Dr. Matt Motta
Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Law, Policy, & Management at the Boston University School of Public Health. His research aims to identify the prevalence, causes, and policy consequences of anti-science attitudes in the U.S. He is the author of Anti-Scientific Americans: the Prevalence, Origins, and Political Consequences of Anti-Intellectualism in the United States, published with Oxford University Press (2024).
Email: motta018@umn.edu
U.S. Election 2024
36. The tilted playing field, and a bygone conclusion (Dr David Karpf)
37. Looking forwards and looking back: Competing visions of America in the 2024 presidential campaign (Prof John Rennie Short)
38. Brat went splat: Or the emotional sticky brand won again (Prof Ken Cosgrove)
39. Election 2024: Does money matter anymore? (Prof Cayce Myers)
40. Advertising trends in the 2024 presidential race (Prof Travis N. Ridout, Prof Michael M. Franz, Prof Erika Franklin Fowler)
41. Who won the ground wars? Trump and Harris field office strategies in 2024 (Sean Whyard, Dr Joshua P. Darr)
42. Kamala Harris: Idealisation and persecution (Dr Amy Tatum)
43. Kamala Harris campaign failed to keep Democratic social coalition together (Prof Anup Kumar)
44. Revisiting Indian-American identity in the 2024 U.S. presidential election (Dr Madhavi Reddi)
45. Harris missed an opportunity to sway swing voters by not morally reframing her message (Prof John H. Parmelee)
46. In pursuit of the true populist at the dawn of America’s golden age (Dr Carl Senior)
47. Language and the floor in the 2024 Harris vs Trump televised presidential debate (Dr Sylvia Shaw)
48. Nullifying the noise of a racialized claim: Nonverbal communication and the 2024 Harris-Trump debate (Prof Erik P. Bucy)
49. A pseudo-scientific revolution? The puzzling relationship between science deference and denial (Dr Matt Motta)
50. Amidst recent lows for women congressional candidates, women at the state level thrive (Dr Jordan Butcher)
Science and other forms of expertise were very much on the ballot in the 2024 US Presidential Election. And while partisan divisions in deference to scientific authority are longstanding, I argue that science was politicized in new and paradoxical ways in 2024.
As I argue in my book Anti-Scientific Americans, Republicans’ attitudes toward the scientific community have become hostile (and often highly personal) following the rise of the Tea Party movement. Reminiscent of JD Vance’s comments in the 2024 vice presidential debate – where he claimed that PhD economists “don’t have common sense and don’t have wisdom,” and that “listening to common sense” over “listening to experts” is the most effective way to resolve trade disputes – I show that Republicans have become increasingly likely to believe that policy ought to be guided by common sense wisdom, over expert evidence.
Correspondingly, public preferences for the role that scientists play in the policymaking process has become polarized on the basis of political partisanship. For example, Vice President Harris raised concerns about former President Trump’s relationship with the authors of Project 2025, which — as part of its policy vision for a second Trump presidency — would empower the president to remove scientists and other credentialed experts from positions within the federal bureaucracy. That includes climate scientists working for the Environmental Protection Agency, economists working in the Department of Labor, and medical/health professionals working in the Department of Health and Human Services.
Yet, beyond the typical fault lines lies an interesting paradox in the way that science-skeptical candidates – including the Republican nominee for President Donald Trump and independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr. (RFK) – talked about their relationship with science.
Take, for example, former President Trump. In his only debate with Vice President Harris in September 2024, his opponent claimed that economics professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business (Trump’s alma mater) viewed his protectionist economic policies as financially unsound. Trump’s response was not (as it has been in the past) to deride economic experts, but to claim that the evidence was on his side. Trump argued:
“Look, I went to the Wharton School of Finance and many of those professors, the top professors, think my plan is a brilliant plan, it’s a great plan.”
Similarly, noted vaccine skeptic and third-party presidential candidate RFK Jr., routinely (and falsely) claimed that he was “not anti-vaccine” on the 2024 campaign trail. In support of this view, the non-profit Children’s Defense Fund – his non-profit anti-vaccine advocacy group – hosts a repository of hundreds of selectively-picked and fringe scientific articles claiming that a wide range of vaccines are unsafe and/or ineffective. RFK regularly made mention of studies like these on the 2024 campaign trail.
Here, we again see RFK Jr. co-opting the language of science – i.e., attempting to provide evidence-based insights from peer-reviewed academic articles in support of his talking points – in order to cast doubt on scientific consensus. And perhaps it is precisely because Kennedy and Trump speak the same language on this score that Trump promised Kennedy the opportunity to “go wild on the medicines [sic]” in exchange for his political endorsement.
These examples raise an important question: why do science skeptical candidates appeal to scientific authority, in order to reject it?
The answer, I argue, may be that we may be witnessing what I call a “pseudo-scientific revolution” in American politics, particularly on the ideological right.
Conservatives’ faith in expertise has been souring for years and decreased precipitously since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This may in part result from views that scientists and academics are politically motivated to protect liberal worldviews has increased; perhaps because left-leaning policymakers are more likely to draw on scientific consensuswhen formulating their policy responses to pressing climate, economic, health, and other issues.
While conservatives’ views toward experts and expertise have soured, however, it is not necessarily the case that they display less mastery of or respect for the scientific method. As Dan Kahan demonstrates, Democrats and Republicans tend to display similar levels of science-related knowledge and scientific reasoning; so long as the metrics used to evaluate science-related competencies make no mention of issues that have become politically polarizing.
And so, it may be the case that candidates like Donald Trump and RFK Jr. are engaging in a pseudo-reclamation of scientific expertise by drawing a distinction between what they portray “real” (conservative) science that lies at the fringes of scientific credibility, and “politically biased” or “fake” science that more accurately reflects expert research and policy opinion. In many ways, this project mirrors the right’s efforts to portray mainstream press outlets as “fake news,” while elevating alternative conservative media sources — that routinely engage in the spread of political and science-related misinformation — as the “real truth.”
This psuedo-scientific revolution could fundamentally change American politics in the years to come. Characterized by a paradoxical relationship between scientific deference and denial on the ideological right, it threatens to undermine evidence-based policymaking by trading falsehoods from pseudo-scientific discourse in place of expert consensus.