The Folly of “Nature” Magazine’s Biden Endorsement

If you’re the type of person who nods vigorously in agreement when someone tells you to “trust the science,” then you probably won’t be disturbed by the results of a new study published in March 2023 in Nature Human Behaviour by Stanford University researcher Floyd Zhang. The study examined the impact of Nature magazine’s decision to endorse Joe Biden for president in the 2020 election. In that endorsement, published in October 2020, Nature editors condemned the Donald Trump administration for its “disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” as well as for “accelerating climate change, razing wilderness, fouling air and killing more wildlife — as well as people.” It also claimed that Trump “promoted nationalism, isolationism and xenophobia” and discouraged “international scientific cooperation — especially with researchers from China.” Joe Biden, the editors claimed, “is the nation’s best hope to begin to repair this damage to science and the truth.” Scientific American, another leading publication, also broke with tradition and endorsed Biden in 2020.

Did the endorsements matter? The new study suggests they did, albeit not in the way Nature’s editors likely intended. The endorsement swayed no one’s vote, but among self-identified Trump voters in the study who randomly received notice of Nature’s Biden endorsement, trust in the publication’s impartiality plummeted. That mistrust extended to those study participants’ views of science and scientists more broadly. Summarizing the study (and stating the bleedingly obvious), Nature noted in a follow-up piece that “this type of finding reflects other research indicating that a person or organization can lose credibility by taking actions that contradict their reputation.”

Had the question (“Are political endorsements by scientific organizations a good thing for the credibility of science?”) been a hypothesis, scientists might have used the clear results (“They are bad for the credibility of scientists”) to reconsider wading so deeply into electoral politics.

Not Nature’s editors! They doubled down on their decision to endorse Biden. In an editorial responding to the study results, they wrote, “Political endorsements might not always win hearts and minds, but when candidates threaten a retreat from reason, science must speak out.” The editorial continued, “When individuals seeking office have a track record of causing harm, when they are transparently dismissive of facts and integrity, when they threaten scholarly autonomy, and when they are disdainful of cooperation and consensus, it becomes important to speak up. We use our voice sparingly and always offer evidence to back up what we say.” Oddly, the editors presented no such evidence in the piece, which made the message, dripping with condescension, clear: Unlike “us” scientists, who understand exactly what the political stakes are, if you must ask for evidence, you probably aren’t intelligent enough to understand the problem.

It would be misleading, though, to view Nature’s endorsement of Biden solely as another example of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” wherein the people who lead institutions that are supposed to value objectivity and nonpartisanship instead embrace partisan politics in order to destroy a politician they deem a threat.

In fact, science and politics have always wrangled, most often when it comes to arguments over how much the government should fund scientific research and whether that funding yields results that benefit the public. Lobbying of Congress by scientific agencies in the federal government — and periodic threats by one political party or the other to cut an agency’s funding or redirect it to pet projects — has been a standard part of the appropriations process on Capitol Hill for decades. Partisan barbs — and unscientific claims — are often traded during such negotiations.

In 2014, after Republicans regained control of the U.S. Senate in the midterm elections, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science and other prominent journals, chose eight-term Democratic representative Rush Holt Jr. as its leader. Many saw his selection as a response to fears that Republicans would challenge government funding of scientific research. Weeks earlier, just before the midterms and amid an outbreak of the Ebola virus in Africa, a Democratic activist group, the Agenda Project, released an advertisement called “Republican Cuts Kill.” The ad alternated images of Republican candidates with disturbing footage of Ebola victims bleeding or in body bags, attended by medical responders. The clear message was that any attempt to cut discretionary funding for the Centers for Disease Control would increase the body count of Americans.

Scientific leaders’ wading into battle in behalf of their preferred politicians is not new, either. In 2012, Nobel Prize winners in chemistry and physics issued a public statement endorsing Barack Obama for president. It was the third presidential election in a row in which Nobel winners invoked their prestigious place among scientists to lobby for the Democratic candidate. The problem isn’t that individual scientists state a political preference, or that they do so in favor of Democrats rather than Republicans. It’s that they invoke the power of institutions, publications, and prestigious prize organizations to suggest that they speak for their profession broadly. That’s when scientists succumb to the hubris of believing that their personal views are not merely partisan opinions but a legitimate expression of Science — with a capital “S.”

Nature’s denunciations of Donald Trump and its endorsement of Biden should also be understood as part of the long-standing effort to portray Republicans as anti-science. Who can forget journalist Chris Mooney’s 2005 book, The Republican War on Science, a best seller he followed up by publishing an equally polemical volume, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality. Countless essays and news reports in the early 2000s documented various fronts in this supposed war. As recently as 2015, National Geographic featured a cover story, “The War on Science,” that framed debates over climate change and other contentious issues in martial language. Not surprisingly, as researchers in Science Communication noted, “results show that when viewed as aggressive, the war on science frame prompted conservatives to report lower agreement with a scientist credibility index than liberals, suggesting that the war on science frame has the potential to further polarize science.”

Popular works such as Mooney’s claimed that the real threat to science came not from hippie opponents of GMO foods and vaccines but from religious conservatives who objected to practices such as research on human embryos. Today, the danger is still Republican, but this time it is often the vague menace of “populism.” It has become an unfortunate shibboleth of the Left that Republicans have been, and always will be, anti-science. Evidence of Democrats’ expressing skepticism about scientific claims and developments are efficiently memory-holed to sustain this narrative. (One such skeptical comment was made by Kamala Harris, then a vice-presidential candidate; when asked by CNN whether she would take the Dr. Fauci–endorsed Covid vaccine, she replied, “Well, I think that’s going to be an issue for all of us. I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump.”)

But the narrative is wrong. As Dan Sarewitz, a professor of science and society at Arizona State University, noted in Nature ten years ago about support for research funding, “the claim that Republicans are anti-science is a staple of Democratic political rhetoric, but bipartisan support among politicians for national investment in science, especially basic research, is still strong.” He added, “For more than 40 years, US government science spending has commanded a remarkably stable 10% of the annual expenditure for non-defense discretionary programs. In good economic times, science budgets have gone up; in bad times, they have gone down. There have been more good times than bad, and science has prospered.”

Yet science publications have become increasingly political in their coverage and tone. This is clear to anyone who has noticed, for example, entire issues of Nature devoted to “Racism: Overcoming Science’s Toxic Legacy.” One study published on Substack by Researchers for Impartiality, which looked at content from Nature, Science, and Scientific American over several months in 2022, found a distinct increase in the number of political articles published. (They defined political articles as “those which cover political subjects from a partisan perspective or make explicit policy suggestions that could be politically contentious.”) During the period studied, Science, for example, “had far greater advocacy and coverage of political and identity issues than it did coverage of science issues” in its editorials.

This isn’t surprising given that the editor of Science, Holden Thorp, was one of the loudest voices supporting Nature’s endorsement of Biden, even after the Nature Human Behaviour study revealed the negative impact of such endorsements on the credibility of scientists. Although Science does not endorse candidates, Thorp rebuked “the idea that scientists can be sidelined in policy decisions,” adding, “‘Stick to science’ infantilizes scientists and tells us to sit at the kids table and let the adults decide. We must fight back.”

These fighting words are precisely the problem. When the Science is viewed by scientists as a tool to pursue partisan solutions to complex social problems that are better decided by politics, people lose trust in scientists. Recall the precipitous loss of credibility in public-health and scientific leaders after they encouraged Americans to join large Black Lives Matter protests in the middle of a pandemic, while proclaiming that it was selfish and ignorant to attend a funeral or an outdoor worship service. Anyone who challenged this contradiction was deemed a “science denier.” A February 2021 Pew Research poll found that only 29 percent of Americans “say they have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public,” down from 40 percent who said this a year earlier. And although most Americans still report having some confidence in scientists, fewer share that confidence today, compared with the level of trust before the pandemic.

The scientists who engage in this sort of rhetoric believe that they are not being partisan but rather are guiding an ignorant public to the Science and the “correct” political views that supposedly flow from it. In fact, their sanctimonious political posturing is undermining their fellow scientists and their profession, increasing polarization, and eroding trust. More and more Americans, through bitter experience, have developed an alternative to one of the Left’s favorite mantras: “Trust the science (if verifiable). Never trust the politics of the scientists.”