Science was not deemed a high-profile issue on the in the United States mid-term elections. Yet it may have been the secret sauce that caused the Republican collapse in collapse. Due to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Democrats he brought with him for his MAHA agenda not actually becoming Republicans at all.
The Republican team losing at least the House of Representatives was numerically a given but big upsets in the Senate were not. Yet it happened and pundits will blame or extol their pet causes, like Gerrymandering, Iran and inflation. They led to the perfect storm for Democrats, often due to cultural differences. Texans are proud that they responded to the Gerrymandering of Republicans by costing Republicans control of the state legislature while Californians are proud that they rewarded Gerrymandering by Democrats by taking away three Congressional seats from ... Republicans. That's the culture of two states in a nutshell. Some will blame the attack on Iran. Others will argue that Republicans were unable to reverse the inflation of the Biden years and the economy gets the blame.
Yet what will get little mention is that Republicans flipping from being the pro-science party to being anti-food, anti-medicine and believing that Science Is A Corporate Conspiracy. All tenets of the Democratic party since the Clinton years. That is due to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Health and Human Services Secretary.
Until 2021, when Democrats took the White House back from President Trump, they were firmly anti-vaccine. The coast of California, led by progressive elites, Hollywood celebrities such as Robert De Niro and Jim Carrey, along with political allies such as Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, had more kids in schools without the MMR vaccine than every Republican state combined. We advocated for years to get California to remove "philosophical" exemptions if kids were going to school.(1) We argued that you should homeschool your child if you think vaccines cause autism, hippies, so they can hate you when they're adults but you won't be putting people with immune issues at risk.
COVID-19 changed a lot of minds about vaccines(2), which meant the largest flip was on the left.
Leading the way for those anti-science elites had been former Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He was so highly-regarded by the Democratic party that President-elect Barack Obama floated him to run EPA; a stance President Obama only abandoned when we noted he already had two UFO conspiracy theorists and a guy who claimed girls can't do math. An anti-vaccine zealot in addition to those wouldn't be the right move for a self-identified "Scientist In Chief."(3)
In 2024, Kennedy shocked Democrats by dropping out of the race for President and endorsing the Republican challenger, former President Donald Trump. After Trump won, the President shocked both Democrats and Republicans by nominating Kennedy for an even bigger prize than Obama had wanted for his friend - control of the entire Health and Human Services department. Which controls the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and EPA.
Republican strategists found a way to spin that as a positive; he was going to bring a lot of Democrats with him. And it seems he did. On Twitter, anyway. When it comes to actual voting, they may not have changed at all.
Dr. Oz, whom Democrats had staunchly defended when a group asked Columbia to remove him from the faculty for being a TV charlatan, joined Kennedy's MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement, as did many other people who hated science. Immediately, many Republicans, at least in name, began to claim corporations were poisoning us, and we needed to ban food coloring and other meaningless placebos that activist epidemiologists had tortured in food surveys to declare hazardous.
Democrats had suddenly abandoned all those positions. In this election, the only Democrats in a rant about science were people like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. But he thinks Newark is an economic role model so it's no shock he's just as illiterate about agriculture. And two Democratic members of the House campaigned against science. Yet the list of Republicans who lost after becoming allies of Kennedy is far more substantial.
Republican Senator Roger Marshall lost, the first time a Republican lost a Kansas Senate race in almost 100 years. Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton, a MAHA science conspiracy theorist, was defeated. Iowa's Zach Lahn, running for Governor as a Republican in an agriculture state, is a MAHA guy who hates science and got trounced by a Democrat.
Compare today's MAHA Republicans to the Obama administration, when 52 Democrats in Congress tried to get warning labels on "GMOs" - a narrow type of genetic engineering hated by the left - barely a decade after fellow Democrat and US President Bill Clinton forced his US Department of Agriculture to give "organic" pesticides their own special government seal.(5)
They have a lot in common. Yet that doesn't mean the people who moved with Kennedy because they think cell phones cause brain cancer and vaccines cause autism really changed their political beliefs. They still love socialism, they still hate Jewish people, they still want more centralized control of power so they have fewer politicians to lobby. And they didn't vote for other Republicans.
Republicans got clobbered badly and the nature of leadership means President Trump will take the blame, but smart people recognize that some support that seemed to be for Republicans was only because Secretary Kennedy had caused Republicans to become what anti-communist Croatian journalist Bogdan Raditsa termed korisne budale - what communists later called "useful idiots" about progressives in the west who were helping them.
NOTES:
(1) Congratulations to Dr. Richard Pan for his return to governance by winning a seat to Congress. He was the leader of the charge in the California legislature to get vaccines back into kids and it meant standing up to his own party doing it. He was vilified by fellow Democrats, called a shill for Big Pharma, told he was against the right to choose for parents, all of the usual stuff, but once enough kids died or were hospitalized in the state, Governor Jerry Brown ignored his Lt. Governor's (current Governor Gavin Newsom) objections about 'parental rights' and signed the law.
Democrats really hated Science Left Behind in 2012 when Dr. Alex Berezow and I exposed how systemic their anti-vaccine beliefs were. Every academic in their party (which was and is nearly all of academia) tried to debunk it. Here is one example by Professor Henry Bauer of Virginia Polytechnic Institute, writing in Journal of Scientific Exploration, who says that Obama being anti-vaccine does not matter because he is not an expert and people he knows agree vaccines might cause autism.He then suggests that the HPV vaccine probably does not work and therefore is just a Big Pharma money grab. His dismissal of our criticism of Obama swine flu preparedness - no multi-use vials allowed because "preservatives" cause autism - is not valid because the epidemic did not actually happen is just weird defense of his guy.
(2) The same wealthy elites who denied their kids vaccines - even paying concierge pediatricians to give kids "medical" exemptions once philosophical was no longer legal - and said President Trump was risking lives rushing an 'untested' vaccine to market, somehow got to the front of the line for it before it was available to poor people or those with clear co-morbidities. They were flashing their vaccine stickers a month before my family was able to get ours.
(3) Kennedy instead was given a taxpayer concession prize. His alternative energy company, which had only $17 million in revenue, was handed $1.4 billion by the Obama administration.
(4) Because he'd been kicked out of his spots at both Columbia and darling of progressive media, because he tried to run for Senate in Pennsylvania. As a Republican.
(5) Embracing agricultural science was nearly as big a flip as endorsing medicine. They were the party that increased the cost of FDA approval using their default 'needs more testing' veil and made drug costs so high - $1 billion and 15 years to get a product to market - that ironically only the Big Pharma they hated could afford to endure the FDA process that Democrats had created. Even something simple, like an epinephrine pen for allergic reactions, was treated like it claimed to cure cancer. Leaving ethically suspect Mylan as the overpriced sole source. Unsurprisingly, Mylan donated generously to Democratic candidates.
