Pediatrician Andrews to face Darline Graham in South Carolina Senate race

314 Action aims to elect 100 doctors to office by 2030

Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who practiced for 20 years, will face Darline Graham, sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, in November for South Carolina’s open U.S. Senate seat. The Guardian described Andrews as “a dark horse Democrat challenging a five-term Republican” before Graham’s death reshaped the race. Donald Trump persuaded South Carolina voters last week to select Darline Graham as the Republican nominee, and the November general election remains heavily favored to stay in Republican hands in the conservative state.

For Andrews, the shift from medicine to politics grew out of two decades of pediatric practice. “It became clear to me that the most effective and efficient way to solve the problems my patients and their families were facing was through politics, by changing who actually has the power, by electing people who inherently care about America’s children,” she said.

Andrews is one of a slate of physician candidates that 314 Action, a fund founded to elect scientists and doctors to office, has backed with fundraising and campaign support. The group’s president, Shaughnessy Naughton, said 314 Action reached its initial $25 million fundraising target in August and is working toward electing at least 100 doctors to state legislatures, governorships and federal offices by 2030. “We need folks to go beyond just signing polite letters and waiting to be tapped as scientific advisers, and actually step up and claim the seat at the table,” Naughton said.

The medical caucus in Congress is small and heavily Republican. The Guardian reports that 20 physicians currently serve in the House and Senate, but only six of the House representatives with medical degrees are Democrats, and there are no Democratic doctors in the Senate. The partisan skew partly reflects the cost of running for office. Physicians often carry heavy student-loan debt from medical school, and candidates who can self-fund tend to be wealthier — a group that skews more conservative.

Hawaii Governor Josh Green, an emergency physician and the only doctor-governor in the country, said he could not have left medicine for politics without the National Health Service Corps loan-forgiveness program. “Had I had $300,000 or $400,000 of debt, like a lot of my colleagues from medical school, I could never have run for the state house,” Green said. “If we can seed their campaigns with enough money to get off the ground, they’ll stand a chance.” Green is mentoring candidates through 314 Action on constituent engagement and political messaging.

The 314 Action initiative faces long historical odds. In the 2018 midterm elections, nearly 200 candidates with backgrounds in science, technology, engineering or mathematics ran for House and Senate seats, but only about 12% won, according to research by Matthew Motta, an assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health. “So to say that you want to get 100 physicians to not just run but to actually be elected to public office is quite a tall order,” Motta said.

Motta’s research finds that 314 Action’s endorsement and financial support do increase the likelihood that candidates with science backgrounds will win. Meredith Conroy, a political science professor at California State University, San Bernardino, has reached a less optimistic conclusion: candidates with STEM backgrounds were less likely than non-STEM peers to win in 2018, though Conroy said the gap likely reflected the salience of the issue at the time rather than the candidates themselves. “I just don’t think it was a salient enough identity at the time to suggest it made or broke their campaign,” Conroy said.

Recent events may be shifting that calculus. “It’s really important then, if we want to defend science from politicized attacks on its daily operation, that those who actually do science and who do medicine are elected to Congress,” Motta said. Naughton added that electing more physicians could help repair public trust in science, because “most people do trust their physicians and they bring a lot of credibility.”

A scientific background, however, does not guarantee a science-friendly voting record. According to the Guardian, some physicians who have run for office, including Senator Rand Paul, have contributed to misinformation on vaccines and other health issues. “Just because somebody has a scientific background does not necessarily mean that they’re going to fight for science,” Motta said.

“The hard truth of it is, people are going to die if we don’t follow science,” Green said.

Barbara Bollier, an anesthesiologist who served as a Republican state lawmaker in Kansas before switching parties and running for the U.S. Senate in 2020, offers one model for what a physician-candidate can accomplish even in defeat. Kansas, which had not elected a Democratic senator since 1932, did not send Bollier to Washington. But she said she received more votes than any Democratic Senate candidate in Kansas history, and the state subsequently voted to protect abortion rights. “I moved the ball down the field,” Bollier said.

“It’s going to take decades to counter the misinformation and damage from officials currently in power,” Andrews said. “I’m just so happy to be a part of this movement of physicians all across the country raising their hands, stepping up to run for office.”