Larry Sabato
speaker
57 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 10 Nov
Larry Sabato’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Apple News Today · How senators finally came to a deal that could end the shutdown · 10 Nov 2025
podcast
There's no guarantee at all that this vote on Obamacare that will be taken sometime in the coming weeks will pass even the Senate.
And it may not even be taken up by the House, much less passed by the House.
So I'm not sure what they got.
And I think most Democrats agree with that.
They can't figure out what they got.
Frightening. And it could get a lot worse before it gets better. And a lot of the damage being done to the governmental structure, which we spent decades as a people putting together, will take a generation or more to repair. I don't think anyone doubts that. There's a lot of it will have to be repaired because it's not working out and it won't work out.
And what really worries me and I think worries everybody is as we move closer to elections, maybe it's 2026, I think it's much more likely to be 2028, things we've taken for granted, we can't take for granted anymore. It's entirely possible that Trump is going to find ways and means either of staying in power himself or
or if not guaranteeing, then assisting, whether it's Vance or I don't think it would be Rubio, it might be Rubio or one of his sons to succeed him. Now, I hope that that won't happen. I hope we're better than that. I hope there are enough checks and balances left to make sure it doesn't happen. But we can't assume these things anymore.
Well, democracy. It's fundamental to everything that we have done as a people and will do as a people, I hope. And look, I can get as upset as anybody about renaming the Gulf of Mexico or the possibility of invading Greenland. But what I'm really worried about is that we'll no longer have a society that can work together on at least some big issues. And we are just deeply, deeply divided.
And I've been around, getting ready to turn 73. I remember the 60s when we had a lot of polarization and division. But this is much worse. This goes right to the fundamentals. And people don't agree on the fundamentals anymore, or they're willing to follow a cult leader. And when the cult leader says, these rules don't apply to me, they applaud.
So, yes, that is what bothers me more than anything else, though I would dispute a lot of the things that Trump and Musk have done.
The accumulation of power in the Oval Office and a tiny group of aides around him, some of whom are even more extreme than Trump. I don't think Trump is extreme in the old sense of the word. He's just all for himself. His personal pronouns are me, myself, and I. But the people around him
clearly want to amass as much power as possible, as early as possible, and head off all of the checks and balances. So what am I most concerned about? I would say the potential for ignoring court decisions, which is very real. They're trying to eat at the edges of this with some of the moves they've already made. That would worry me more than anything else.
But I'm concerned about everything you mentioned. We all want to be concerned about all of that because it all fits together. It's all roads lead to the Oval Office, except that's not what the founders wanted. And it's not how we practice politics for all of these years.
Well, at base, it's civic education, which is what my Center for Politics is dedicated to and is trying to do something about at the lowest possible levels, meaning starting in kindergarten and going through at least high school and maybe junior colleges as well. You have to teach people. how to interpret the system. And they have to be willing to pay attention.
They have to be willing to remember that citizenship in America doesn't require very much anymore, but at a very minimum, it requires that citizens pay attention to big events. And they don't. I think the New York Times had a piece of a poll recently over the weekend where they separated Americans into people who follow the news carefully and people who don't.
And the people who followed the news carefully were much more critical of Trump and much more concerned about what he was doing. And the people who didn't follow what was happening in the news thought a lot of what Trump was doing was just fine. They were much more inclined to support him. And that is potentially fatal to a system like ours. We've got to work on it. Everybody's got to work on it.
Most universities have a center like mine. We all ought to be working together on it. High school and elementary school teachers have to work together on it. We started this 25 years ago, and we were able to get in the schools fairly easily. In fact, the superintendents and principals welcomed us because we were providing all the information they needed to for free. They paid for nothing.
They used what they wanted to use. Now, we can't even get our foot in the door because it's political. They're worried about offending their Republican governors or their Republican legislatures or, goodness knows, the Trump administration in Washington. And I've seen it everywhere. I've seen it here. People hunker down. They don't want to challenge things.
They feel strongly about something, but they won't speak out about it. That has never been a part of university life around the country. It is now. Fear is everywhere, which is exactly what the Trump administration has been trying to do. And they are succeeding.
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