3.14 Action says candidates it backed flipped at least 10 Republican seats
Health care was the second-biggest issue in campaign advertising in the 2026 midterms, according to the Cook Political Report, with Democrats running more than 158,000 health-care-related ads against 61,000 for Republicans. The political organization 3.14 Action, which worked to elect Democratic health professionals and scientists across the country, spent $23m on independent advertisements, most of them on health issues — including, as corruption became a defining issue of the race, standing up to pharmaceutical companies and insurers.
Erik Polyak, the group’s executive director, said, “It’s clear from the results: 2026 was a healthcare election. We’ve heard a lot about affordability. Healthcare affordability is the No 1 piece of that. Our doctors and scientists are certainly well-equipped to lead on those issues.” Polyak also said: “Americans who believe in science are fired up. We’ve flipped at least 10 Republican seats and the final number is the low 30s. Flipping control of the House in 2026 ran through Democratic doctors and scientists – and we led the charge.”
Dr Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to improving Americans’ health, said in a statement, “The voters’ message is simple and clear: enough.” “People across America are frustrated by the high cost of living, exhausted trying to make ends meet, and fed up with a ridiculously expensive and complicated healthcare system,” he said. “They want leaders who understand how hard it is and will do something to make their lives better.”
The wins behind those numbers ranged from the Senate down to hundreds of down-ballot races. Among the history-making lawmakers are Democrats Dr Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Dr Annie Andrews of South Carolina; the last time a Democratic doctor held a seat in the US Senate was in 1969, the era when Medicare and Medicaid were passed into law. 3.14 Action said it was still tallying wins and waiting for results among “hundreds” of obscure state races, some of which were not even reporting results yet, and the group called the outcome the “Stem swing” and the “revenge of the nerds.”
Doctors and scientists have long held leadership roles in Congress, but until this election the overwhelming majority were Republican. The Guardian reported that, from 2011 to 2020, 86% of the physician-members of Congress were Republican and three-quarters were from southern states. A photograph accompanying the Guardian’s report showed Congress members Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Andy Harris, Roger Marshall, Ronny Jackson and Michael Burgess at a news conference with the GOP doctors caucus in Washington DC on 22 July 2021.
The 2026 election turned that on its head: Republicans like Dr Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa and Senate candidate Dr Roger Marshall — both allies of the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr — lost, races for three more Republican doctors were too close to call, and all incumbent Democratic doctors won their races.
The Guardian reported that the wins came after years of cuts and upheaval to US health and science infrastructure, as Democrats spent big on health-related ads and voters rejected the Make America Healthy Again (Maha) movement. Trump and Kennedy brought upheaval to nearly every American scientific institution and corner of American healthcare, from the Environmental Protection Agency to Medicaid, the public health program that insures 72 million Americans.
Kennedy disrupted and defunded federal work on vaccines to placate a base of zealots, The Guardian reported, as four in 10 “Maha voters” worried about healthcare prices. He also became a key figure for doctors and scientists to rally against. Before the election, 3.14 Action said that Kennedy was “our No 1 recruitment and fundraising tool – hands down.” Public health political organizations are already calling for Kennedy to be removed from office.
The disruption reached the agencies themselves. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost up to one-third of its staff in the midst of a record-breaking measles outbreak. The National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, lost leadership and saw path-breaking research stymied amid disruptions, cancellations and censorship. The Food and Drug Administration struggled to keep up with a historic outbreak of diarrhea-inducing cyclosporiasis. On election day, New York health authorities announced that a child in the state had died of measles for the first time in 30 years.
High-profile Democratic candidates often spoke about local healthcare challenges. In South Carolina, as a measles outbreak took hold in February, pediatrician Andrews was able to give specific health advice even as federal authorities downplayed the dangers. “I never in a million years, when I was in medical school, thought that I would be running for the US Senate and also talking about measles nearly every single day,” Andrews told the 19th at the time. El-Sayed pitched a vision of Medicare for All that would save rural hospitals threatened by the Republican-led One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and his call and response with the crowd ran: “Money in your … ” “Pocket!” “Money out of … ” “Politics!” “Medicare for … ” “All!”
In Ohio, where Dr Amy Acton prevailed, her experience as a health director during Covid-19 turned out to be an asset rather than a liability. In Iowa, Democrat Christina Bohannan, who is not a doctor but a law professor, pledged to spend more on research as rising cancer rates became a bipartisan political issue in the state.
New Democratic lawmakers face far-reaching challenges when they are sworn in. The most severe cuts of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act go into effect on New Year’s Day 2027, and among the most emblematic are work requirements for Medicaid. All told, the cuts are expected to result in 17 million people losing insurance in the next decade.
They will also be faced with enormous insurers and drug companies, which will seek to push back and influence lawmakers as Democrats hammer out consensus on wide-ranging health proposals pitched during the campaign, from a public option to government-backed single-payer healthcare. Polyak said the election marked a turning point. “In a lot of ways, this election represented the beginning of the end of RFK Jr’s disastrous leadership,” he said. “It’s clear Americans want something different – they didn’t elect all these Democratic scientists just to oppose Trump. People want to see an alternative agenda, they want to see what Democratic scientists can deliver for them.”