Meet the state legislator who wants to make daylight saving time permanent

This weekend, we spring forward.

If Del. Joe McNamara, R-Roanoke County, had his way, we’d never fall back.

Welcome to the Great Daylight Saving Time Controversy.

The world is divided into two types of people: Those who think daylight saving time should be made permanent and those who do not. Or, as both sides see it, those who are right and those who are wrong.

This is one of the few times we get to combine politics with phrases such as “circadian rhythm” and “New Zealand bug collector.” You’ll also get some random references to Benjamin Franklin, Winston Churchill, Cher and Coldplay. We’ll even throw in some Donald Trump for those of you who like that sort of thing. If this were a drinking game, you could take a shot of either a tequila sunrise or Malibu sunset whenever any of those get mentioned. And here you thought politics was boring, right?

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Let’s start with how McNamara became interested in daylight saving time. He was in Florida in 2018 when the state Senate there passed a bill cleverly called the Sunshine Protection Act. It would make daylight saving time in Florida permanent — if Congress ever agreed. 

“I was sitting in a restaurant, 6 or 7 at night, it was pitch dark outside, and I thought that made a lot of sense,” McNamara says. “So I started doing a little research. … There’s a fair amount of research that says changing the time is not great for our bodies.”

No, no, no, don’t take a drink yet. Wait for it. Or, more specifically, let’s wait for Helmut Zarbl, director of Rutgers University’s Environmental and Occupational Health Science Institute, to say the words: “Changing sleep-wake cycles by an hour has an effect on our circadian clock.”

Ding! Ding, ding! OK, now you can knock one back.

“There’s research that says we’re better off on standard time, research that says we’re better off on daylight saving time,” McNamara says. He comes down on the pro-daylight saving time side, or, as some prefer to think of it, the pro-evening sunshine side.

He wasn’t in the legislature when he first became a convert to permanent daylight saving time, but now he is. For five years in a row, he’s introduced a bill about daylight saving time in the General Assembly. For five years in a row, it’s died in the House Rules Committee, which is an important committee where bills go to die. 

The first three years he simply asked for a study. The last two years he asked for Virginia to pass a bill to convert to daylight saving time if Congress ever approves. Some years Democrats were in charge, some years Republicans were in charge. Didn’t matter. The result was always the same. The pro-evening sunshine lobby in Richmond is not strong. 

“I keep putting that bill in in hopes it’s actually heard,” McNamara says. Maybe someday.

I should point out here just how unusual this bill is for McNamara. He’s an accountant by trade (he also owns two ice cream shops), and most of his bills usually deal with boring things like taxes. Being a Republican, those bills invariably involve lowering taxes. This year, he had bills to cap the meal tax, lower the tax on food purchased through vending machines, and eliminate the remaining tax on food. Those are just the ones I understand. He also had a bill to implement “market-based corporate income tax sourcing for attributing sales, other than sales of tangible personal property” where section B, subsection 3 contains a provision dealing with “internet root infrastructure providers.” No, that’s not a word in our drinking game, but if reading the tax code makes your head hurt, feel free to take a swig.

Naturally, out of all these bills, the one McNamara always gets calls about is his perennial daylight saving time bill.

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No, Benjamin Franklin did not invent daylight saving time, but feel free to take a drink anyway. He’d want you to. He did suggest that Parisians could save money on candles simply by waking up earlier. “An immense sum!” he declared. He satirically laid out a four-point plan by which Parisians could be induced to wake up earlier. Tax any windows that had shutters. Ration how many candles people could buy. Post guards to prevent people from staying out at night. And, of course, the kicker: “Every morning, as soon as the sun rises, let all the bells in every church be set ringing; and if that is not sufficient? Let cannon be fired in every street, to wake the sluggards effectually, and make them open their eyes to see their true interest.”

Anyway, Franklin had nothing to do with this, although we often mix up our facts and think he does. Instead, the honor of inventing daylight saving time belongs to George Hudson, a New Zealand entomologist or, if you prefer, a New Zealand bug collector.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Raise a toast to George Hudson!

He was a nerdy kid in the 19th century who collected bugs, so many that by age 16 he had a scientific paper published in The Entomologist. Collecting bugs, though, does not pay the bills, a severe failure of our capitalist system. Instead, Hudson worked in the post office in Wellington. Selling stamps all day put a serious crimp in Hudson’s bug-collecting because there often wasn’t enough daylight left when he got off work. 

Since he couldn’t change the hours at the post office, he had a different idea. What if he could persuade everyone to simply change their clocks? That would give him more time to hunt bugs. In 1895, he presented a formal scientific paper on the subject to the Wellington Philosophical Society, but nothing ever happened. Hudson, though, did amass the largest bug collection in all of New Zealand, one that today is housed in the national museum.

On the other side of the world, a Canadian businessman named John Hewitson had the same idea. He wasn’t into bugs, he was into sports and wanted more time after work for whatever summer games Canadians were playing in 1909. He lived in Port Arthur, Ontario, on Lake Superior, which was on Central Time. His solution: In the summer, the town could switch to Eastern Time and gain an extra hour of daylight, then switch back to Central Time during the winter, aka hockey season. Hewitson succeeded where the bug-hunter in New Zealand did not. Port Arthur and neighboring Fort William agreed. Today these towns have merged into Thunder Bay, and that’s its claim to history. Unfortunately, the only place that followed suit was another town in Ontario called Orillia. This is probably because Hewitson did not have a TikTok account to make the idea go viral. 

In Great Britain, though, somebody did have the early 20th century equivalent of social media. William Willett was a building contractor. There are two different stories about how it came to Willett. One is that he was out riding early one morning and noticed how many blinds were still drawn. The other is that he wanted more time for golf after work. That’s clearly the more colorful story, so that’s the one I prefer, although it’s possible both could be true. What matters is that Willett felt so strongly about the subject that in 1907 he published a pamphlet, “The Waste of Daylight.” Today he’d have had a website and a social media account, but in 1907, he had a pamphlet. He estimated that advancing the clock would not only give people more time for recreation but save £2.5 million in lighting costs. That’s about $329 million today. (Fun fact: The online Inflation Calculator run by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics goes back to 1913. The one run by the Bank of England goes back to 1209.)

Anyway, you get the idea: Willett wanted to save money and play more golf, two things that are often in contradiction, but there you have it. 

Willett didn’t just have a pamphlet, he had connections. He persuaded a member of Parliament to push the idea. So did another member of Parliament by the name of Winston Churchill. Winston would definitely want you to take a drink, perhaps even two or three. Still, nothing happened. The idea of changing the time was too radical. World War I changed that. 

When World War I broke out, the British Foreign Secretary looked out his window at St. James Park and observed: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” The fuel for those lamps was expensive. In 1916, two years into the war, Germany and Austria-Hungary decided to save money on lighting by changing the time. Britain promptly did the same, as a provision of the Defense of the Realm Act. Daylight saving time was a national security measure.

Alas, Willett did not live to see this. He died of influenza the year before. Today there’s a sundial in his home town of Petts Wood, just outside London, that’s permanently set to daylight saving time. Or, as he preferred to call it, British Summer Time.

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The science on daylight saving time is not always kind. A news release this week from Virginia Tech called attention to the work of Carla Finkelstein, director of the Molecular Diagnostics Lab at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute and an expert in circadian biology.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

“Research shows that daylight saving time messes with our biological clocks by reducing morning sunlight exposure, which pushes our sleep schedules later and can have negative effects on health,” she says. “Staying on standard time year-round is much better for our circadian rhythms, overall health, and well-being.”

Ding! Ding! Ding!

The Tech release references the Society for Research in Biological Rhythms, which “warns daylight saving time can increase risks for heart disease, obesity, depression, and workplace accidents.” It’s not alone. The American Economic Journal once computed that switching to Daylight Savings Time results in more traffic accidents because more drivers are sleep-deprived.

Those are the arguments on the anti side. Now for the arguments on the pro side.

Sunshine! Well, more of it in the evening anyway. Studies have found that daylight saving time boosts revenues for golf courses and convenience stores but hurts prime-time television ratings. Other studies have found that while the transition to daylight saving time may make us more accident-prone, once our bodies adjust we’re less accident-prone because there’s more light. Crime goes down. Science News reports that once daylight saving time ends, car vs. deer collisions spike by 16%. As someone who currently has a dent in the side of my car from a deer running into me, I am definitely pro-sunshine. The deer never seem to get the hang of changing the clock.

The United States adopted permanent daylight saving time during the energy crisis of 1974. Unfortunately, many people didn’t like waking up in darkness in the depths of winter. The change only lasted for a year. This also coincides with the rise of disco and the fall of Richard Nixon. Correlation is not causation, of course, but who knows?

Despite that 1970s setback and despite what the scientists say, the pro-daylight saving time side has been gradually winning. In 2022, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill to make daylight saving time permanent, but the legislation died in the House. That bill was sponsored by Sen. Rick Scott, R-Florida, or, if you prefer, R-Sunshine State. 

Donald Trump — Ding! Ding! Ding! — used to be for daylight saving time. In 2019, he tweeted: “Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is O.K. with me!”

Now, though, he’s gone over to the dark side. On Dec. 13, 2024, he posted: “The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.” 

So which is it? Daylight saving time would give us more time to frolic in the Gulf of America!

McNamara says he will keep pushing. “I like Cher and all but I’m not interested in turning back time,” he said. “I want to stay on permanent daylight savings time.”

There’s your prompt for Cher — Ding! Ding! Ding! If you don’t get the reference, it’s because she once recorded “If I Could Turn Back Time.” 

Why is McNamara so passionate about this? “I know people in the fall are less happy when it starts getting dark,” he says, “and I want people to be happy.”

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If you now have Cher’s song stuck in your head and don’t like that, don’t worry. Here’s another fun fact: Remember Willett, the British guy who promoted daylight saving time? His great-great-grandson is Chris Martin of Coldplay, which had a hit with the song “Clocks.”

Ding! Ding, ding!