this coming election,” he said.
Political, not partisan
Scholars who study science communications and perceptions of science say that the decision to endorse a candidate risks further entrenching the idea that science is a partisan issue.
“Science has always been political, and it will always be political,” said Scheufele. But partisan, he says, means “that we actually align our thinking with one party.”
Researchers have documented a decline in trust of science among conservatives since the 1970s, but the divide was exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing debates over public health measures like vaccines, quarantines, and masking, experts said.
The Pew Research Center, which collects data on public trust in science and medicine annually, reported in 2022 that around 1 in 3 conservatives felt public health officials were doing a “good” or “excellent” job responding to the coronavirus outbreak and about half believed government officials overreacted to the pandemic.
“Before the Covid pandemic the gap between Republicans and Democrats was much more modest,” said Alec Tyson, an associate director of research at the Pew Research Center. In April 2020, 85% of Republicans said they had “great” or “fair” levels of confidence in science; by December of 2021, that number had dropped to 63%.
“That 22 point drop, it’s the biggest change we’d seen in this data for about a decade — and it corresponds quite tightly with the first year and a half of the pandemic,” Tyson said.
The growing partisan divide on science is concerning, Scheufele and others said, noting that scientists and health care workers are typically among the most trusted demographics in the country.
“The claim of science’s rightful place in society is that we’re the best curators of knowledge, and that we are that because we function in a systematic, objective and neutral way. That is a claim that underlies everything that we do,” Scheufele said.
If it’s true that journal endorsements undermine trust in scientists more broadly, as the Nature Human Behavior study suggested, “they’re undermining the capacity of the entire community of scientists to speak on issues that potentially could have relevance to politics,” said Cory Clark, a behavioral scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied why organizations make political statements. “We now have an uphill battle when we’re trying to speak about our own areas of expertise that bear on politics, because the public doesn’t trust us, not because of what we did, but because of what these editors are doing.”
Americans’ trust in institutions including the federal government, universities, and the media are all also on the decline, and science is still held in comparatively high regard. But that is largely predicated on the idea that science is not a partisan issue, Scheufele said.
“The moment science becomes just one institution like all the others that is being aligned with partisan views, we will see the exact same declines in trust,” Scheufele said. “For us, that’s existential.”