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With Republican Bob McDonnell holding a wide lead over Democrat Creigh Deeds in the Virginia race for governor, the former state attorney general could be at the fore of a GOP takeover on Election Day. (snip) Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, told Fox News he expects McDonnell to win big -- and usher other Republicans into office along the way. "McDonnell is not only going to win -- he's going to win by a landslide. He's going to pull his entire ticket to victory," he said, predicting GOP gains in the House of Delegates...

Here is video of a Fox News report tonight by James Rosen on Radical Obama "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones. The report details all the major evidence of his radicalism that has surfaced over the last couple of weeks. Significantly, toward the end of the report, University of Virginia Political Science Professor Larry Sabato said the "vetting process" clearly broke down with "Mr. Jones." Sabato went on to say: "If a Bush official had made anything comparable to what Mr. Jones has said and done, no doubt there would have been a national hurrah (fuss) of magnificent proportions."This means the...

Something truly astonishing appeared in a Washington Post column on July 25, 2009 (click here to view). It was written by Frank Mankiewicz, former press secretary to Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY) and the man who is perhaps most widely remembered for announcing RFK's death in June 1968. Mankiewicz was also the political director of Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern's losing 1972 campaign. The column contained a two-fold revelation about the just-deceased Walter Cronkite, the longtime CBS News anchorman. Here are the disclosures, in Mankiewicz' own words:

The whisper of September has turned to a roar in October: Barack Obama may be on the verge of a landslide victory. A year ago, no one on the planet could have conceived of such a thing. After all, Democrats have elected just two American presidents since 1968, moderate white Southerners Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both by modest popular vote margins. In 2008 Democrats took a daring leap of faith and chose a far more liberal nominee who is the first African-American standard-bearer - no minor matter in a nation that is just 11% black and has been plagued...

Joseph Biden's Plagiarism; Michael Dukakis's 'Attack Video' – 1988 Feeding Frenzy Democratic presidential candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr., a U.S. senator from Delaware, was driven from the nomination battle after delivering, without attribution, passages from a speech by British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock. A barrage of subsidiary revelations by the press also contributed to Biden's withdrawal: a serious plagiarism incident involving Biden during his law school years; the senator's boastful exaggerations of his academic record at a New Hampshire campaign event; and the discovery of other quotations in Biden's speeches pilfered from past Democratic politicians.

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain can help his chances by vowing to serve only one term — a recognition of his relatively advanced age and a promise that his time in the White House wouldn't be tainted by the politics of seeking a second term. That's according to Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics and a professor whose "Crystal Ball" Internet site bills itself as "the Web's most accurate political analysis."

BY modern American standards it was a very minor crisis, but a bizarre hostage-taking episode at one of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign offices in New Hampshire on Friday offered the former first lady an unexpected opportunity to display her leadership qualities. Clinton was far from the scene and never at risk from a mentally unstable man who eventually surrendered to police after holding three campaign workers hostage. Yet her calm demeanour and authoritative response to a potentially ugly drama was yesterday earning her widespread praise. Clinton followed the incident from her home in Washington, then flew to New Hampshire to...

The presidential candidates are offering prescriptions for everything from Iraq to healthcare, but listen closely. Their fixes are situational and incremental. Meanwhile, the underlying structural problems in American politics and government are systemic and prevent us from solving our most intractable challenges. If we really want to make progress and achieve greater fairness as a society, it is time for elemental change. And we should start by looking at the Constitution, with the goal of holding a new Constitutional Convention. Sound radical? If so, then the founders were radicals. They would be amazed and disappointed that after 220 years, the...

Every election, I seem to recall Sabato and Dick Morris being wrong at some point. Although Morris goes back and forth so much it's hard to tell. Is there any website that tracks the accuracy of pundit predictions. I'm particularly interested in a historical look at Sabato's so-called "crystal ball."

With one day to go, the situation is still very fluid. This weekend, we had a potentially pro-GOP event, the sentencing of Saddam Hussein, and a potentially pro-Democratic event, the unveiling of Rev. Ted Haggard's family values hypocrisy. The Crystal Ball's initial guess was that both news headlines, while attention-grabbing, would have only a marginal impact on the vote (and it's also worth noting that a record percentage of voters will have voted early this year, softening any impact of the last-minute headlines). Yet something is happening. Both the Washington Post/ABC News poll and the new Pew survey show a...

Larry Sabato has made his official list of Senate predictions on Newsmax. He pick Webb over Allen in Virginia. Does anyone know Sabatos' record of accuracy?

www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball Crystal Ball 2006: THE PREDICTIONSCampaigns Clamor for Last-Minute Midterm "Mo"Larry J. Sabato and David WassermanU.Va. Center for PoliticsNovember 2, 2006 Just how Democratic a year is 2006? Five days out, let's rephrase the question this way: when's the last time a major political party has failed to capture a single House seat, Senate seat, or governorship of the opposing party in a federal election year? We bet it's never happened before, and it certainly hasn't happened in the post-World War II era. After all, even when a party suffers miserable net losses, it usually picks up at least several...

Dick Wadhams is the next Republican maestro of cutthroat campaigning. Can Democrats figure out how to stop him? This spring, former combat Marine, one-time Reagan Navy secretary, and first-time candidate James Webb surprised political experts by entering the Democratic Senate primary in Virginia at the last minute--and winning. Three days later, Webb shocked Washington again by pulling within five points of the heavy-spending incumbent, Republican George Allen, despite a cash crunch that had kept Webb off the air for weeks. Legendary Virginia pundit Larry Sabato gave an ominous reading of the situation: The state's voters didn't yet know much about...

He's a professor. He's a pundit. Now some critics are accusing him of being a provocateur. Larry Sabato, the Norfolk-bred political scientist who is among the most widely quoted academics in America, dropped a very large pebble into the already roiled pond of Virginia politics this week when he joined the debate over U.S. Sen. George Allen's racial attitudes. The resulting ripples have been spreading far and wide all week. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, made national news Monday when he alleged on the MSNBC television show "Hardball" that Allen, a Republican, used...

A Powerline blog entry posted here this morning started me thinking about the origins of this week's hit pieces on Senator Allen. I would like to call attention to a few excerpts from this week's deluge. NY Times 9/26/06: "Christopher Taylor, now an anthropology professor at the Birmingham campus of the University of Alabama, said he heard Mr. Allen use an epithet to describe African-Americans in the early 1980’s. ...[He] initially wrote of his recollections in a private e-mail message to a **colleague** after the “macaca” incident. The message was eventually **forwarded to The New York Times**" According to Allens-A-team...

Cragg, 67, who lives in Fairfax County, said on Wednesday that Webb described taking drives through the black neighborhood of Watts, where he and members of his ROTC unit used racial epithets and pointed fake guns at blacks to scare them.

Many are questioning whether Larry Sabato's issued, then modified, then somewhat-withdrawn accusations against Sen. Allen amount to Sabato unmasking himself as a democrat partisan, posing as an impartial observer. I can add one new fact that I have personal knowledge of, one that is somewhat curious, and potentially relevant. Here it is: the person that Allen referred to as "Macaca", the person who was stalking the Allen campaign, is one of Sabato's students, in Sabato's class at UVA. I don't know whether this fact has been disclosed anywhere. Hmmmmmmm.............

One of Virginia's best-known political analysts said he had never personally heard Sen. George Allen use racial epithets, despite saying on television a day earlier that the senator "did use the n-word." Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, said Tuesday in an e-mail to The Associated Press, "I didn't personally hear GFA (Allen's initials) say the n-word. "My conclusion is based on the very credible testimony I have heard for weeks, mainly from people I personally know and knew in the '70s," Sabato wrote. Sabato, a classmate of Allen's at the University of Virginia...

MINNEAPOLIS—As the Republican National Committee closed its recent summer meeting at the Sheraton Bloomington Hotel here, two of the nation’s most-quoted political prognosticators told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that it was increasingly more likely that the Republicans would lose their majority in the House, and possibly in the Senate, in this November’s elections. Despite these gloomy forecasts from analysts, the members of the Republican National Committee with whom I spoke almost universally expressed confidence that the party would emerge triumphantly from the mid-term elections. Independent political analyst Charles Cook told the Star Tribune the Republicans could face “an electoral rout”...

Just over one month ago, the Crystal Ball argued that a larger wave than currently existed at the time would have to build in order for Republicans to lose their congressional majorities. At the time, the race-by-race rather than national dynamic of competitive races pointed more towards a "micro-wave" than a "macro-wave" for out-of-power Democrats. But now, with a quarter of time elapsed between that pulse-reading and the election, surer signs are emerging that something more substantial than a "micro-wave" is heating up this summer. Historical trends and big picture indicators--generic congressional ballot tests and approval ratings of President Bush's...

Just how perilously close are Republicans to losing their congressional majority in 2006? The way several independent observers and Democrats are talking and acting these days, you might guess the GOP's demise was all but a done deal. But a little more than four months out from the election, the Crystal Ball is not yet ready to view the GOP majority as a flimsy house of cards, nor in our estimation should Murtha fast-forward to helping Pelosi hand out committee gavels to the ranking members of his caucus. The Republican margin in the House of Representatives may be more tenuous...

The Democrats may or may not score real breakthroughs in the houses of Congress in 2006, but it's undeniable that they have opportunities galore in the Governorships this year. Opportunity is not reality, though, and on prior occasions the Democrats have fumbled away some key contests, as Shakespeare once penned, "in the twinkling of an eye." Yet at the starting gate, Democrats appear headed for control of a narrow majority of the statehouses, and it will be a setback for their 2008 presidential plans if they don't get there. Let's recap where we are at present. The Republicans hold 28...

The long and short of the "War for the Senate" in 2006 is this: Democrats are a good bet to pick up two or three seats net. But for Democrats to regain control of the Senate, almost everything has to fall just right for them. In politics, very occasionally those things happen--but only rarely do all the dominoes fall in one direction. And the Democrats will have to win the world championship of dominoes for the Senate to become theirs again this year.

In last week's installment of the Crystal Ball, we explored the myriad of possible Republican White House contenders for 2008, the lack of an obvious successor to President Bush, as well as the wide open nature of the 2008 party primaries. This is only the fifth time since the dawn of the twentieth century that the incumbent President or Vice President has not been running--the earlier examples were 1908, 1920, 1928, and 1952.And now to the Democrats. The most compelling element of the 2008 contest for the Democrats, in the Crystal Ball's view, will be their burning desire to end...

WASHINGTON — Democrats hope the stars are aligned for a big victory in the 2006 mid-term elections, saying more than astrology is on their side — recent Capitol Hill scandals and wavering popularity of President Bush is helping to boost their chances for a congressional takeover. "We're in a very strong position right now," said Phil Singer, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "We're poised to make gains." Winning a majority of the House or Senate would be unlikely based on the current numbers, say most political observers. Still, Democrats are riding a growing wave of disenchantment with Republicans...

FYI..C-span 2 will be televising all day today, from the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, a forum on the 20006 elections. It's scheduled to start at 9:00am EST. The first panel, from 9-10:30, looks promising. It features Fred Barnes and the center's Larry Sabado...who often appears as a talking head on the cable news nets. Might be worthwhile checking out..

WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va.--Virginia’s two major-party candidates for governor agreed Saturday that they offer vastly different visions for the state’s next chief executive, but found little other common ground in a feisty 90-minute debate in which Republican Jerry W. Kilgore proved more aggressive. Kilgore asserted several times during the Virginia Bar Association-sponsored event that Democrat Timothy M. Kaine would issue blanket clemency to death row inmates because he is opposed to capital punishment for philosophical and religious reasons. The Republican, a supporter of the death penalty and an abortion opponent, said Kaine has called for a moratorium on the death...

All Crystal Ball junkies know the drill. Every election year, most Senators skate by, especially the venerable elders who well fit their states. Meanwhile, a handful of Senators are vulnerable, and those are the contests we watch like hawks. In last week's Crystal Ball email ( http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/article.php?id=LJS2005032401), we examined seniority and the 109th Senate, as well as the seats that are currently open and those that might open between now and 2006. This week, we've brought you the 14 seats out of the 33 up for election that appear to be moderately to very vulnerable. In alphabetical order by state,...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Terri Schiavo case has been catapulted from a drawn-out medical and legal battle into a fast-paced political drama with Congress, the White House and the courts playing leading roles. Republicans see a vote for prolonging the life of the brain-damaged Florida woman as an opportunity to strengthen their support among religious conservatives, a vital constituency group, ahead of next year's congressional elections. For the most part, minority-party Democrats are asserting that congressional involvement in such a heart-wrenching private matter is unwarranted and unwise. But they are treading carefully, not wanting again to get clobbered on the...

And so it begins anew: the quadrennial orgy that eventually results in the birth of a president. Over the decades the presidential gestation period has lengthened dramatically. While the "hidden campaign" to be the next president has always consumed the entire term of the incumbent, only in the past couple of elections has the full-blown public campaign stretched from the day after the last election to Election Day four years hence. Believe it or not, we are nearly four months into the 48 month 2008 campaign--and a mere 35 months away from the start of the primary nomination season. Thus,...

After a spate of glowing magazine profiles, puffball interviews and polls staged to highlight her popularity, the press has all but awarded the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton. But respected political prognosticator Larry Sabato is warning Dems that they better think twice if they see Hillary as their best hope to recapture the White House. Sure, Clinton has universal name recognition, an unbeatable fundraising machine and the adoration of liberal reporters around the world. But Sabato predicts: "Senator Clinton is likely to win the general election only if 2008 turns out to be a strong Democratic year...

Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) - Following an Election Day prediction that Democratic candidate John Kerry would win more than 300 electoral votes and the presidency, one of America's most well known polling firms continued the job Wednesday of explaining its flawed projection. Shawnta Watson Walcott, communications director for Zogby International, joined a group of liberal Democrats at a faux congressional hearing focused on whether fraud influenced the Nov. 2 outcome. "... it has become increasingly clear that this election has produced unprecedented levels of suspicion regarding its outcome, and we join this panel discussion in an attempt to find a...

The controversial veterans group that trashed the war record of Democratic Sen. John Kerry during the presidential campaign and helped hand President Bush a second term will remain a potent force, according to an associate of the group. Chris LaCivita, who was a paid political consultant to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the campaign but said he is no longer on the payroll, asserted that the organization, with 280 members nationwide, is pondering its next step. patrick g. ryan An associate of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth says the group, known for attacking Sen. John Kerry’s war record,...

Larry Sabato, the respected political scientist from the University of Virginia, admitted to Fox News' "Fox & Friends" this morning that he was "steamed" about the exit polls yesterday. Sabato joined Dick Morris in questioning the results of the surveys, which showed John Kerry with a decisive victory. Story Continues Below He said the exit polling service had to "answer for" the inaccuracies. Sabato said the unusual mistakes were way off base. He noted one exit poll had Kerry winning Pennsylvania by 19 points. Results so far show Kerry winning Pennsylvania by a tiny margin, smaller than President Bush's margin...

Larry Sabato was just on one of the DC-area local stations, and just said something shocking - the reason it took forever to call Virginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina is that the exit polls had them for Kerry. For Kerry! Sabato also said that the exit polls also had at least two other states "wrong" — which is not to say they had the wrong winner, but that they had results that were immediately detected as out of whack

As we conclude this amazing election campaign, we have just one question for our readers: When has an incumbent candidate ever won when he is tied with his challenger on election eve? The answer is never--at least in the age of polling that began in the 1930s. So George W. Bush needs to beat history, and the polls, to win the election tomorrow. It is possible that the vagaries of the Electoral College will enable Bush to eke out a victory, and it is also possible that the Republican Party's get out the vote effort will equal or exceed the...

Sabato predicts 269-269 Electoral Tie; says Florida will go to Kerry.

Sabato says Bin laden tape was sent out as a recruiting tool for terrorist. Says terrorist want Bush to win election! (?????)

Larry Sabato says the polls-both public and private internal polls-shows Kerry winning Ohio!? I don't like the sound of that. Come on Ohio - Get the Lead Out!

Sabato's Electoral Road Map October 19, 2004 Update: Now that the three presidential and one vice-presidential debates are through, it is clear that the debates in many ways served to elevate Kerry. In an ironic twist of fate, the rules that the president's campaign thought would help George W. Bush strike a convincing blow against the Democrat only kept John Kerry on message and within the allotted time. With national polls showing the president anywhere from a point to many points ahead of the Democrat, it will come down to just a few states in the Electoral College. The Crystal...

Passion and Motivation to Vote Are Hard to Gauge With less than three weeks before the election, President Bush may be in a politically precarious position going into tonight's critical debate with Sen. John F. Kerry. Anecdotal and quantitative evidence suggest that Democrats and independent groups that support Democrats have done a better job than Republicans at registering new voters in key battleground states. In a normal year, the difficulty in getting the newly registered to the polls might mitigate this advantage. But anti-Bush passions on the left are running exceedingly high, making it more likely that marginal voters --...

...We continue to believe that President Bush absolutely, positively MUST have at least a 51 percent approval rating in the nation as a whole to be reelected. Second, given our surmise that the undecideds/leaners will break somewhat more heavily for Kerry, we think Bush needs to have built a lead of at least several points overall to win narrowly. In other words, a polling tie probably results in Kerry's election. Another reason for concern in the Bush ranks ought to be the likelihood of an enormous turnout (by American standards)--somewhere between 55 and 60 percent of eligible adults. The Crystal...

President Bush has talked himself out the lead he recently had over Sen. John Kerry, notes Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. And it's time to get tough. After his "unsteady" showing in the first presidential debate, "Bush no longer appears to be the certain choice of voters on Nov. 2," Sabato writes in the latest issue of his popular Crystal Ball e-mail newsletter 'Slack-Jawed' "Overall, in advance of the debate, people had expected Bush to win easily and Kerry to do poorly. Exactly the opposite happened, and many people on both sides of this...

It ain't over 'til the Portuguese-Mozambican-American lady sings, or screeches. Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, warns that although President Bush has the lead over John Kerry, a lot could happen before Nov. 2. "By our best estimate, Bush currently leads at the top of the ballot by about 5 percent nationally. Note that this is not the overwhelming lead of 14 percent suggested last week by the CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey, but neither is the contest the tie projected by Pew, Harris, and other surveys," he writes in the latest issue of his popular Crystal...

[last paragraph] The long and short at Labor Day: President Bush has at least a temporary lead thanks to his convention bounce, but this contest is still very much winnable by John Kerry. The debates--which do have an influence on the remaining undecideds and swing voters, the October jobs numbers (the last such measure before the election), developments in Iraq (including the tragic passing of the 1,000 mark in the deaths of American), the overall war on terrorism, and surprise issues (such as yet another chapter on President Bush's National Guard service--a media-driven penance for the "sins" of the Swift...

It wasn't too long ago that professor Sabato was being tauted by O'Reilly as the genius of politial science. He was on The O'Reilly Factor saying that this election was all but over and Bush was certainly going to lose, barring a miracle!! So where, oh where is Dr. Sabato now that the tide has turned? I suspect he will claim it was miraculous that Bush is surging ahead in the polls, but in reality, the American voter is just getting to know the true John Kerry and they don't much like what they are seeing. As O'Reilly would say....What...

key paragraphs: So why do we wonder whether history will be rewritten by the Republican Convention? It's all just too pat and pre-packaged for our tastes. Yes, as it has been written a thousand times since Boston, there are few "undecideds" in 2004, so a bounce this year cannot be very large. This argument appears logical, but is it not also possible that Americans were not overly impressed with the Democratic conclave or with Kerry's performance? Could it be, in retrospect, that even to untrained eyes, Kerry overdid his Vietnam service and left too many blanks about the rest of...

The extraordinary emotional exchanges we are witnessing daily about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group leads us to one unavoidable conclusion: For only the second time in our nation's history, the bitterness of a bloody, lost war will shadow national politics until generational replacement has removed all the brave soldiers who experienced the event first-hand. The Civil War did not end until everyone who had fought in it had passed away--and then some. For over a century after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House, Americans were still arguing over the war's name (the Civil War, the War...

New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey's outrageous attempt to win sympathy as a confused "gay American" instead of admitting he is a corrupt American will hurt John Kerry and help President Bush, suggests Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "The governor wrapped himself in the rainbow flag of gay rights to cover up some most unappealing warts. First, his administration has been surrounded by the stench of corruption almost from the beginning – and there is certainly more to come," Sabato writes in his popular e-mail newsletter, Crystal Ball. "Second, the people of New Jersey seemed...

Business Council gathering is told Bush will `need a miracle' POINT CLEAR - Democratic nominee John Kerry easily would beat Republican President George W. Bush if the presidential election was held now, political analyst Larry Sabato told members of the Business Council of Alabama Saturday. " Kerry would win very handily," said Sabato, 52, a frequent guest of network television news shows and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. Sabato, speaking at the BCA's governmental affairs conference at the Grand Hotel Marriott Resort here, said the growing unpopularity of the Iraq war is the biggest...