Doctor Democrats who embrace the medical establishment notched major wins in high-profile races in Ohio, South Carolina and Michigan on Tuesday.
The results represent a major victory for proponents of the scientific institutions that became a political lightning rod during the COVID-19 pandemic — and a drastic pivot from their apparent rebuke two years ago.
South Carolina Senator-elect Annie Andrews, Ohio Governor-elect Amy Acton and Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed all centered their experience in healthcare as the core of their political identities.
All were supported by 314 Action, a PAC and dark money group that supports Democratic candidates with science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) backgrounds on a "pro-science" agenda. This includes pro-abortion, pro-gun control, and pro-climate action policies, as well as those aligned with public health orthodoxy.
El-Sayed has called for Medicare for All, while Acton and Andrews have instead called for increasing health subsidies and lowering drug costs.
But central to their health care message was lambasting Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a dangerous heretic of established medical science.
Another example of the rapidly shrinking MAHA agenda:
— Helena Bottemiller Evich (@hbottemiller) November 3, 2026
This started out as a threat to take away hospital Medicare/Medicaid funding if they didn't align their food w/the new dietary guidelines (which say to avoid highly processed foods).
Where we are now: Kindly asking hospitals… https://t.co/zEj95hC0TR
Acton served as outgoing Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine's COVID czar in 2020 — earning the moniker "Ohio's Anthony Fauci" — and has lambasted Kennedy for his critique of the medical establishment. She wrote that he was "trying to convince parents to pin the blame on doctors for childhood diseases and diagnoses" in a June 2025 op-ed.
"During the COVID pandemic, I was on the front lines in Ohio, working to save lives and reopen responsibly and quickly as the director of the Ohio Department of Health," Acton wrote. "It's not an exaggeration to say that if allowed to continue as is, he will kill Americans." (RELATED: Amy Acton, 'Ohio's Anthony Fauci,' Has Only Published One Research Paper. It's About Horseback Riding)
A search for Acton in PubMed, the repository of medical papers hosted by the National Institutes of Health, turned up just one 2020 study about horse injuries, the Daily Caller News Foundation found. Nevertheless, Acton issued directives mandating policies restricting the lives of millions.
Meanwhile, opposition to Kennedy led Andrews, a pediatrician, to pursue the Senate seat. She has called for the HHS' secretary's impeachment.
"The day that RFK Jr. was nominated to lead HHS was the day that I really seriously started considering running for this seat," Andrews said in a July interview with left-wing outlet The New Republic. "RFK Jr. has been my professional archnemesis for decades, and there are thousands of pediatricians across the country who would say the same thing."
She has named ensuring universal measles vaccination and ending the Trump administration's reforms to Medicaid as top priorities.
El-Sayed — who described himself on the campaign trail as potentially being "the first ever public health official elected to the Senate" — has emphasized his experience as a public health official serving the everyman in Detroit and Wayne County.
His focus as a public health scholar was often centered on ethnic identity, his past writings show. He argued that "acculturation," an academic term for adopting a nation's values and ways of life, causes the health of Arabs living in the U.S. to decline, the DCNF found.
In his closing statement to voters, El-Sayed criticized Kennedy's oversight of the cyclospora outbreak, his lack of academic credentials, and his statement that Arabs "don't produce science" and "don't produce literature."
The Democratic doctors were ushered in just as the frustration of Kennedy's allies with Washington intransigence had reached a fever pitch, with former Kennedy aide Calley Means and former Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices member Robert Malone issuing scathing critiques about the direction of the administration.
Safety issues with the COVID vaccine, pharmaceutical industry influence at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and vaccine mandates generated concerns among many Americans during the pandemic. Though in 2020 Trump pioneered Operation Warp Speed — the all-of-government blitz to manufacture COVID vaccines — he elevated their most prominent critic, Kennedy, as his chief health official. Trump said in an October 2024 campaign rally he would let Kennedy "go wild."
But after the spring resignation of former FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, the Trump administration said it would stop pursuing policies with blowback from drug companies and a corporate press overwhelmingly sponsored by them.
In an open letter to Kennedy and President Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, former Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, and over 100 other journalists, activists, physicians and nurses expressed a sense of disillusionment with the alliance between the Make America Great Again (MAGA) and Make America Healthy Again (MAGA) movements that cinched the 2024 presidential election.
Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio found that a bipartisan majority of voters do not trust the pharmaceutical industry (90%) and expressed concerns about vaccine mandates (73%) in a poll obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation but never released in full.
In communications with the press, the Trump administration instead cited two separate Fabrizio polls that measured popular support for individual vaccines and described them as well established.
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