The Candidates Aren’t Even Pretending Science Matters

On a presidential-debate stage 17 years ago, a moderator posed what was then a kind of  gotcha question: “Do you believe in evolution?” he asked John McCain. The senator froze for a moment before delivering a “yes.” Then, after several other candidates expressed their disagreement, he clarified: “I believe in evolution,” he said, “but I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there.”

Not a single synthetic theory that explains the history of life was floated during Tuesday night’s debate—not even one! In fact, the moderators hardly asked the candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, about any scientific issues whatsoever. It’s 2024, just a year and change since the formal end of the coronavirus pandemic, and another global pathogenic threat is already looming. Also, we’re living through the hottest stretch of years that’s ever been recorded. Certainly, scientific topics such as these matter to the public interest at least as much today as they did in previous elections. Yet aside from Trump’s desultory defense of his administration’s response to COVID—“we got gowns; we got masks”—pandemic policy was not mentioned, and the subject of climate change emerged only in the 87th minute of a 90-minute live event.

Otherwise, our would-be presidents’ thoughts on science policy and innovation simply didn’t make the cut. They were asked to talk about the economy, abortion, immigration, and the war in Ukraine, but not how they would handle the next emerging virus, or what they think about immunization policy, or why a military operation first deployed during the Trump administration spread anti-vaccine propaganda overseas. The moderators made no reference to technology at all. They did not discuss AI. This debate, likely the only one these two candidates will have, was unscientific, through and through.

Not so long ago, topics like these were considered core to the project of the presidency. If the evolution question could be asked in 2007—if it could even be a litmus test—that’s because the country was in the midst of a debate over whether public schools should be allowed, or forced, to teach biblical accounts of the Creation. Soon after McCain laid out his theory of the divine canyon-maker, Barack Obama was faced with a similar challenge at a live CNN event. “If one of your daughters asked you—and maybe they already have—‘Daddy, did God really create the world in six days?,’” a moderator asked him, “what would you say?” Obama gave a waffling reply: “My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent Earth on which we live—that is essentially true, that is fundamentally true,” he said. “Now, whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible: That, I don’t presume to know.”

Such questions, however awkward, got at something big: how America would teach its future citizens to understand the very fact of our existence, and whether science or religion should be paramount in public life (or what the balance of the two should really be). During that campaign cycle, an entire grassroots effort would emerge to cajole both Obama and McCain into having a full debate on scientific questions. Those efforts eventually coalesced into the nonpartisan group Science Debate. Its supporters were numerous and impressive—lots of Nobel laureates, along with several scientists who ended up as senior members of the Obama administration. Noting that science formed “the basis of some of the thorniest public policy issues in recent history,” two of the group’s key organizers, Lawrence Krauss and Chris Mooney, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that fall that “a presidential debate on science would help voters determine who among the candidates is up to the task of dealing with whatever comes next.”

However gamely the candidates would answer questions on phylogeny and the Big Bang, they did not agree that scientific topics deserved a nationally televised debate. But Obama and McCain did give written answers to a set of 14 questions, laying out their attitudes on matters such as how to foster innovation, protect the oceans, manage stem-cell research, and, yes, guard against the next pandemic. In 2012, the major candidates again submitted statements in response to Science Debate. (And again, pandemics made the list of topics for discussion: “I will empower the private sector to pursue the breakthroughs that will equip society” to prevent them, Mitt Romney wrote.)

By 2016, Science Debate had to press its case, enlisting a group of adorable children to ask the candidates whether they would share their views on “fixing our climate,” “the dying honeybees,” and “wobots and jobs,” among other matters of national importance. They got some written answers, in the end, not just from Trump and Hillary Clinton, but also from Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Ironically, this time around, the pandemic question was downplayed, but the candidates did give answers on the matter of scientific integrity. “Science is science and facts are facts,” Trump wrote at the time. “My administration will ensure that there will be total transparency and accountability without political bias.”

Trump would not exactly be locked into an ironclad adherence to empirical reality; a few years later, he was literally redrawing his administration’s hurricane forecasts, as if to bend the very atmosphere in service of his pride. Of course the statements Science Debate had elicited were never binding, and Trump (or whoever on his campaign actually wrote those answers) may well have lied about the fact of whether he believes that facts are facts. But they symbolized a way of thinking, or at least the pretense of a frame of mind. As a scientist might say, they were data. And even if the answers weren’t always enlightening, they got plenty of attention, which is noteworthy in itself. Not so long ago, a presidential candidate would or could be held accountable, at least to some extent, for their views on ocean health, the internet, vaccination, or cosmology.

In 2020, a dozen years after it began, Science Debate ran aground. Both candidates that year refused to answer any of its questions. Even Joe Biden, who campaigned explicitly on the promise of a scientific restoration—his victory speech would promise “to marshal the forces of science and the forces of hope in the great battles of our time”—could not be bothered to engage. COVID was still raging, and the candidates did discuss pandemic policy (as well as climate change) during their regular debates. “We got the gowns. We got the masks,” Trump said back then, almost exactly as he did this week. But at the same time, in the fall of our most recent election—when science was so clearly tied to urgent policy conundrums, when acting on the data (whatever that entailed) was both tricky and divisive, and when public-health measures could lead to riotous protest—our potential presidents were also moving on from the very notion that science policy, in the broader sense, ought to be thrashed out.

Science Debate, which was eventually folded into the National Science Policy Network, now has more diffuse goals about engaging candidates at all levels to answer a science-policy questionnaire. It hasn’t shown any signs of seriously trying to extract answers from the presidential candidates in 2024. The website where the project started, ScienceDebate2008.com, is a sketchy Russian news site. (Among its posted stories are “There Is No Place to Store Sugar in Russia,” by a “graduate student,” and “How to Exchange Currency in Kharkov at a Favorable Rate.”) ScienceDebate.com has also gone offline, and the group’s social-media presence even in this election year has been almost nonexistent.

This week’s debate added another note of confirmation: A long stretch of treating science like it matters, for America and for presidential politics, has reached its end.