"Politicians are good at putting on their game face," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, adding that Perry appears to believe he's got a strong case. But Perry needs more than that. "If he were to be found guilty, he's facing serious jail time, so you don't take any chances in those circumstances, and he clearly is not," Sabato said. "Everything is riding on it. Not just his presidential candidacy but his freedom." 
University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato said it’s not only a reversal from past midterms, but also the opposite of almost all other races in the country this year. “That has got to be of great concern to the Walker camp,” Sabato said. “(If) Burke pulls an upset, it’s going to be all of Walker’s chickens coming home to roost on one night.”
“He’s the underdog against the incumbent, but not by an insurmountable margin,” said Larry Sabato, the veteran political scientist at the University of Virginia. “Georgia is in transition. It has been solidly Republican since the 1960s – and heavily so – but the Republican edge shrinks a bit with each passing election.”
Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, predicted a pickup by Republicans of six-to-seven seats as the "likeliest" outcome. Republicans would need to gain six seats to obtain a majority in the Senate.
Nevertheless, this is not turning into the Republican-red year some certainly had reason to believe it would be, write Larry Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley in the University of Virginia's Crystal Ball political newsletter and Politico. "So where's the wave?" they ask.
Despite President Barack Obama’s low approval ratings, Republicans are still struggling to move ahead of Democrats to reclaim the Senate in November’s midterm elections. In a piece authored by Larry Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley for Politico this week, the authors state that Republican Senate candidates in toss-up states of Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana and North Carolina have yet to open up a real polling lead, and the summer is coming to a close to pull away.
Despite a highly touted class of challengers, though, Republicans have struggled in a number of other conservative states, leaving the fate of the Senate to be fought out over the next two months in North Carolina, Louisiana, Alaska and Arkansas, as well as in several progressive states. “Republicans remain slight favorites to net the six seats they need to win the Senate,” said Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, added that races where Republicans have “thrown races away,” have typically been Senate contests, such as Missouri’s former GOP Senate hopeful Todd Akin, who made controversial comments about how victims of “legitimate rape” rarely become pregnant.
The Crystal Ball, a political assessment of big races released by the University of Virginia, has marked Kasich as safe in his bid for reelection. Managing editor Kyle Kondik says it was always going to be an uphill battle for Democrat Ed FitzGerald, but a set of scandals dug him an even deeper hole.
In their 2011 book “Academically Adrift,” authors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa argued that colleges are failing to educate students. Many undergraduates, the authors wrote, are "drifting through college without a clear sense of purpose," with more than a third of students not demonstrating any significant improvement in learning over four years in college. Now Arum and Roksa have revisited a large sampling of those same undergraduates for a new book examining how they've fared after graduation. They're no longer students, the authors write, but they are still adr...
(Subscription required) Many recent college graduates struggle to transition into adulthood, and their alma maters must share some of the blame, argue the authors of “Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates,” scheduled for release this week. The book is a follow-up to its authors’ 2011 hit, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” In their new book, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa tracked many of the same 2009 graduates they studied in their first book, compiling data on employment outcomes, living arrangements, relatio...
(Subscription required) As college costs increase, so do expectations about payoff and questions about value. How should colleges be judged, if not by the financial success of their students? Is it higher education’s job to fix the economy? These questions suffuse “Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates,” the new book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa.
(Editorial) Just consider two areas for potential future growth the governor has touted: biotech and renewable energy. The commonwealth is home to two of the nation’s premier research medical schools at the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University, in addition to Virginia Tech where research also reigns supreme. The future of medicine is one of treatments individualized for each patient and his disease, a result of the sequencing of the humane genome, a federal government science project of the 1990s and early 2000s. And Virginia medical research institutes, along with...
Another research team led by Matt Motyl, a University of Virginia doctoral candidate in psychology, tapped several sets of data to conclude that Americans increasingly are moving away from communities where they don’t sense an “ideological fit” and into politically “homogenous enclaves” more agreeable to their worldviews.
According to reports on CNN and elsewhere, police in New York City are experimenting with geo-tagged tweets to predict crime. Matthew Gerber of the University of Virginia says the system would map the Twitter environment and look at what people are saying in real time. Then they would match that up with what they say afterward. Thus, if a group of people exchanged tweets about heading to a bar to get drunk, the police could track those activities and get ready for the scene to turn into a crime hot spot.
The data, from Brandon Garrett at the University of Virginia, suggest firms might want to watch their competitors closely, but their regulators even more.
What to make of this sport that has such a grip on American culture? The new book “Why Football Matters: My Education in the Game” is one response. Its author, University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson, joins me now.
“Why Football Matters,” by a University of Virginia English teacher named Mark Edmundson, could be read as a defense of football. But it’s more than that, more of a from-the-heart memoir about growing up in a working-class suburb of Boston in a family devastated by the early illness and death of Edmundson’s sister.
Missing out on a job isn’t just hard on teens’ wallets – it’s hard on their career prospects, too. In a new study, economists from the University of Virginia and Middle Tennessee State University found that young adults who worked part-time in high school were earning 20 percent more six to nine years after graduation compared with their counterparts who didn’t find part-time work while in school.
Brandon Garrett, a University of Virginia law professor, has analyzed all 317 cases of people proven innocent by DNA in the U.S. Sixty-three cases – 18 percent – involved false confessions. Trial transcripts, police files and court records show that in almost all the false confessions, the accused gave rich detailed evidence about the crime, not just flat proclamations of "I did it." In most cases, investigating officers – knowingly or inadvertently – provide details to the suspects.