Tom Stalcup, the Republican Party’s candidate to represent Massachusetts’s fourth district in Congress, does not like the way American politicians talk about science.
Stalcup, who holds a Ph.D. in physics from Florida State University, faces an uphill challenge to defeat incumbent Democrat Jake Auchincloss, who was elected in 2020. The district has not been represented by a Republican since 1947.
That long-shot status seems to have offered Stalcup a little more freedom—he’s distanced himself from the party’s standard line on issues such as climate change and drug pricing. But that doesn’t mean he believes the Democrats are any better when it comes to science-related policies.
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In an interview with Scientific American, Stalcup explains how he hopes to apply the scientific method to making policy, what years of misinformation have done to the American public and why he believes both parties abuse science for political gain.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
You are a scientist by training. Can you tell us about your field of expertise?
I have a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics. I got my degree while working at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, [Fla.], where we studied organic superconductors, which are two-dimensional period materials—crystals actually—that become superconductors at various temperatures. I was studying copper bromine, and it had an interesting transition around 80 kelvins. I published results that showed that the superconducting transition temperature, as well as the effective mass of the electron and other properties of the material, would actually be changed based on how slowly or fast you cool it.
After you received your Ph.D., you founded a company, Upward Innovations. How do you use your scientific background there? Why didn’t you go into academia?
That’s a company that I founded in 2004. I graduated [with] my Ph.D. in 2000. I did not go into academia. I was pretty burned out after getting my Ph.D.; it was a pretty grueling experience. So I got a job at an electronics firm where they were building a remote weather station, and so I made a spin-off company that allowed their data to basically get on the cloud.
As a company, we do business as DataGarrison.com. That’s the website where users can get their data. Our remote weather stations are situated all around the world, and their data is purchased by researchers studying climate change. We don’t really take a position on what they’re going to measure. We just provide the equipment to allow them to measure. And of course, I’m not avoiding the climate change issue because I completely agree—even as a Republican—that climate change is real and human-caused. We have the data to prove it. It’s not an item of debate. So that’s where it differentiates me as a Republican.
It’s fun, interesting work. We have a bunch [of stations] in Antarctica. And recently, in the past five or 10 years, we added cameras to the systems. [Our stations] are actually studying sea ice down in Antarctica now and how it moves. The Fish and Wildlife Service uses them to study birds in one of the most remote islands on Earth, called Jarvis Island, in the middle Pacific.
On your website, you say you put science and reason ahead of partisan politics. Can you explain how your scientific background affects your approach to policy?
Science informs all of it. Science is often used when it’s convenient for either side, and that’s just wrong, and both sides do it—Republicans and Democrats. If the science doesn’t agree with what they say, they just ignore it, and it’s troublesome. Science cuts both ways, and that’s why I say, “Science over politics.”
Throughout my life, I saw a deterioration in the U.S. media, where we were just given misinformation. Science is the search for truth and the search for facts that back up what [argument] you’re trying to present. One of the biggest examples that really affected me was George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq based on lies. Back in the day, seven in 10 Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks.
It’s not just the Iraq War; it’s every subject. You can make an argument for anything by selecting and cherry-picking facts and omitting facts and sound convincing. There are basically two media bubbles now, where each side of the country is being misled about the other side—not through lies per se but by selectively, carefully curated facts and omissions of other facts. I’m trying to cut through that.
You talk a lot about using data-driven solutions to reduce health care costs. How would you go about doing that?
One solution is to have broad price negotiations. The data show that there is active legal corruption going on. Health insurance agencies, as well as the pharmaceutical companies, keep prices high, and they call it capitalism. I’m all for capitalism. But when it comes to a life-or-death decision, there’s a huge demand for staying alive, and you shouldn’t use someone’s life-or-death decision to price gouge them. My aunt died recently of cancer, in the last few months of her life she was spending $10,000 a month on prescription medications, and that’s just atrocious and should be illegal.
I’m a Republican saying that, in some areas, socialism is required. We do it for the national defense of the country. There’s no reason why we can’t socialize the defense of the human body and keep it safe and protected from outside pathogens.
To fight this terrible plague of corruption that’s driving these high costs, you need a lot of money. Let’s say you solve the health care [problem]—the next election cycle, these people that were making money on it will then give a lot of money again to reverse what you did. And so I think Republicans must agree to eliminate Citizens United and reform campaign finance. [Editor’s Note: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that lifted campaign spending restrictions on corporations and other outside groups.]
You acknowledge that climate change is real and measurable. How would you make your voice heard within your party, given that the most senior Republican leaders, including the president, have called it a hoax?
It’s not a hoax. It’s real. However, you can point to certain instances where companies have used their clout and connections to make a lot of money off the climate change crisis. I think [former president Barack] Obama got in a bit of trouble for giving a lot of money Solyndra, a company that failed quickly after they received many millions of dollars.
I think there are two things. I think some people say [they don’t believe in climate change] just because they want to get votes, and I think some people actually believe that because they’re in this media bubble. I’ve done a lot of work as a pro se litigant in the courts in the past 10 or 20 years, and there’s something called Rule 11, where you’re not allowed to omit facts when you’re presenting information to the court. I think the same thing should apply to journalists. If there is a channel or people providing news to the country, the court of public opinion should not be able to be swayed by the omission of facts or [by] misleading facts.
Congress recently paused a Trump administration effort to charge political appointees with deciding scientific grant funding. Do you support the administration’s plan?
I would put a moratorium on all of Trump’s changes regarding the [National Science Foundation] and the [Department of Health and Human Services]. He’s taking the sledgehammer to a problem rather than a scalpel. There’s obviously some favoritism going on in the NSF; there is some politics going on, which I disagree with. I disagreed with it even back when I was a grad student. Everyone knows that there’s politics involved in grants sometimes, and that should be excised from the grant-making procedures. But taking the sledgehammer to this problem, as Trump has done, is the wrong approach. There are so many people affected, in my district, by his approach, and it’s not good for the country. Yes, there are abuses, just like there were in other almost every area of government, and they must be tackled surgically, not with a sledgehammer.
[The U.S. was] and always has been a leader in technology and advancements in science: the telephone, the Internet, the light bulb. I don’t think Trump understands basic scientific research. There’s no real immediate turnaround and investment in basic research. That’s the research I was doing. No one made money off increasing the superconducting transition temperature by two or three kelvins, but it was important to understand the broader science surrounding superconductivity in general. [That could] revolutionize all electronics, but again, it’s not immediate, and if we don’t fund it anymore, we’re going to fall behind. And I don’t think Trump wants that. I just don’t think he sees it clearly enough to make proper decisions.
Almost all the other candidates running in the midterms who have science backgrounds are running as Democrats. Do you think that the Republican Party has a science problem?
I do, but I believe the Democrats have a science problem as well. There are many issues on which Democrats will not side with science. What the Democrats do with science, they also do with minorities. They co-opt a movement and take it as their own, and that’s just not the proper thing to do. If you’re going to use science, you have to let it cut both ways. And if science doesn’t really support what you’re saying, then you can’t claim to be the party of science.
[During the pandemic], it seemed pretty obvious to a lot of people that COVID most likely came from a laboratory in China. And all of the power centers of the Left fought tooth and nail against that narrative and called the people who would say that conspiracy theorists. [Editor’s Note: According to a 2025 World Health Organization report, the lab leak possibility “cannot be confirmed nor eliminated” because of a lack of evidence.]
It’s a tribalism thing to say we’re with science—and it’s not necessarily science; it’s virtue signaling.
Some of my really good friends are also Ph.D.s in physics; many of them are Democrats. And they believe that half the country is stupid—not just wrong but actually dumb. I think it comforts people to feel like they’re better and superior, and that makes the Right feel very upset that people are viewing them in that way. It creates a lot of friction, and it’s just not good for the country.