Since many Tea Party candidates ran on no-compromise platforms, they can be particularly hard nuts to crack on any topic that involves spending, including research and development–or that is my impression. Regulation is also unpopular in the current economic climate. Terence would be able to speak better to the politics. But not all communication has to be confrontational, and many ecological scientists have expertise to share that is not strictly tied to partisan politics.

There has been plenty of talk over the last couple of years about confirmation bias, the tendency to reject fairly straight-forward factual information that clashes with your current understanding of how the world works. The phenomenon is pretty universal. I’m starting to see suggestions of ways to work with it. Some people like to take it head-on, like Skeptical Science does in their debunking handbook. Others try out new language, reaching for common ground.

It’s also helpful to keep in mind that when we talk to policy makers about science, we aren’t just fighting for attention to a particular issue. We want each meeting to lay groundwork for future conversations.