Tanner Hirschfeld, 19, a University of Virginia student who was youth director for one of Stewart’s primary opponents, Del. Nick Freitas, is considering leaving his Senate ballot blank. He was one of several Republicans interviewed for this story who said Stewart could still win them over by clearly denouncing hate groups with which he has associated. “It’s going to take a lot of convincing and apologies and condemnations and clear statements,” Hirschfeld said. “Because it’s not acceptable to play footsie with the alt-right. There’s nothing right about them.”
Rep. Mimi Walters of Irvine (Orange County) found her 45th District race dropped from “leans Republican” to “toss-up” by Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a nonpartisan election race rating service at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. Walters is being challenged by Democrat Katie Porter in the Nov. 6 election. Walters “only got about 53 percent of the two-party vote (in the primary), a significant drop from usual GOP performance in the district,” said Kyle Kondick, the site’s managing editor. “The primary results don’t suggest Walters is doomed to lose; rather, they just indicate th...
The party itself is changing, argues Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. He said while the party used to be dominated by “white men with ethnic European surnames” like Crowley, “the party is increasingly reliant, particularly in diverse places like New York City, on nonwhite voters and women in general.” He said that the Democrats who have spoken out against Pelosi combined with Crowley’s surprising loss may not be the canaries in the coal mine that some think they are. The New York primary, he said, “means little for November,” he said and the midterms themselves, h...
Virginia GOP Chairman John Whitbeck announced his resignation just weeks after Corey Stewart won the Republican nomination to go up against Sen. Tim Kaine in the November election for Senate, and some are speculating that the two pieces of news are related. Geoffrey Skelley, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said Whitbeck’s decision comes as his party goes through an internal conflict between an insurgent, more conservative wing and establishment-type Republicans. “I would suspect that that conflict might arise here as well, in terms o...
Facing one of the toughest re-election fights of the 2018 cycle, North Dakota Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp is laser-focused on the bipartisan legislative victories she's accumulated in the six years she's been on Capitol Hill, which span the issues that drive her state's economy, including energy and agriculture. That message was front and center in the campaign ad Heitkamp's team unveiled this week, which notes her 2017 designation as one of the most effective Democratic senators of the last Congress by the Center for Effective Lawmaking. That effort, a joint project between the University ...
While campus-based racial incidents get a lot of attention, racism is endemic to American society, noted Kirt von Daacke, a University of Virginia professor and the co-chair of the university president’s commission on slavery and the university. Von Daacke encouraged reporters to broaden their focus and to include off-campus perspectives. “Don’t look at universities as ivory towers walled off from the communities around them,” he said. “We’re local microcosms of that phenomenon and that history.” He added: “Any of these stories about slavery and racism on college campuses are ones that as soon...
(Commentary) National Guard divisions would help, but we needed millions of Americans in uniform, not tens of thousands. A draft would have to make up the difference. That’s how the “National Army” emerged, an induction-based collection of divisions topped with professional military leadership. Among the first to get ready and enter the fighting was the 77th Division, based in New York, and that involved an amalgam of ethnic backgrounds. Pulling people together and training them became a business of Americans meeting Americans, from sea to shining sea — and it started with being able to talk t...
Whether artmaking was encouraged depended on the personality of the missionary, explained Henry Skerritt, curator of indigenous arts of Australia at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia. "In Milingimbi, for example, people talk very fondly of the missionaries Wilbur Chaseling and T.T. Webb, who were really instrumental in getting the art movement there," he said. "Other missions were much more determined to get everyone wearing white shirts and working in the gardens."
"Chief Justice Roberts will become the new ideological center of the court based on the data that we have," Risa Goluboff, a professor at the University of Virginia school of law, told Newsweek. But Goluboff also noted that ideological center will probably find itself leaning more conservative under Roberts's leadership, as he is less likely to swing his vote as often as Kennedy did during his tenure on the bench.
There was a certain naïveté in how liberals used to approach free speech, said Frederick Schauer, a law professor at the University of Virginia. “Because so many free-speech claims of the 1950s and 1960s involved anti-obscenity claims, or civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, it was easy for the left to sympathize with the speakers or believe that speech in general was harmless,” he said. “But the claim that speech was harmless or causally inert was never true, even if it has taken recent events to convince the left of that. The question, then, is why the left ever believed otherwise.”&n...
(Editorial) Congress could also rely on its powers under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, once women begin traveling from red states to blue states to get abortions, as seems inevitable. "Congress could presumably regulate it, or prohibit it, under its powers to regulate interstate commerce," says Douglas Laycock, a professor on the law of religious liberty at the University of Virginia.
Marriage advocates say the law might slightly reduce divorce rates in the long term, if it ends up hurting women, who are more likely to initiate proceedings. “If the new tax regime is more likely to disadvantage them economically, that could put some damper, I would say a slight damper, on divorce over all,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.
Yesterday, we learned about a new adult transgender clinic in the University of Virginia Health System. With an estimated 700 transgender adults living in and around Charlottesville, they should have plenty of demand. But what about kids struggling with their gender identities? Where do THEY go? Today, WMRA’s Emily Richardson-Lorente takes us to a clinic designed just for them.
An mHealth app designed at the University of Virginia for recently-diagnosed HIV patients not only has improved care management and coordination, but has also helped them suppress the virus. The effectiveness of the PositiveLinks app, developed by Rebecca Dillingham, MD, MPH, an associate professor of medicine at UVA, was highlighted in a study recently published in AIDS Patient Care and STDs. It reinforces the contention among connected health experts that a personalized mHealth platform – which some call “warm technology” - can enhance patient engagement and improve clinical outcomes.
Looking into their crystal ball, the folks at the University of Virginia Center for Politics see trouble for three Republican incumbents. Perhaps the most troubled is Barbara Comstock in Northern Virginia. Geoff Skelley at the Center for Politics says her race against Jennifer Wexton has moved from toss up to leans Democratic.
(By Dr. Susan C. Modesitt, director of gynecologic oncology at the UVA Cancer Center) For the past 10 years, we have had the ability to eradicate cervical cancer and drastically reduce other types of cancers related to the human papillomavirus, but it hasn’t happened.
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Young people are more likely to take risks and demand changes in their surroundings – hence the stereotype that college campuses are full of activism, according to UVA researcher Nancy Deutsch – but UVA has historically not harnessed that power to benefit the surrounding city. A $25,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation, though, will help Deutsch and a team of UVA researchers develop workshops and a short-term class to help undergraduates team up, connect with and help Charlottesville residents to address longstanding inequalities.
There are 418 first-generation students currently enrolled for the fall semester at UVA, and with both early action and regular decisions now made and deposits submitted, the expected class of 3,700 first-years will be more diverse overall than ever, Tom Katsouleas, outgoing provost and executive vice president, said at a June 8 Board of Visitors meeting.
The lone star tick is widespread in the southeastern and eastern U.S., and is now being found as far north as Maine. A crowdsourced map is keeping track of alpha-gal allergy cases worldwide. One reason may be the explosion of the deer population on the East coast, said Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills, who heads the division of allergy and clinical immunology at the University of Virginia and who helped discover the link between the lone star tick and the allergy.
The falling birth rate has some experts worried that America will be left with too few people of working age to support its burgeoning elderly population — both by paying into programs like Social Security andby filling jobs in fields such as health care and home assistance. "If we stay at 1.76, it's not a huge issue," says Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, a nonpartisan research group at the University of Virginia that examines trends in family and childbearing. "If we continue to see a decline in fertility, that would be more likely to lead to some importa...