Tom Stalcup is not the kind of politician who fits neatly into a party label. A physicist by training, a small-business owner by choice, and a Republican candidate in a deeply Democratic Massachusetts district, he seems almost deliberately out of step with the usual rhythms of American politics. Stalcup holds a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Florida State University, where he studied exotic organic superconductors at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee. He spent years investigating materials like copper bromine, which undergoes a fascinating superconducting transition around 80 kelvins, and he learned early that scientific truth can be as elusive as it is rewarding. After finishing his doctorate in 2000, he was burned out and turned away from academia. Instead, he founded Upward Innovations, a company that operates under the name DataGarrison.com. The company builds remote weather stations positioned all over the world, from Antarctica to tiny, near-uninhabited Jarvis Island in the Pacific, and the data they collect are used by researchers studying climate change. Stalcup is quick to say that his company does not take a position on what the data mean; it simply helps people measure the world more accurately. But he is also quick to say that as a Republican he completely accepts that climate change is real and human-caused. In a party where that view can seem an outlier, he finds a kind of freedom in being a long shot. His district has not sent a Republican to Congress since 1947, and he faces incumbent Democrat Jake Auchincloss, who was elected in 2020. That long-shot status, he suggests, lets him speak honestly rather than strategically.
In an interview with Scientific American, Stalcup talked at length about what it means to put science over politics, and why he believes both parties are guilty of misusing science when it suits them. He is frustrated by the way public debate works now. Too often, he says, science is invoked only when it is convenient, and ignored when it isn’t. Both Republicans and Democrats do this, and he is not shy about saying so. He talks about the deterioration of American media, where carefully curated facts and omissions are used not to inform but to persuade. The example that influenced him early was the Iraq War under George W. Bush. On the basis of what he considers lies, the country was led into a war, and for years a large share of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks. Stalcup sees that as a failure not just of politicians but of media and public culture. He wants to apply the scientific method to policy making, which means trying to find actual facts and letting them lead wherever they may go. In his own legal fights over the years, he became familiar with Rule 11, which prevents lawyers from omitting facts when presenting arguments to a court. He believes something like that should apply to journalism and politics as well. If the court of public opinion is going to function, he argues, people should not be allowed to sway it by hiding inconvenient truths. This is the core of his message: not that science always has the answer, but that honesty about evidence is the only way forward.
One area where Stalcup is particularly passionate is health care, and his argument is both personal and structural. He believes the data show a sort of legal corruption in American medicine, where insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies keep prices high and call it capitalism. He is all for capitalism, he says, but not when it turns life-or-death decisions into opportunities for price gouging. His aunt died of cancer recently, and in the last months of her life she was spending ten thousand dollars a month on prescription medication. He calls that atrocious and says it should be illegal. His blunt solution is that in some areas socialism is necessary. The country already socializes national defense, he points out, so why not socialize the defense of the human body against disease? This is a striking thing for a Republican to say, and he knows it. But he also knows that structural reform is not enough. He argues that the only way to make lasting changes in health care is to address the deeper problem of money in politics. The people who profit from the current system will simply spend millions to reverse whatever reforms are passed in the next election cycle. That is why he believes Republicans must agree to eliminate Citizens United and reform campaign finance. Without doing that, he says, corruption will just keep reasserting itself. It is a rare mix of idealism and political realism, and it speaks to his broader sense that the system itself is broken in ways that no single policy can fix on its own.
On climate change, Stalcup is equally direct and unusually critical of his own party. He says the idea that climate change is a hoax is simply false. He acknowledges that some people in conservative media bubbles genuinely believe that, but he also thinks some politicians say it because it wins votes. He is careful to point out that the climate crisis can be exploited by all sides. He mentions Solyndra, the solar company that received millions in federal support under the Obama administration and then collapsed, as an example of how government money can flow to politically connected companies. But he does not let that history obscure the bigger truth. The evidence is overwhelming, and his own company helps gather it. His weather stations are spread across the globe, and the data they collect are used by climate researchers. He sees this as a real advantage: he is not an ideologue talking abstractly about policy; he is a scientist and a businessman who has been helping to measure the Earth for years. He also thinks the way journalists and politicians frame climate change is profoundly unhelpful. Too often, the issue is treated as a tribal marker rather than a scientific question. He wants to see a standard of honesty in public communication that mirrors what courts require of lawyers. If you are going to present facts to the public, you should not be allowed to omit other facts that complicate your story. That is not a liberal or conservative principle; it is a scientific one. And he argues it should apply equally to everyone, no matter which side of the political divide they happen to stand on.
Stalcup is similarly critical of the Trump administration’s approach to scientific research. He says he would put a moratorium on all of Trump’s changes to agencies like the National Science Foundation and the Department of Health and Human Services. His metaphor is vivid: Trump is taking a sledgehammer to a problem that needs a scalpel. Yes, he acknowledges, there is politics in grant making. That was true when he was a graduate student, and it is true now. There are abuses, and those abuses should be excised. But cutting funding broadly across scientific agencies will hurt the country in profound ways. Basic scientific research, like the kind he used to do, often has no immediate financial payoff. No one made money from showing that the superconducting transition temperature of a particular material changed by a few kelvins, but that knowledge mattered because it helped scientists understand superconductivity more broadly. That understanding might eventually revolutionize electronics, transportation, or energy systems. But you cannot rush it, and you cannot expect immediate returns. Stalcup worries that many political leaders, including Trump, simply do not understand how basic research works. They see it as wasteful or too slow, so they slash funding. In the long run, he says, that means the United States will fall behind. It always has been a leader in technology and science, and it has thrived because of investments in research that did not promise instant rewards. If the country stops doing that, it will lose its edge. Stalcup’s critique is not anti-Trump in a reflexive sense; it is the warning of a scientist who has seen how discovery actually happens.
Finally, Stalcup addresses a question that hangs over his candidacy: does the Republican Party have a science problem? He says yes, but he is quick to add that the Democratic Party has one too. In his view, Democrats have co-opted science the way they have co-opted minority movements, claiming exclusive ownership of a noble cause and using it as a badge of moral superiority. They say they are the party of science, but they too pick and choose when science serves their agenda. He points to the early debate about the origins of COVID-19. To him, it seemed obvious to many people that the virus most likely came from a laboratory in China, and yet powerful voices on the left fought that idea fiercely and dismissed those who raised it as conspiracy theorists. He sees this as tribalism, not science. It is virtue signaling, a way of showing loyalty rather than a genuine commitment to truth. Even among his own friends, many of whom are Ph.D. scientists and Democrats, he sees a dangerous condescension. They believe that half the country is not just wrong but actually stupid. That attitude comforts people, he says; it makes them feel superior. But it also infuriates the other side and drives the country further apart. Stalcup wants to cut through that divide. He is not asking everyone to agree, but he is asking people to be honest about evidence and to stop treating science as a weapon of political tribalism. In a world of curated facts and carefully edited narratives, that is a surprisingly radical position. Whether or not he wins the election, he seems determined to keep saying it.