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
Yes.
Let's start by remembering Democrats don't control the House. Even if it's five votes, we're so partisan today. The five votes is enough to govern, as I think they'll prove again with that big, beautiful bill. They don't control the Senate. They do have some influence there when 60 votes are required, but they don't control it. They don't control the White House.
They don't control even federal agencies that are supposed to be independent, much less the rest of the bureaucracy. They don't control half of the states, a little more than half of the states and the legislatures. They don't control the Supreme Court, which is still tilted Republican, even if occasionally one or two of them will break with the Trump preferences. So they control nothing.
And in a situation like that, you have to control your forum first because you don't have anything else. You have to spend a lot of time and energy and effort looking toward the next election, which they should be doing more of rather than less of. That's their chance to regain the House.
It would take a massive landslide wave against Trump to take control of the Senate, given the seats that are up. But they can at least focus on the House. And I think a 10-, 15-, 20-seat majority is entirely possible. The way they're going, they'll be lucky to have the five-seat majority that Republicans have right now.
But once you have some piece of the government that you control, you control the schedule, you control a lot of the issues that come before it, you can have a greater impact.
But for right now, other than focusing on the elections, which to me is the most important thing by far, you want to find ways to attract media attention and therefore the public's attention, at least those who will pay minimal attention to what the media are covering. And you do that by clever actions, by protests that are, yes, intense, maybe involving civil disobedience, nonviolent.
I always add that because somebody's going to write me and say, oh, he's pushing violence. Of course not. Nonviolent civil disobedience has had a major impact on American history. There should be some of that. There needs to be some of that. So it's tough to say. I can tell you what they shouldn't be doing. I can't stop laughing about Chuck Schumer's tough letter. Yeah.
really tough, tough language to President Trump as though he reads anything. That's what they think opposition is. And I don't mean just to criticize Schumer, because it's really a party-wide problem. And the leadership is, and I'm saying this as a guy getting ready to turn 73, so I'm a senior, it's way too old. The democratic structure is way too old.
They need a lot more younger people who won't take no for an answer. And yes, a good number of people who do what we used to do in the 60s and 70s, issue a list of non-negotiable demands, all of which you will negotiate in time.
But you have a list of non-negotiable demands and you organize around it and you get people energized about it and activated about it because the Democratic Party and the Democratic constituency is half dead. And I'm being kind.
You want to start by saying any anti-Semitism is wrong, and we had a little bit of it here. It was relatively minor compared to other universities. And while it's a legitimate concern, and it's worse in some places, and it deserves a lot of focus, and it's getting it as far as I can see, it's also a cover story for the Trump administration. They're using that. That is not a reason to
to limit what universities can investigate or to withdraw grants that are looking into terrible diseases, people will die because of all of this withdrawn money. It's not wasted money. In fact, if you want money well spent, you generally go to the health side of a university. So it's a cover story to some degree.
I tell you what people should focus on more. It's not just Trump. It's where he's reinforced by Republican governors and or Republican legislators. In most of the states, the governors appoint most or all of the board of trustees, or we call it a board of visitors here, for public institutions. Private institutions do it a different way. But they appoint people who are going to push their agenda.
And today, the Republican Party agenda is Donald Trump and whatever he stands for. There are so few Republicans who will stand up. I should say there are so few ex-Republicans who will stand up to Trump, because if they weren't ex-Republicans at the beginning, they'll be ex-Republicans once MAGA takes care of them.
And that's the real problem, because you have the states reinforcing what the Trump administration is doing in the slight majority of the states where they control the appointments. So it's tough.
Again, elections matter, and most of the focus has to be on winning the next election, not just for the House and the Senate in Washington, but also for the state legislatures and the governorships that are up. And most of them are up in 2026 as an off-year election.
And of course, independents have turned pretty strongly against Trump. That's why his ratings have been falling, and they'll fall more once the independents, who are not paying attention, figure out what's going on. They're the group of voters that will switch without much push or pressure. depending on the circumstances of their lives, like the economy, but not just the economy.
What influences them is what helps them in their daily lives. They're heavily concentrated in middle class and lower middle class. And those independents, as I say, are busy earning a living or busy living their lives. They don't have a lot of extra time. They certainly don't pay attention to public affairs as much as they should.
Well, there's a bit of a satirical element to a crystal ball. Our slogan is, he who lives by the crystal ball ends up eating ground glass. And we've had plenty of ground glass like every other analyst, so I don't want to pretend that we've always been right. Anyway, what are we predicting so far?
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