Scientific American endorses Kamala Harris—their second endorsement in history

September 20, 2024 • 10:45 am

For the second time in its 179-year history, Scientific American, which has become increasingly lame in its science reporting but increasingly “progressive” in its politics (see all my posts about this rag here), has decided to endorse a political candidate. I consider this endorsement—or any ensorsement—an abrogation of institutional neutrality that should go with science journals and magazines. I am opposed to science magazines making political or ideological statements in general. Of course Sci Am endorsed Harris, but I’d be just as opposed if they had endorsed Trump.) My main objections to an endorsement per se are fourfold:

  1. It’s performative, designed to show the virtue of the magazine, and will accomplish nothing.
  2. It’s been shown that when science journals endorese political candidates, it reduces not only the credibility of the journal, but of science itself in the eyes of the public.
  3. The purpose of a science magazine is to present science, not endorse ideologies or politics. If ideological endorsements becomes normal—and they are becoming normal—then science magazines will morph into political magazines.  It’s as if the National Review published an editorial endorsing string theory.
  4. If you argue that the endorsement is simply because Trump would do more damage to the scientific enterprise than would Harris, then why does the endorsement include a lot of issues that have nothing to do with that mission: like approving of Harris’s stand on abortion? (Again, I’m firmly on her side in this, but science magazines shouldn’t be giving endorsements for debatable issues like abortion.)

Blame editor Laura Helmuth, who has taken the magazine to its present depths and must have approved this endorsement.

But let someone more articulate than I give his critique: writer Tom Nichols writing in The Atlantic. I’ve also put a link Scientific American’s long endorsement below. Click to read, or find the Atlantic piece archived here.

Like me, Nichols considers Trump a scientific ignoramus and someone whose actions, during the pandemic, almost certainly injured people:

I understand the frustration that probably led to this decision. Donald Trump is the most willfully ignorant man ever to hold the presidency. He does not understand even basic concepts of … well, almost anything. (Yesterday, he explained to a woman in Michigan that he would lower food prices by limiting food imports—in other words, by reducing the supply of food. Trump went to the Wharton School, where I assume “supply and demand” was part of the first-year curriculum.) He is insensate to anything that conflicts with his needs or beliefs, and briefing him on any topic is virtually impossible.

When a scientific crisis—a pandemic—struck, Trump was worse than useless. He approved the government program to work with private industry to create vaccines, but he also flogged nutty theories about an unproven drug therapy and later undermined public confidence in the vaccines he’d helped bring to fruition. His stubborn stupidity literally cost American lives.

It makes sense, then, that a magazine of science would feel the need to inform its readers about the dangers of such a man returning to public office. To be honest, almost any sensible magazine about anything probably wants to endorse his opponent, because of Trump’s baleful effects on just about every corner of American life. (Cat Fancy magazine-—now called Catster-—should be especially eager to write up a jeremiad about Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance. But I digress.)

Catster??!  Was Cat Fancy considered politically incorrect, perhaps implying that people were having sex with cats? But I digress, too. For after noting the above, Nichols still disagrees with Helmuth’s decision to endorse Harris.

Strange as it seems to say it, a magazine devoted to science should not take sides in a political contest. For one thing, it doesn’t need to endorse anyone: The readers of a magazine such as Scientific American are likely people who have a pretty good grasp of a variety of concepts, including causation, the scientific method, peer review, and probability. It’s something of an insult to these readers to explain to them that Trump has no idea what any of those words mean. They likely know this already.

And here are the reasons Nichols opposes political endorsements in general. The bold headings are mine.

They won’t sway the readers. Nichols has already said that the readers are too savvy to be influenced by the magazine. Indeed, I felt patronized when I read the endorsement, even though I agree in the main with the article’s opinions about Trump. And, Nichols says, Trump voters have pretty much made up their minds and won’t be swayed by what this magazine says:

Now, I am aware that the science and engineering community has plenty of Trump voters in it. (I know some of them.) But one of the most distinctive qualities of Trump supporters is that they are not swayed by the appeals of intellectuals. They’re voting for reasons of their own, and they are not waiting for the editors of Scientific American to brainiac-splain why Trump is bad for knowledge.

Well, there are people on the fence, and perhaps they might be influenced, right? Perhaps. But one of the biggest arguments about science magazines taking ideological stands is that they reduce the public’s trust in both the magazine and science. This is pretty well known from the Nature study cited next:

Political stands of magazines reduce public trust in science.

In fact, we have at least some evidence that scientists taking sides in politics can backfire. In 2021, a researcher asked a group that included both Biden and Trump supporters to look at two versions of the prestigious journal Nature—one with merely an informative page about the magazine, the other carrying an endorsement of Biden. Here is the utterly unsurprising result:

The endorsement message caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters. This distrust lowered the demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature, as evidenced by substantially reduced requests for Nature articles on vaccine efficacy when offered. The endorsement also reduced Trump supporters’ trust in scientists in general. The estimated effects on Biden supporters’ trust in Nature and scientists were positive, small and mostly statistically insignificant.

In other words, readers who supported Biden shrugged; Trump supporters decided that Nature was taking sides and was therefore an unreliable source of scientific information.

To me this is the most important issue, and is why I keep my political views out of lectures on science, like when I’m defending evolution. I could go on and on in such lectures about how Republicans oppose evolution far more than do Democrats, and thus the audience should vote Democratic, but that would accomplish nothing save reduce my credibility about evolution. “Coyne must be pushing this issue because he’s a Democrat,” they’d say.

The Scientific American editorial ventured into fields that had little or nothing to do with science, and also dealt with debatable issues that can’t be “scientifically” settled.

But even if Scientific American’s editors felt that the threat to science and knowledge was so dire that they had to endorse a candidate, they did it the worst way possible. They could have made a case for electing Harris as a matter of science acting in self-defense, because Trump, who chafes at any version of science that does not serve him, plans to destroy the relationship between expertise and government by obliterating the independence of the government’s scientific institutions. This is an obvious danger, especially when Trump is consorting with kooks such as Laura Loomer and has floated bringing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crackpot circus into the government.

Instead, the magazine gave a standard-issue left-liberal endorsement that focused on health care, reproductive rights, gun safety, climate policy, technology policy, and the economy. Although science and data play their role in debates around such issues, most of the policy choices they present are not specifically scientific questions: In the end, almost all political questions are about values—and how voters think about risks and rewards. Science cannot answer those questions; it can only tell us about the likely consequences of our choices.

. . . . Also unhelpful is that some of the endorsement seemed to be drawn from the Harris campaign’s talking points, such as this section:

Economically, the renewable-energy projects she supports will create new jobs in rural America. Her platform also increases tax deductions for new small businesses from $5,000 to $50,000, making it easier for them to turn a profit. Trump, a convicted felon who was also found liable of sexual abuse in a civil trial, offers a return to his dark fantasies and demagoguery …

An endorsement based on Harris’s tax proposals—which again, are policy choices—belongs in a newspaper or financial journal. It’s not a matter of science, any more than her views on abortions or guns or anything else are.

This implies that it might be okay if the magazine endorsed Harris because her election is better for science than the election of Trump. That might well be true, but we can’t be sure (after all, both candidates are making promises they can’t keep). More important, even if the endorsement were based on the proposed effect on science in the U.S., it’s still based on politics and ideology (Scientific American is hardly politically neutral!), and is outside the ambit of what the magazine should be about. Readers may disagree, of course, and feel free to do so in the comments. But I’d feel the same way not only if they endorsed Trump, but also if a journal like Nature of Evolution endorsed any presidential candidates.

Here’s Nichols’s conclusion:

I realize that my objections seem like I’m asking scientists to be morally neutral androids who have no feelings on important issues. Many decent people want to express their objections to Trump in the public square, regardless of their profession, and scientists are not required to be some cloistered monastic order. But policy choices are matters of judgment and belong in the realm of politics and democratic choice. If the point of a publication such as Scientific American is to increase respect for science and knowledge as part of creating a better society, then the magazine’s highly politicized endorsement of Harris does not serve that cause.

But have a look at Sci Am’s endorsement below (click on the headline or find it archived here):

The topics covered in the endorsement are healthcare (a debatable issues on what kind to provide), reproductive rights, gun safety, environment and climate, and technology.  Except for the undoubtable presence of anthropogenic climate change, which is a scientific reality that Trump has denied, all of these issues involve political differences.  Now I agree with Helmuth Scientific American and Harris on nearly all these issues, and, indeed, I go further than most in my permissive views on abortion (I favor unrestricted abortion up to term). But I know that many regard abortion as murder, and how up to what point in gestation we should permit abortion is simply not a scientific issue. Gun issues, too, are a debatable proposition, and, of course, if you’re going to bring up issues that bear on science, then Title IX and gender ideology, in which I think the Trump administrator has done better than Biden, should make an appearance (they don’t).

Further, the op-ed gives credit to Harris for things that the Biden administration actually did, referring to the accomplishments of the “Biden-Harris” administration, as if they were one person and as if Harris had a major role. As Harris has emphasized repeatedly, “I am not Joe Biden.”

But this is all pilpul.  The main point is that, in my view, science magazines should stay out of politics. If they want to publish articles about global warming, or the effect of gun laws on human lives, that’s fine, but let the readers absorb the scientific information and make their own judgments.  To tell them how to vote is both patronizing and a slippery slope that could lead to the politicization of all science journals and magazines. (In fact, that’s already happening; have a look at the Lancet or Nature.)

27 thoughts on “Scientific American endorses Kamala Harris—their second endorsement in history”

  1. Laura Helmuth and the Scientific American staff could read this :

    Science, Politics, and Gnosticism
    Eric Voegelin
    1968, 1997
    Regenery Press,
    Chicago; Washington D.C.

    … but even so, the dialectical process synthetically combining science with, here, political activism, would be as visible as water is to a fish, as the gnostic temptation you can’t be neutral on a moving train (title of a book by Howard Zinn) has gone too deep.

  3. Someone had a thread on twitter looking at the senior staff of The Atlantic. It looked like most them do not have a science background. Looking at their website, it seems to be true.

    1. That same thread was also making a point about the preponderance of women on the senior staff. I’m not sure if there’s a valid connection there or not.

      I agree with Jerry that Scientific American should stay free from political endorsements. If one of the candidates comes right out and says “If elected, I promise to do all I can to close down the magazine Scientific American,” I would still think they should struggle to remain above it all (though might be more sympathetic if they don’t quite manage it.)

  4. I sent this to a friend along with my comment that I don’t see why it’s a problem for Scientific American to endorse a candidate. Angelo’s reply:

    I’m with you on this. The argument that an endorsement undermines “trust in the enterprise” presumes that publishers of a magazine addressed to a science-invested readership should offer no opinion on a campaign in which one candidate lies about everything. That’s a bit short sighted. This is no ordinary presidential election, and pretending it is, to maintain a distance from the interests of your readership, is just stupid.

    1. Trump does not lie about everything, and Harris has lied about some things. So does your friend think that every venue in the world should avoid “maintaining a distance from the interests of their readership?” Should restaurants endorse candidates because not doing so distances them from the interests of their customers? (Remember, readers are customers, too.)

      Nobody pretended this is an ordinary election, and I resent the “stupid” remark if it’s aimed at what I said. Besides, look at what happened with Nature, which belies what your friend said. Trust was lost.

      If you think this is fine, then you must think it’s fine for every academic journal in the world to endorse a candidate. And, of course, that chills speech.

    2. RE:

      The argument that an endorsement undermines “trust in the enterprise” presumes that publishers of a magazine addressed to a science-invested readership should offer no opinion on a campaign in which one candidate lies about everything. That’s a bit short sighted.

      I hope Harris’ wins it. But I do not believe that a Trump win would mean the end of democracy in the US (though it would surely degrade the quality of democracy some more). I know that this has been repeated ad nauseam by his opponents. But I don’t believe it. Let’s remember what happened when Trump lost in 2020 and claimed fraud in order to stay in office: He lost resoundingly in the courts. The US military has no love for Trump, and will definitely stay out of politics. If Trump wins, I know there will be fewer people like Brad Raffensperger, and more people like judge Aileen Cannon when Trump enacts his l’état-c’est-moi stunts …

      Something, Barry, that you seem to completely ignore is that:
      1.Scientific American’s endorsement of Harris will have no effect on the outcome.
      2. But the politicization of science reduces trust in science (see below).
      3. In fact, if any institution goes woke, then a decline in the public’s trust in that institution follows like day follows night – because the public, overwhelmingly, is not woke. (And the politicization of everything is surely a woke thing.)
      4. Trust matters.

      U.S. Confidence in Higher Education Now Closely Divided. July 8, 2024
      Nearly as many U.S. adults have little or no confidence as have high confidence
      https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-education-closely-divided.aspx

      Kevin Bass: NEW STUDY: Public trust in American physicians has collapsed. Aug 15, 2024
      https://kevinbass.substack.com/p/new-study-public-trust-in-american

      John Halpin: Americans Have the Lowest Trust in News in the World. Feb 28, 2023
      Only around one quarter of Americans trust the news most of the time, and more than 4 in 10 limit their news consumption or avoid it altogether.
      https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/americans-have-the-lowest-trust-in

      Americans’ Trust in Scientists, Positive Views of Science Continue to Decline. Nov 14, 2023
      Among both Democrats and Republicans, trust in scientists is lower than before the pandemic
      https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/11/14/americans-trust-in-scientists-positive-views-of-science-continue-to-decline/

      Barry you call Jerry’s view “stupid.” I wonder whether you may suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. My own view of Trump is that of George Conway (see his long cover piece in the The Atlantic or his recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show, it’s on YouTube): Trump is a narcissistic sociopath. Given this, the real question is why the Dems are locked in a very tight electoral fight with Trump. It’s because of this:

      Ruy Teixeira: The Five Deadly Sins of the Left. Oct 13, 2020
      Identity Politics. Retro-Socialism. Catastrophism. Growthphobia. Technopessimism.
      https://americancompass.org/essays/the-five-deadly-sins-of-the-left/
      “The Left has to decide if it wants to be popular or Brahmin*, only one of which is likely to succeed in a democracy”.

      *In a 2018 paper, [French economist Thomas] Piketty suggested that throughout the Western world, political parties of both the left and the right have been captured by the “elites,” coining the terms Brahmin Left and Merchant Right respectively to describe them.[44] According to Piketty, western left-wing parties have lost working-class voters and are now dominated by highly educated voters.[45]
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty

      Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano and Thomas Piketty: How politics became a contest dominated by two kinds of elite. 2021
      Studying hundreds of elections, we found that political parties increasingly cater to only the well educated and the rich
      https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/05/around-the-world-the-disadvantaged-have-been-left-behind-by-politicians-of-all-hues

      1. Thanks for you comment, but let me point out two things. First, please don’t put so many links in a post, which not only held it up, but makes it unwieldy.

        Most important, Barry didn’t call me stupid; his friend said my views were, which isn’t quite the same thing. But really, asking Barry whether he suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome is the kind of insult I don’t like to see on this website. Readers should treat each other with civility, so it would be nice if you apologized to Barry for characterizing him that way.

    3. Science’s strength lies in its earnest intention to be as neutral as humanly possible, and science magazines should endeavour to do so as well. Peddling the reputation as the ultimate factual source and purveyor of factual truth for an election barely two months from now is the definition of short-sighted. Trump is an embarassingly stupid (thankfully) populist but SciAm’s influence on his support base is nil, so their endorsement is a loss, for the magazine and for science.

  5. Jerry I totally agree. I also agree that Scientific American is a dumpster fire (sad because it used to be good). That said I do think it might be useful to point out to readers who are not academic scientists what I think the real danger is for a Trump presidency regarding the scientific enterprise is as I see it as someone working in the field (as you are) simply because my fears are not the typical ones:
    1. Funding: when Trump came in in 2016 he attempted to cut science budgets in unheard of ways. Massive cuts to NSF, NIH, etc. with only boosts to NASA. Luckily that didn’t pass. That alone is a huge issue.
    2. Treatment of Chinese scientists: some of our best students and future scientists come from China. Many of these people want to stay permanently in the US and contribute greatly. Many were unfairly harassed during Trumps presidency and disheartened. This is a big problem, as is even getting visas for students from abroad was hard.
    3. The specter of Title 6: many private universities have only themselves to blame for the legal state they are in over the current protests and the damage done by left wing faculty. But cutting off federal funding to private universities, which I think will be attempted, only really hurts STEM faculty, who ironically are the ones mostly against the protests in the first place.

    I wouldn’t make endorsements as a science journal but my fears of a second Trump presidency don’t relate to COVID (actually Trump did get the vaccine rollout fast!) but to these things.

  6. I am completely in agreement with you on this issue, Jerry. And, if it matters, I have never voted for Trump and never will. Living in Ohio, it’s irrelevant whether or not I vote for Harris, since the state is firmly in Trump’s grasp. But will be voting in all down ballot categories.

    1. After Springfield, a ballot in Ohio had Trump leading by only 4 percentage points: I think that you should consider voting.

    2. It is not irrelevant to vote (for Harris) in Ohio. Even though Trump will win the state, we want the popular vote to show, once again, that the Democrat wins. And hopefully acquires 270 or more electoral college votes.

  7. Agree with you 100% — more important for Scientific American to be on top of science topics. Thank you for bringing Atlantic article to our attention. I hope someone articulate can get a letter to editor published making these points.

    This was a magazine I cherished in 60s and 70s. I remember being a senior and asking for a subscription for Xmas, and having a study hall in 9th grade in the library and discovering the magazine. I was such a fan of Martin Gardner and amazed at what they did in Amateur Scientist. I still subscribe and now there is the online archive but it’s so changed.

    Really enjoyed the columns by Steven J. Gould in Natural History — another golden age…

  8. Can’t stand Trump, dislike DEI Airline Safety Briefing AI presidential hopeful Harris, but even if there were somebody I liked, it isn’t the place for SciAm to take political positions. Their coverage of seemingly all issues is so wildly left coded these days.
    Some institutions do decline (witness the BBC, NPR, Time, Pan Am, etc).
    Some can come back… I presume.

    D.A.
    NYC
    ps for a laugh, enjoy “Hitler bunker scene” rearranged for Beirut:
    https://x.com/TheMossadIL/status/1837151315589259744 (3 min)
    I’ve seen the scene used for various political satires. Always funny.

  9. I may have missed it but who was the last guy they endorsed?

    I say who as the others had all been blokes!

      1. Well after Trump first put a great deal of effort into Covid-19 vaccines and then dissed it all after first messing up the whole pandemic I’m not surprised but still… Sleepy Joe?

  10. Scientific American (Laura Helmuth) did endorse Biden against Trump in 2020, so it’s kind of folklore as already noted. According to Wikipedia Laura Helmuth defended their decision as follows: the magazine needs “to tell what we know about the consequences the Trump administration has had for science, health, the environment, for using evidence, for really understanding and accepting reality,” and to “show that this time the choice is just so important for science.”

    Her intentions are probably good but also very narrow minded. I think scientists who publicly take sides in political matters misuse their authority and undermine the authority science might have among the general public. Would be interesting to know how many potential Trump voters read the Scientific American and change their vote and how it affected their trust in science.

  11. I’m in favor of ANY organization coming out in favor of Harris/Walz because the more that do, the more the small-handed orange one gets annoyed and goes off the rails. I think NOW is a reasonable time for a scientific magazine to support the only candidate who gives a cr*p about science, the air and water, and climate change.

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