Session 1: What's Stirring in the Domestic Political Environment?
Monday, May 3, 2021, 11 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. ET
“Post-Pandemic Trajectories: Politics, the Economy, and Global Markets,” the Carroll School's 2021 webinar series, kicked off on May 3 with a fresh assessment of the domestic political landscape by Larry J. Sabato, political scientist and the founder and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. In his talk, he predicted that the Democrats would lose their congressional majority in 2022—“He’s got two years,” Sabato said of President Biden and his legislative agenda. He noted that it took “two miracles” for the Democrats to win control of both houses of Congress, referring to their two U.S. senate victories in Georgia, in November. Sabato said, “It’ll take two more miracles for the Democrats to retain control of the House and Senate” in the 2022 midterm elections. On a darker note, the well-known political scientist and prognosticator alluded to events such as the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol and to extreme polarization in general: “People who think those things are over are sadly mistaken. There are more disturbing things to come.”
Participant Bios
Speaker: Larry J. Sabato, Founder and Director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, University Professor of Politics, University of Virginia
Dr. Larry Sabato is a New York Times bestselling author, recipient of four Emmy awards, and one of the nation’s most respected political analysts. He is the author or editor of two dozen books on American politics, including the editor and lead author of the recent book, The Blue Wave, which explores the 2018 election and its outcome. Sabato appears multiple times per week on national and international news including CNN, BBC, and CNN International. A Rhodes Scholar, Sabato is the founder and director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, and has had visiting appointments at Oxford and Cambridge universities in England.
Sabato also heads up Sabato’s Crystal Ball, which has won numerous awards. The Pew Charitable Trust recognized the Crystal Ball as the #1 leader in the field of political prediction, and The Daily Beast designated it as one of the top political sites on the web. A thorough statistical analysis of all 2018 prognosticators found that the Crystal Ball was the best (Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com was second). The Harvard Political Review just named the Crystal Ball as #1 in predicting the Electoral College in 2020, getting 49 of 50 states correct as well as the two separate congressional districts that have one electoral vote each (NE-2 and ME-2): “While crystal balls may not exist in real life, Larry Sabato’s editorial team might be the next best thing.”
Sabato has received four Emmys for the PBS television documentaries “Out of Order,” which highlights the dysfunctional U.S. Senate; “The Kennedy Half-Century,” which examines the life, assassination, and lasting legacy of President John F. Kennedy; “Feeling Good About America,” which looks at the 1976 presidential election; and “Charlottesville,” which looks at the events in the titular city during August 11 and 12, 2017.
Sabato is very active on social media. His Twitter feed (@LarrySabato) was named by Time magazine as one of the 140 best.
Moderator: Jonathan Reuter, Associate Professor of Finance, Boston College Carroll School of Management
Dr. Jonathan Reuter is an associate professor of finance at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. His research focuses on the behavior of both individual investors and financial institutions, including mutual funds, investment banks, and the financial media. His ongoing research projects study the outsourcing of portfolio management in the U.S. mutual fund industry (a practice known as subadvising) and the determinants of individual retirement behavior.
Prior to joining the faculty at Boston College, Reuter spent five years as an assistant professor of finance at the University of Oregon, where he was named the Laura and Abbott Keller Distinguished Research Scholar and received both the Business Advisory Council Undergraduate Teaching Award (Winter 2007) and the James E. Reinmuth M.B.A. Teaching Excellence Award (2007-2008).
After receiving his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002, Reuter spent one year as a postdoctoral research fellow at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. His research has been published in the Journal of Finance and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.