Sam Wang, Politician-in-Training
Veronica, a pug with a spiky pink collar, trudged alongside her sister Betty, a thirteen-year-old hound, in Princeton one recent wet morning. They were led by their owner, the neuroscientist and brand-new congressional candidate Sam Wang, who was out looking for voters. Wang, who is fifty-eight and wore rectangular glasses and a big blue campaign button, is still getting the hang of interacting with would-be constituents. A few weeks earlier, he had walked through a snowstorm to a pancake restaurant. “My wife said, ‘If you’re really serious about this, you will ask everybody in this diner for their signature,’ ” he recalled. “I said, ‘My God, do I have to?’ ”
Wang had grown accustomed to another side of politics. His academic work is on early brain development, but for the past decade he has been a celebrity among online liberals and election nerds. In 2004, he started aggregating Presidential polls and became a prominent enough analyst that Time named his rivalry with Nate Silver one of its “Top 10 Feuds” of 2014. Two years later, Wired crowned him the “new king of the presidential election data mountain” just before Election Day; soon afterward, he swallowed a cricket on CNN because he’d publicly vowed that if Donald Trump earned more than two hundred and forty electoral votes, he’d “eat a bug.” He then turned his focus to electoral reforms, especially on gerrymandering, and advised New Jersey on its map-drawing in 2021. So far, in his campaign, he said, “I’m extremely tempted to do my own data work. But there are other smart data workers. Only I can go meet voters.”
Wang is one of thirteen candidates running in June’s Democratic primary to represent an educated, diverse, mostly progressive district. His platform includes defending science and abolishing ICE and the Electoral College. He recently argued outside a Princeton movie theatre with a voter who insisted that the only research grants losing funding were “D.E.I. grants.” “And I’m, like, ‘When I write a grant on sensory processing and how it influences dendritic pruning, that is not a D.E.I. grant,’ ” he said.
Eventually, Betty stopped and squatted. Wang grimaced, eying his neighbor’s yard. “Betty, we’re going to learn the word ‘easement,’ ” he said. He concluded that there were no voters on this walk and headed for home. He was due at a nearby café to thank his volunteers.
Outside the café, a nuclear-policy expert thanked him for running, and a small crowd formed. One man, John, said he was an independent voter—he’d volunteered for Trump—and asked for Wang’s position on Iran (Wang: we need congressional approval to declare war) and illegal immigration (ICE isn’t the answer). He told Wang that he was concerned about communism, and Wang shared that his own parents had fled China in 1949.
John took out his phone. “I’m reading about you right now on Wikipedia. In 2016, you predicted Hillary would win?”
“It’s important to own mistakes,” Wang said, a politician already.
A campaign volunteer approached: the café was packed, so they were relocating to a seafood restaurant two doors down. Wang turned to his supporters, who included a pediatrician, a genomics researcher, and a Princeton University neuroscience colleague. They celebrated getting Wang on the ballot, and the conversation drifted to A.I. “I find A.I. to be kind of impressive, but also scary,” Wang said. “When people were first discovering radiation—‘Oh, radiation’s really good. We should put radium in everything! We should put radium in beverages!’ We’re in this weird, unregulated moment in A.I. where we just think it’s wonderful and put it everywhere: ‘Let’s put A.I. in TVs! Let’s put A.I. in our furniture!’ ”
The regulation talk brought them back to Trump. Neha Saraiya, the pediatrician, said that she’d seen an explosion in vaccine skepticism. “It’s like my knowledge went out the window after hard-earned years of God knows, medical-school debt, and everything. It’s like there’s no value to science.”
Wang nodded, firmly. These days, he said, “it is harder to see causes and effects. Look at Trump! Trump is somehow acting surprised that the price of gas is going up.” He laughed. “Someone online said your average Warhammer player would be better at waging this war than Donald Trump.”
As the volunteers packed up, Wang turned to Roy Sparrow, an eighty-six-year-old former N.Y.U. professor in a campaign hat, to talk about the No Kings rally happening the next day at his retirement community. Wang told Sparrow, a veteran of both the Air Force and the protests at Berkeley in the sixties, that he thought he’d seen a “Heart tribute band” on the schedule—was it an homage to the rock group from Seattle? Sparrow, who plays the ukulele, clarified: “We call ourselves the Heartthrobs because many of us have heart conditions.”
A woman wearing headphones waved to Wang. Smelling a potential voter, he started to approach, but then stopped. “I would’ve said hi to her,” he said. “But she seemed like she was on the phone.” ♦