messaging

Health care affordability was a potent campaign message

Ross Mantle for STAT

In several closely watched races, candidates made health care affordability a key campaign plank, promising to restore Affordable Care Act subsidies and fight the Medicaid cuts passed by Republicans as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill act in 2025.

In Ohio, physician Amy Acton won the state’s governorship after pledging to make health care a major focus in office. Acton, who led Ohio's Covid-19 response, prioritized protecting the accessibility of Medicaid, forgiving medical debt, tackling surprise billing, and creating a new prescription drug plan to lower costs. Her opponent, billionaire biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, frequently sought to turn the race into a referendum on the lockdowns and school closures that occurred during Acton's pandemic-era tenure in state government.

In Georgia, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms won the governorship, becoming the first Black woman to occupy that position in any state. Bottoms also pushed for more aggressive health coverage for the state's lowest earners. Georgia's controversial Medicaid program, which partially expanded coverage to low-income adults if they proved they were working, expires at the end of the year. Bottoms promised to switch to full Medicaid expansion provided under the Affordable Care Act. She defeated Republican Rick Jackson, the wealthy founder of Jackson Healthcare, a large physician and nurse staffing company. – Sarah Todd and Bob Herman

a stem wave?

Doctors and scientists won key seats

A microbiologist. A doctor. A nuclear engineer. These are some of the Democrats who won seats in Congress last night.

Perhaps the most surprising was pediatrician Annie Andrews. Andrews won South Carolina’s open Senate seat, which had been held by Republican Lindsey Graham for 23 years before his death. She, along with Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed (more below on El-Sayed, who completed medical school but not residency), will be the the first Democrats with medical degrees in the Senate since 1969.

In her campaign ads, Andrews frequently wore her scrubs, and made walking back Trump’s health policies central to her campaign.

“My two decades as a physician have shown me in a thousand heartbreaking ways just how broken our health care system is,” her platform for reducing health care costs reads. Her platform included health care being a “right” and not a “privilege.” To that end, she said she will work to maintain access to vaccines and ensure rural hospitals do not close.

For a sense of how far Andrews has come, when our colleague Margaret Manto wrote about her last year, for NOTUS (now the Washington Sun), her race was considered a longshot. “This is not a path I ever envisioned for myself. I was perfectly happy in my role as a pediatrician,” she told Margaret at the time.

While not a doctor, Xavier Becerra, who served as health secretary in the Biden administration, cruised in his race to become California governor. From that perch, he could continue his focus on drug pricing, which has also been a priority for the state's leaders.

On the other side, longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a prominent booster of federal support for academic research who criticized the Trump administration's moves to reshape that system, lost her reelection campaign to Democrat Troy Jackson. — Anil Oza

maha misses

The MAHA movement is on life support

He ran as a model MAHA candidate — an enemy of Big Agriculture, a friend of Kennedy.

And yet Republican Zach Lahn lost his race for the Iowa governorship, a crushing blow to the Make America Healthy Again movement. The MAHA PAC poured a million dollars into Lahn’s campaign and Kennedy enthusiastically backed him.

The loss may reflect the waning power of the MAHA movement, which has been on shaky ground over the last several months amid frustration by some members that the Trump administration was too slow on achieving real progress, including on pesticides. Lahn had promised to take down Big Agriculture, ban Covid-19 vaccines from the market, and tackle Iowa’s high cancer rate.

Sen. Roger Marshall (R) lost his reelection bid in Kansas. Marshall, a doctor, started the congressional MAHA Caucus. Although high prices for diesel and fertilizer were the initial drivers of discontent in the state, Marshall has spent the final two months of his campaign fending off reports of aggressive medical debt collection as an OB-GYN.

Marshall also faced an unusually well-suited Democratic contender, Adam Hamilton. Hamilton leads one of Kansas’ largest megachurches and has gained crossover appeal, including endorsements from two former Republican governors. – Chelsea Ciruzzo and John Wilkerson

michigan goes for el-sayed

‘Medicare for All’ gets a high-profile champion

Abdul El-Sayed’s win in a Michigan Senate race sets him up to be Democrats’ principal challenger to Kennedy. When I talked to him last week, he said he wants to lay the groundwork for a 2028 administration to rebuild the Department of Health and Human Services, but in the meantime he aims to hold Kennedy and Trump “accountable for all of the failures.”

While his race was one of the most closely watched of the cycle, largely because of Democrats’ angst about the direction of their party, many in academia and public health had hoped he could be a fighter for them. El-Sayed trained as a physician-scientist, doing research on health disparities and maternal health before becoming the head of Detroit’s public health department.

Through the race, he also amassed a huge platform that he will leverage to advocate for Medicare for All, as well as his vision for public health. We’ll have more to say later today, when my colleague Sarah Todd, who wrote about Acton's gubernatorial campaign in Ohio, and I will have a breakdown of how doctors and scientists on the ballot fared. – Anil Oza