A record number of health professionals are running for office. Could they help heal US politics?

By Jen Christensen, CNN

(CNN) — At least 125 doctors, nurses and public health experts are on the ballot for Tuesday’s midterm elections — an unprecedented number from fields that historically offered fewer paths to elected office than boardrooms and courtrooms.

Their campaigns emerged in the aftermath of Covid-19, when doctors and health officials were celebrated at first, overwhelmed by work and tragedy for years, and in some cases, targeted because of distrust or politics around their messages.

Some candidates say they realized during that time how their training and expertise in health and science were more closely tied to government and politics than they’d thought.

“One of the things you learn to do in medicine is to listen and sit with somebody in pain and help them to clarify what the opportunities are, based on your knowledge about how the body or their health works, and I find that the work of politics is really quite similar,” said Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a former health director for Wayne County, Michigan, who is running for US Senate against Republican Mike Rogers.

Dr. Amy Acton, a preventive medicine specialist who served as Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s high-profile public health director in Ohio, is running for governor as a Democrat against biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican.

Democrat Xavier Becerra, a former congressman who served as President Joe Biden’s secretary of health and human services, is vying for the governor in California against Republican media personality Steve Hilton.

Dr. Annie Andrews, a Democrat and pediatrician in South Carolina, is running for US Senate against Republican Sen. Darline Graham.

There are candidates with industry experience too, including healthcare attorney Cinde Warmington, a Democrat running to be New Hampshire’s governor, and Republican Rick Jackson, founder and CEO of Jackson Healthcare, who’s running to be Georgia’s governor.

“I haven’t seen anything exactly like this before,” said historian Dr. Kristoffer Shields, director of the Eagleton Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University. “The link between science and politics has always been sort of weak.”

Less than 10% of the current Congress has a medical, public health or engineering degree. By comparison, 47% of senators and 31% of House members have law degrees.

Congress does have tiny but active Republican and Democratic doctors’ caucuses. Four people with health backgrounds — all Republicans and doctors — serve in the US Senate: Wyoming’s John Barrasso, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, Kansas’ Roger Marshall and Kentucky’s Rand Paul. The House has 17 physicians, four dentists, two pharmacists, a nurse practitioner, an optometrist and a rehabilitation therapist.

At the state level, the ranks are even thinner, and they’ve been shrinking. Only about 3% of state legislators had medical, science or engineering backgrounds as of March 2025, according to a Rutgers analysis of the Scientists in State Politics Database. That’s down 25% from the year before.

Hawaii’s Josh Green is the sole US governor with a medical degree, and no governors have a public health degree. No doctor has ever been president; the ninth president, William Henry Harrison, went to medical school but dropped out when he ran out of money to pay for it, and became a soldier instead.

Unprecedented interest

Something seemed to change this year, said Erik Polyak, executive director of 314 Action, a political action committee that recruits, trains and helps Democrats with science, tech, engineering and math backgrounds get elected. His group has been flooded with support requests.

“We’ve had over 700 applications from people who want to run for office. To put that in context, it’s usually been like 200 every election cycle,” Polyak said.

The American Medical Association has long encouraged people in the profession to get involved in politics. It has two political education programs: a candidate workshop and a campaign school for members. Cassidy and Barrasso are graduates, as are US Reps. Ami Bera and Mariannette Miller-Meeks.

“Advocacy is strongest when physicians themselves are in the room where decisions are made. As is often noted, ‘If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,’” AMA President Dr. Willie Underwood said in an email to CNN.

“More physicians running for office is a good sign. We don’t think of ourselves as politicians, but we advocate for our patients every day because of prior authorization or other obstacles that prevent them from receiving care. We are accustomed to relentless advocacy.”

Public health saw a similar surge in candidate interest.

“I started getting calls in January and February a year ago, asking me for advice,” said Dr. Kristin Hook, a former staffer at the US National Institutes of Health and the US Government Accountability Office. She lost the first time she ran as a Democrat for Texas’ 21st Congressional District, in 2024, but is on the ballot again this year for the same seat.

“People from all across the country wanted to run, and they wanted to know what I did and what I learned,” she said. “I had these little chats with a bunch of public health folks, all different, and many former feds who wanted to prevent what we’re seeing right now.”

One strong motivator for Hook to run for office was what she sees as an attack on science by the Trump administration.

“Our country should be great. Our country should be pro-science, pro-innovation, and science keeps us safe. It protects us. It leads to wonderful discoveries, and this administration has completely burned all of that down,” she said.

Hook points to the firing of thousands of federal doctors and scientists, cuts to billions in research funding, the removal of entire government datasets and public health websites, and the undermining of longstanding public health measures like water fluoridation and childhood vaccines.

Along with gas prices, healthcare is the biggest household expense worrying voters, polls show. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is expected to cut insurance to 10 million more people, one of the biggest rollbacks in health insurance coverage ever, experts say.

Many of the candidates with healthcare backgrounds, like most Americans surveyed, say they disapprove of the current leadership at HHS.

“HHS is not a place for science deniers or science skeptics,” Becerra told CNN earlier this year. “Why would you get rid of some of our best scientists and doctors and health professionals?

“I think it’s a prescription for a real disaster,” he added. “We deal with enough natural disasters, having to help with hurricanes, having to address pandemics, that’s bad enough. But when you put on top of that these man-made disasters, then you know that America’s health and America’s economy are at risk.”

Pandemic politics

The pandemic was also a major driver for many of the healthcare professionals now seeking office.

“They’ve been under heavy political fire and either survived it or have moved on and learned from it, and it’s made them that much stronger,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

Typically, public health leaders play a vital role that’s out of the spotlight. But the pandemic pushed many onto everyone’s television. For some, the attention brought death threats and hate mail, and a record number quit. Others emerged as local folk heroes.

Acton says she faced a handful of protesters at her home but mostly felt support from Ohioans, many of whom watched her daily briefings with DeWine, the Republican governor. During the pandemic, her image appeared on T-shirts and a mural, and a bobblehead ad quoted the Dayton Daily News describing her as “Ohio’s trusted face during the pandemic.” A 2020 New York Times editorial called Acton “the leader we wish we all had.”

“The love in this state was so much greater than any of the hate,” she said. “It was an honor to work alongside Gov. Mike DeWine. We were totally focused on saving lives, and we definitely put people’s health and well-being over politics.”

But it may be hard for public health leaders and doctors to win over voters aggrieved by pandemic-era vaccine policies, masking rules and shuttered schools and businesses.

“Especially on the Republican side, I think there’s a lot more distrust of the medical profession post-Covid,” said Woodrow Johnston, a political consultant for Republican politicians. “A lot of Republicans feel they were misled or even lied to when it came to government shutdowns.”

Polls show that Democrats have more confidence in scientists than Republicans. However, one Pew poll found that trust dipped during the pandemic and has ticked up more recently. Another 2026 Pew survey found that scientists are more trusted to act in the public interest than journalists, business leaders and elected officials.

Not everyone realizes how much political skill public health leaders must wield to win support for their solutions, Freeman says. The pandemic tested many of them.

“We serve everyone everywhere in every single community, no matter what their political leaning,” she said. “To have somebody with all of this wealth of experience in different areas would help all across the board, and not just health programs. Even just to help people understand that healthiness really drives economic prosperity.”

Johnston said he has helped more Republican candidates with medical or public health backgrounds win office lately. Such candidates can connect with certain voters.

“Sometimes, smart people like smart people,” Johnston said.

And their scientific expertise is needed, said Shields, the historian. Some problems are straightforward health issues, such as lack of access to care. Other problems are more existential: how to govern AI so it’s safe, how to find renewable energy and how to address the climate crisis.

“There’s so many issues that we’re facing where we need people with scientific expertise in the room,” he said.

Acton says that having health professionals in higher office can help people’s health, perhaps even more than an individual doctor can help a patient. She thinks of the average lifespan in the US: Advances in medicine and technology account for some improvements, but a lot of it’s also due to “things that we had to solve together.”

“It was things like clean water, safe food, child labor laws, public school for every kid, traffic safety laws – the list goes on and on,” Acton said. “That’s what government’s role is: a big catalyzer and convener.”

She said it was clear to her while working with DeWine during Covid-19 that the governor’s job was about protecting the health and well-being of everyone.

“Just like being a doctor, we’re for all patients. Being governor is actually about improving those social and economic and environmental determinants of our well-being and our prosperity,” Acton said. “It’s funny. You think of it as so different, but I really realized it’s actually exactly what I’ve been trained to do.”

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