“I am so impressed by the turnout,” Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at UVA, said. “This has to be one of the most engaged electorates of any non-presidential races in modern history.”
Georgia smashed its turnout record for a runoff even before most polls closed at 7 p.m. on Election Day, with more than 3 million votes cast by mail or during early in-person voting in December. “Both sides are very highly energized,” UVA Center for Politics analyst J. Miles Coleman said.
James Coan, a neuroscientist and UVA psychology professor, has decidedly mixed feelings about the experiment he inadvertently spearheaded. “I’m slow enough on the uptake that it took me a while to realize that the study I was doing was making people who had been sexually abused feel like I was their enemy,” he said. “That was completely devastating to me.” Although he has been asked to testify about false memory in countless court cases, Coan has always refused.
Susan A. Saliba, a professor of kinesiology in the School of Education and Human Development, is featured.
Our sources are Aseem Mulji, a legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, and Sai Prakash, a constitutional law professor at the UVA School of Law, as well as the federal statute about counting electoral votes. For an objection to pass, a senator and house representative must put it in writing. Then the two chambers would split off to debate the objection and vote. For an objection to be accepted, both the Senate and the House of Representatives have to approve it.
According to 3 U.S. Code § 15, only Congress can object to electors, if both chambers of Congress agree to the objection. There is “zero chance such a maneuver by Pence or the Republicans will succeed if they are bold enough to try this,” Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics, said.
(Commentary co-written by Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, practitioner senior fellow at UVA’s Miller Center) Since the early days of the republic, presidents have had the ability to temporarily fill federal roles that need Senate confirmation with acting officials, a vital practice in the transition from one leader to the next. But serious flaws with the law that governs federal vacancies, combined with Senate inaction, have enabled Donald Trump to fill numerous critical jobs with acting officials indefinitely, a practice that has destabilized the work of federal agencies and undermined the role of the S...
Today, we unveil the 2021 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, ranking the university-based scholars in the U.S. who did the most last year to shape educational practice and policy. Stanford placed two scholars in the top five and five in the top 20. Harvard, USC, the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania all had multiple scholars in the top 20.
If it seems like there’s a lack of informed and intelligent debate in politics these days, UVA’s Center for Politics is hoping to change that impression with its new Democracy Dialogues series. Larry Sabato, a nationally known political pundit and the center’s director, will host the first installment in its series Wednesday at 6 p.m.
(Podcast) UVA alumnus Matt Olsen held so many important and difficult jobs in federal law enforcement and national security that it is hard to know where to begin, but his work as a civil rights prosecutor was particularly fascinating and vital. There, he focused on enforcing the Voting Rights Act – a landmark civil rights statute – in several Southern states to ensure that minority citizens were not disenfranchised.
(Commentary by Russell L. Riley, Miller Center professor of ethics and institutions and co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program) Presidential transitions have become major productions.
In a 2020 paper, Shigehiro Oishi, a UVA professor of psychology, proposed a new dimension for understanding a life well lived: psychological richness. That term underscores the value of variety, interest and novelty.
Sporting Kansas City and the Kansas City soccer community lost one of their own this past week as former Kansas City Wizards defender and local youth soccer coach, Scott Vermillion passed away on Christmas at the age of 44. Vermillion had joined the Wizards in 1998 as a Project 40 (the precursor to Generation Adidas) allocation out of the University of Virginia.
Author Ed Tarkington, a graduate of Furman University with advanced degrees from UVA and Florida State, teaches English at the Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville. Working at one of Nashville’s oldest private schools provided him with plenty of detail, and his portrayals of quirky teachers, black tie galas and mysterious benefactors are biting and real.
While the numbers are impressive, J. Miles Coleman with the UVA Center for Politics says McAuliffe shouldn’t pop the champagne just yet. “Money definitely isn’t everything,” Coleman said.
“It wasn’t so much a surprise that we’re having a run-off in Georgia, the surprise is what the stakes are,” said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at UVA Center for Politics.
Many analysts view the Georgia races as nail-biters, and some have warned that winners might not be declared for days, as happened in the 2020 presidential contest. “This election is about as close as you can get,” wrote J. Miles Coleman and Niles Francis in a recent analysis for UVA’s Center for Politics. “It’s hard to tell who has the edge, but undoubtedly, the party that does a better job turning out the base will be the party that carries the day.”
Kyle Kondik of the UVA Center for Politics said both races were “toss-ups” but that Republicans would need “impressive day-of-election performance” to win their seats.
Perhaps, post-George Floyd, these white rappers are reading the room and realizing they need to embrace a sound that speaks more honestly to their experiences. “White anger and confidence is something rap audiences just don’t want to hear as much of any more,” says AD Carson, an author, rapper and assistant professor of hip-hop at the University of Virginia. He argues that the shift “has everything to do with the current political landscape.”
The General Assembly is not and never has been a full-time job. What if it were? Del. Sally Hudson, a Democratic lawmaker who represents Charlottesville, thinks it could be. As she enters the second year of her first term in the legislature, she considers herself fortunate to have been able to balance her position as a professor at the University of Virginia with her service to her district politically – but, she said, the part-time nature of her elected seat is not without shortfalls and can be exclusionary to others who may wish to serve.