Last Look

Larry Sabato
Photo by Stephanie Gross

What an election!

No political analyst could have asked for a better laboratory than 2008. It is a year of firsts that has included the first female and African-American candidates with a real chance of winning the presidency, not to mention the first former prisoner-of-war in the same position.

Representing the University of Virginia, my home for the last 38 years, I have been privileged to watch it all unfold, from Iowa and New Hampshire to the party nominating conventions in Denver and Minneapolis/St. Paul to the exciting stumping around the country in the general election campaign.

Thanks to fast work by the able staff of the U.Va. Center for Politics, we were able to bring the campaign to Charlottesville for 900 faculty and students in February, as we hosted Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in Old Cabell Hall auditorium. The students of American Politics 101 impressed Senator Clinton and the news media with superb, policy-oriented questions that she handled with aplomb. Ninety minutes passed quickly, and the candidate exited to a rousing, swaying serenade led by the University Singers. It was The Good Ol’ Song, of course.

Watching the nominating battles skip from state to state, the entire country wondered anew whether this exhausting cavalcade that had lasted years and eliminated some good candidates all too quickly was the best way to pick presidential candidates. It’s no secret that I am in favor of major reforms, and I have argued at length for them in my new book, A More Perfect Constitution. We need a system that is shorter, sharply focused and fairer to all states and regions over time. Other democracies choose good leaders with a fraction of the time and money America does, and it is past time for change in the United States.

The release of the book stirred the pot—and deep passions—just as I had hoped. Among the descendants of James Madison, the volume sparked a family feud. I was delighted. Part of an academic’s work is to challenge citizens to think in new ways. Whether they agree or disagree with one’s proposals is of much less consequence.

This election season has also generated a remarkable degree of student involvement, more than we have seen since the late 1960s and early 1970s. Almost all my young charges in Charlottesville have been following the campaign closely, and many hundreds of U.Va. students have chosen to get involved. At the Center for Politics, our largest program, the Youth Leadership Initiative, will hold the nation’s largest secure online mock election in the fall, allowing more than 2 million students from across the nation to register their votes for the candidates of their choice. The Center-led Voter Registration Coalition will continue to encourage new registration on Grounds and distribute absentee ballot information into the fall.

The Center produces a weekly Crystal Ball e-newsletter, now sent to over 25,000 subscribers. We keep up with the Electoral College scoreboard, as well as all the races for U.S. Senate, U.S. House and state governorships. After the 2006 midterm elections, the Crystal Ball was named the “most accurate predictor” of the results by the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism as well as news networks as diverse as MSNBC and FOX News. Many U.Va. students participate in the Crystal Ball’s research efforts, by the way.

For political analysts, the bonus value of the election will be reams of voter and polling data that will keep us busy for years. Already we are planning a book on the watershed 2008 quest for the presidency.

Despite the hot rhetoric and upheaval, politics is a good and necessary thing in a vibrant democracy, and in America, it represents an unbroken continuum stretching over 220 years. Our time here is well spent studying the considered actions of tens of millions of citizens, and encouraging civic education and participation in every way. Thomas Jefferson would have wanted his University to be in the vanguard of these efforts—and it is.