A familiar face will be joining the management team of new UVA athletic director Carla Williams. Williams has chosen Jim Booz as deputy athletics director for administration.
Like much of the South, Virginia was solidly Democratic through the 1940s. At this time, parties in the U.S. were much more geographically than ideologically based, according to Geoffrey Skelley, associate editor of UVA’s Center for Politics. Between the South’s Democratic bent and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s soaring popularity — he fought World War II and crafted the New Deal, which brought the country out of the Great Depression — Virginia was “a one-party state,” Skelley says.
"People sometimes think of Virginia as a blue state or a Democratic-leaning state, and it's true that it's gone from a state that routinely voted Republican on the federal level to one that's a little more Democratic than the rest of the nation, but not overwhelmingly so," Kyle Kondik, the director of communications at the UVA Center for Politics, said last month. "And the off-year electorate is smaller than the presidential electorate, which is true of any state, but it's also an older and less diverse electorate, which demographically tends to be more Republican. So I think this is...
Experts aren’t yet sure if the Libertarian candidate’s vote tallies will be large enough to spawn theories about a "spoiler effect" after the election. “If Northam wins by less than 1 percent and Hyra gets 1 or 2 percent, there’s going to be some talk,” said Geoffrey Skelley of the UVA Center for Politics. “Libertarian voters tend to be more Republican than not,” he said.
Last November, Hillary Clinton won Virginia by five points, mostly by running up sizable margins in metropolitan hubs across the state and in the northern suburbs. The rural parts of the state, which are reliably Republican, voted overwhelmingly for Trump. “Gillespie is counting on lower turnout in northern Virginia, where he has to make sure Northam doesn’t run away with it,” said Geoffrey Skelley of the UVA Center for Politics.
Analysts and campaign strategists might now spend more time trying to woo Michigan voters in 2020 than they had in the past, said Kyle Kondik, managing editor for Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the UVA Center for Politics. “Michigan is going to be a super-important state in 2020,” he said. “Democrats can win the White House without Ohio and Iowa, but a Democrat, I don’t think, can win without Michigan.”
Political scientists are expecting voters to flock to the polls, but not in the same numbers as last year’s presidential election. Turnout and the demographics of voters will help decide the election. Geoffrey Skelley, a political scientist and spokesman for UVA’s Center for Politics, said he is expecting voter turnout in 2017 to be “somewhat higher” than the gubernatorial election in 2013. “Absentee and early voting numbers are higher than they were that year, and had already set a record for a non-presidential year by Saturday,” Skelley said.
The latest polls suggest that Northam, Virginia’s lieutenant governor, still has a slight edge on his GOP rival. But Republicans believe Gillespie can rally their conservative base to pull off an upset. “The concern for Democrats has to be that Republicans are pretty united on some of the issues that have taken center stage in this race,” UVA political analyst Geoffrey Skelley said, citing issues like immigration and the controversial debate over protecting Confederate statues.
Some political watchers see the Virginia race in particular as a referendum on President Trump. “Here & Now’s” Jeremy Hobson talks with Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics, about what's going on in the state.
Experts from across the United States are joining forces to eventually grow replacement limbs and organs. On Monday, UVA's Center for Advanced Biomanufacturing invited experts in both the medical and engineering fields to explore how to make regrowth of limbs a reality.
An international business publication has released its ranking for the Top 100 full-time international MBA programs, and Darden is at the top again. For the seventh year in a row, The Economist has listed UVA’s Darden School of Business as No. 1 in the world for education experience.
The University of Virginia has significantly increased the cultural and financial diversity of its student body in recent years.
An interview with Michael Slon, director of the Oratorio Society of Virginia and director of choral music at the University of Virginia.
The University of Virginia ROTC held its annual 24-hour vigil to remember prisoners of war and those who are missing in action on Monday in the McIntire Amphitheater.
The use of a general court martial, as opposed to the less serious special court martial, is a sign that the initial charges against Kelley carried the potential for both dishonorable discharge and more than a year in confinement, said UVA law professor Benjamin Spencer, a reserve officer in the Judge Advocate General's Corps of the U.S. Army.
The Cavaliers have six wins for the first time in six years, and with three games left in the regular season, they still have a shot at the ACC Coastal Division Championship.
In a driving rainstorm, 10-point underdog Virginia battled back twice to pull off the upset and become bowl eligible for the first time since 2011. The few remaining rain-soaked fans rushed the field in a celebration that only Wahoos would truly understand. This is what Bronco Mendenhall had dreamed about.
Virginia has hired Jim Booz as its news deputy athletics director for administration, the school announced on Monday. Booz will follow incoming Virginia athletics director Carla Williams from the University of Georgia to Charlottesville.
Campaign donations “influence the officeholders’ choices whether they know it or not,” said Geoffrey Skelley of UVA’s Center for Politics. “Not every donation is a quid pro quo, but you are probably going to listen to those donors a little more when big issues come up.”
The question of this election season is whether progressive and establishment Democrats in Virginia can set their differences aside to keep a Democrat in the governor's office (incumbent Terry McAuliffe is termed out) and pick up seats in the legislature. “Anytime that you’re the party that’s out of power, divisions can begin to get glossed over,” says Geoffrey Skelley, a political analyst at UVA’s Center for Politics. “If Hillary Clinton were in the White House and not Donald Trump, we might be seeing more open tension in Virginia.”