Photograph Source: World Economic Forum – CC BY 3.0

Recently, Faunalytics, the animal-welfare research nonprofit, put out a report about how American voters respond to nonhuman policy proposals. I’ve seen activists with views similar to mine despair about the findings on social media, specifically in regards to cultivated meat. Cellular agriculture may or may not take off, but I don’t think the report, in and of itself, is a reason to give up on trying to advance the industry through the electoral process. I should note at the outset I am not a science or political wonk, so take from my thoughts what you will.

The relevant findings of the October 25 report by Zach Wulderk, Sparsha Saha and Allison Troy were as follows. All else being equal, 53.8 percent of voters supported candidates who proposed banning cultivated meat. Meanwhile, 45.1 percent of voters supported increased public investment in cultivated meat. Predictably, conservatives were more hostile to cultivated meat than liberals. Somewhat counterintuitively, however, given demographics of the animal movement, women were more hostile to cultivated meat than men.

Honestly, in my view, these numbers don’t seem so bad, considering the novelty of cultivated meat, conservative demonization of the protein, and what I suspect is a growing, generalized backlash to the pace of technological change. I’ll be interested to see whether these numbers improve as cultivated meat nears commercialization. On the one hand, I could imagine them getting worse, as conservative demonization and anti-technological sentiment increases. On the other, perhaps they will improve as more people directly experience cultivated meat.

It’s important to say the aforementioned authors of the report don’t understand their findings as a reason to abandon the project of advancing cellular agriculture through the electoral process. “Rather than writing off cultivated meat as politically unpopular, advocates could make additional efforts to educate the public on the benefits of these products. Public opinion is far from static. Advocates can and should work to shift the perceptions around unpopular topics as a way of helping animals,” they conclude in the text’s cellular-agriculture section.

I’d add politicians and parties as a whole stake out unpopular positions all of the time. To mention one example, according to a June 2025 fact sheet from Pew Research Center, 63 percent of voters believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 36 percent believe it should be illegal in all or most cases. The latter position, of course, is a central part of Republican orthodoxy. Maybe that will change in a post Roe v. Wade environment, but it hasn’t yet. Conservative politicians across the country continue to run as vehement opponents of abortion.

Now, as much as I’d love for candidates to make advancing cellular agriculture a centerpiece of their campaign, I don’t believe this would be conducive to winning. It’s just not an important issue to many voters. What’s needed is for cultivated-meat proponents to embed themselves as part of a larger political coalition, capable of winning elections. I believe we are at the beginning of a new era, in which left-wing populists blaming society’s ills on economic elites will compete with right-wing populists blaming the same on religious, racial and sexual minorities.

Even if one doesn’t care about these issues, all available evidence suggests the Democratic Party, as it begins to move in a left-wing populist direction, is more open to public investment in cultivated-meat research than the Republican Party, as it begins to move in a right-wing populist direction. Cellular-agriculture proponents should push as hard as they can to extract public, sincere commitments from Democratic candidates on funding for cultivated-meat research, while understanding they are the most junior of junior coalition partners.

In the decades to come, the Democratic Party will seek to pass massive pieces of legislation, which reform capitalism to a degree not seen since the New Deal. I suspect it wouldn’t be too hard to include significant funding for cellular-agriculture development in these bills, without expending much of any political capital. Conservatives will be so busy tearing their hair out over socialized medicine and the like they wouldn’t be able to focus a great deal of time or energy on comparatively-small investments in cultivated-meat research at agricultural schools.

Finally, for those agonizing about the Faunalytics report, I’d point out Democrats at the federal and state level have already funded cellular-agriculture development. Yes, the political parties are at the start of a period of transformation, so perhaps this will change, but, as recently as last year, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey‘s administration gave more than $2.1 million to the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture. As far as I can tell, the investment hasn’t inspired any political backlash whatsoever. It’s very much politically feasible.

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