Scientists Strongly Endorse Joe Biden As US President In Nature Poll

There is only 11 days until the hard-contested US presidential election, although many Americans already cast their votes by mail and at select polling places. National polls give Democratic challenger Joe Biden a moderate lead. But scientists seem overwhelmingly wanting the former vice president as the next American leader, according to a Nature survey almost 900 readers. They identified climate change and the United States’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic as the main issues that have influenced who they support in this election.

Many respondents to the survey, which is not representative of working scientists or the United States as a whole, also expressed fear over the re-election of US President Donald Trump and anguish over the potentially lasting damage to scientific integrity that has caused. Responses to the survey were requested at Naturewebsite, through the Nature Briefing e-newsletter and on social media. Respondents came from both the United States and abroad, and were asked to give both their eligibility and their intention to vote.

The 2020 elections have been very tense; Hotly debated topics that have been at the forefront of the divide include racial inequalities, reproductive rights and climate change. Trump’s first term has been so disruptive to the scientific enterprise that it has spawned several high-profile scientific publications, including Nature, to back Biden.

Biden leads Trump by about 10 percentage points, according to survey analysis site FiveThirtyEight, which considers surveys at the national and state levels. But the divide between Biden and Trump supporters in NatureThe number of readers is substantially higher: out of 892 total respondents, 86% supported the Democratic candidate, 8% in favor of Trump and 6% answered ‘Other’; Responses written in this category indicated support for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgenson. About the same percentage of respondents who intend to vote, out of a total of 579, Biden endorsed.

It is surprising to see how large Biden’s margin of support is between Naturerespondents, says Cindy Kam, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. But she notes that by the way NatureThe survey was conducted, and because its audience is comprised primarily of scientists, there is no reason to expect the results to be representative of the general American public.

The survey also asked respondents to indicate that their field belongs to one of the four major disciplines: social, biological, physical, or computer science. Social scientists showed the largest margin of support for Biden, at more than 90%, while 83% of physical and computer scientists supported the former vice president. This trend reflects the results of a survey by the Research Institute of Higher Education at the University of California, Los Angeles, which has shown that sociologists hold more leftist views than their counterparts in the physical sciences.

The COVID-19 pandemic has ensured that, unlike most previous elections, scientific issues have taken center stage. Nearly a third of the respondents who support Biden selected climate change from the set of options offered as their most urgent problem, 26% selected the response to the US pandemic, and 18% chose social justice. Many of these voters commented that the three issues were closely related. “The last four years have felt like an ongoing assault on women, people of color, science, decency and ethics. Without changes in the White House, these cannot be addressed, ”wrote a Biden supporter. Written responses, which were provided by 11% of Biden’s supporters, included character and leadership skills and health care reform.

By contrast, about 43% of those polled who supported Trump cited the economy as the biggest problem in the election, followed by about 16% who chose immigration. 17% of Trump supporters wrote in their own responses, which included questions like foreign policy and the Supreme Court. “Although I support Trump for economic reasons, I would like him to do a better job embracing science, supporting the scientific community, and not contradicting scientific advice from experts,” wrote one respondent.

That Biden and Trump supporters have such different priorities is no surprise, says Kam. These trends are more or less in line with what supporters of the two candidates tend to focus on, he adds. The data also shows that respondents outside the United States have different priorities than those at home; for example, they are much less likely to classify the response to a pandemic as a key problem.

When properly contextualized, such polls can provide a useful lens for thinking about electoral attitudes, says Kam. “Even if they are not representative, they can be informative.”