“My name is Dr. Annie Andrews, and for almost two decades, I’ve been a pediatrician in South Carolina. Parents trust me to treat their kids for just about everything you can imagine.” That’s how Andrews, who is the Democratic nominee for the Senate in South Carolina, launched herself into the race.
In a lab coat, with a stethoscope slung around her neck, she goes on in the campaign video to talk about the damage that the Trump administration has wrought on Americans’ physical well-being. She describes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the head of Health and Human Services, as “the vaccine-denying brain worm guy” who “is gutting our nation’s health care system.”
Andrews is not the only prominent medical professional running as a Democrat in Tuesday’s election. Amy Acton, who is running for governor in Ohio, is a physician and a former director of the Ohio Department of Health. Though the vile attack ad run by her opponent Vivek Ramaswamy put Acton in the national spotlight, this ad distracts from her public health expertise and her commitment to health care affordability, which have been pillars of her campaign.
Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Michigan who is an epidemiologist, has crowds chanting about Medicare for All, which he literally co-wrote the book about even as he has to defend himself against bigoted smears about Arab scientists from Kennedy.
According to The Hill, seven doctors who are not incumbents are running for Congress as Democrats, along with 14 nurses. If all the doctors running as Democrats win office, they will meaningfully shift the balance of physicians in both the Senate and the House away from Republicans. That means Democrats with medical expertise will have more of a say in confirming health-related officials, will vote for more progressive health care policies and will create viral moments arguing with ignorant Trump administration officials during hearings on medical issues.
But I think these doctors, if they can eke out victories in tight races, are poised to do something bigger: They can reclaim the mantle of health and wellness as a winning issue for Democrats.
Though Kennedy pulled off a feat of great marketing with his Make America Healthy Again movement, MAHA never represented a majority of Americans who care about health. While trust in public health, and in President Joe Biden and the Democrats especially, took a drubbing in the aftermath of the pandemic, it simply isn’t true that Americans ever trusted Republicans to have the answers for what ails us.
MAHA’s canny marketing — a symbiotic relationship with grass-roots “crunchy mama” influencers who spent years spreading bad information — was a shiny object that distracted from the truth that Democrats have been the more trusted party on this topic in the recent past. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, when the Covid mitigation backlash was arguably at its peak, a Reuters/Ipsos survey found that “more Americans believe Democrats are stronger on Covid-19.” Two years later, KFF, a nonprofit health policy research organization, did polling during the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. On every health care policy measure, it found that Americans trusted Biden more than they trusted Donald Trump.
The only health care issue on which Trump polled close to Biden in 2024 had to do with the expense of care: 38 percent of Americans trusted Biden to “address high health care costs” versus 36 percent who trusted Trump and 27 percent who trusted neither.
Trump embraced Kennedy and MAHA because it was politically convenient, and the president does seem to have some bizarre and deeply held beliefs about vaccines and the effects of Tylenol during pregnancy. But outside those convictions, Trump has never seemed to care much about clean air, clean water or providing health care to all Americans regardless of income or job status.
Millions have lost access to health care under Trump’s watch. MAHA stalwarts, like Calley Means, a former senior adviser to Kennedy, are starting to defect, reportedly because of the administration’s lack of progress on food policy.
Republicans appear to have frittered away Americans’ trust on health care costs completely in the past two years. According to a survey published earlier this month, “About twice as many voters say they trust the Democrats over the Republicans on the cost of health care.” It is hard not to conclude that the Trump administration’s promise to restore trust in public health has also been a flop. A poll conducted by Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation published earlier this year found that “only 50 percent of U.S. adults say they trust health recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.), compared with 77 percent in spring 2025.”
Republicans, Democrats and independents overwhelmingly still trust their own doctors. By leading with their experience as physicians and public health champions, candidates like Andrews, Acton and El-Sayed have an opportunity to start the long process of rebuilding America’s federal public health system.
If these candidates prevail, they have the expertise and authority to actually hold Kennedy to account for many of the disastrous decisions that he has made, and continues to make. Just this week, Kennedy put forth, against the advice of the administration’s scientists, a plan to bypass the Food and Drug Administration and give Americans access to a wide array of unproven peptides.
Of all the physician candidates running, Andrews might be the most effective antidote to MAHA. When she’s out of her white coat, she looks and sounds exactly like all the anti-vaccine influencer moms I see on my feed whose support made Kennedy who he is today. A 40-something mom of three, with perfectly styled blond hair and an approachable demeanor, she seems to relish going after Kennedy. On Instagram she posts memes showing the White House’s East Wing in shambles, suggesting that this is what Kennedy has done to America’s public health system.
In her launch video, Andrews talked about how the National Institutes of Health cut funding to study childhood cancer because of Trump administration malfeasance, and that gun violence is no longer classified as a public health crisis. “I also just happen to be someone who isn’t afraid of a fight,” Andrews said.
I want to see that fight on the Senate floor.
End Notes
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I have been watching “The One About Matthew Perry,” the new Netflix documentary series about the life and death of the “Friends” star. Perry’s sister, Mia Perry Bowick, is prominently featured, and she speaks so beautifully about her brother, his triumphs and how painful it was to watch him succumb to drug addiction. It’s worth watching, not just if you are a fan of Perry’s, but also as a sensitive portrait of a talented man whose success and financial security ultimately could not save him.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
The post This Is How MAHA Ends appeared first on New York Times.
