This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
There’s something different about the crop of Democrats running for Congress in 2018. As in previous years, the party has recruited a small army of veterans in high-profile races and in Republican-held districts. There are loads of state legislators, business owners, and government officials.
But the candidates also include a volcanologist who’s worried that her favorite research spot will be opened up for development, an aerospace engineer who’s running against the climate-denying head of the House Science Committee, a pediatrician who spends part of the year treating leprosy patients in Vietnam, and a physicist who worries what budget cuts would mean to the federal research facility where she spent her career.
All told, more than a dozen Democratic candidates with science backgrounds have announced their candidacies for Congress or are expected to in the coming months. The boomlet of STEM-based candidates amounts to a minor seismic event in a community where politics and research have traditionally gone together like sodium and water. Trump... Read more
