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Larry Sabato

Larry Sabato is the Robert Kent Gooch professor of politics at the University of Virginia, where he directs the Center for Politics, which he founded. He has written more than 20 books, including The Sixth Year Itch: The Rise and Fall of the George W. Bush Presidency and Divided States of America: The Slash and Burn Politics of the 2004 Presidential Election. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have both described Sabato as the college professor most cited by national and regional news organizations.

John W. Mashek interviewed Sabato on May 1, 2007.

We are estimating now that between $4 billion and $5 billion is probably going to be spent in this next [election] cycle. To be the devil’s advocate, is that too much to pay for democracy? Or are we going way around the bend in the money that we are putting out now for politics?

Well, you can always look at it in a lot of different directions. And many people say correctly that large corporations spend $10 billion a year advertising deodorants and toothpaste and so on. So I don’t think it’s the amount of money that’s important as much as it is the access people have to politics or don’t have to politics. And so it’s important for candidates who are not as well-funded to have the opportunity to get a basic message across.

Well, then you return to the other side. Is the public, which is inured to these things, we think, going to become so cynical to see the tens of millions of dollars being raised that you are going to lose interest over this extended presidential period?

Well, that’s a real threat. This thing is just going on too long, and it’s too intense. And major debates [are] in April before the voting starts in January. I lived in Britain for seven years off and on and saw two prime ministerial contests over there. And the elections are four to five weeks. People will get focused. They get excited. They pay close attention. And they probably cast an informed vote.

As a follow-up to the NBC interview done in South Carolina, [Chris] Matthews is going to be interviewing 10 Republicans. And I defy anybody but to name even more than six or seven. So it’s a group action at a time when very few people are paying attention. We say the candidates are out there in a preening period, but yet they are spending money. As a matter of fact, [John] McCain is spending money at a very, very fast clip.

Oh yes, that’s absolutely true. A lot of them are spending money early. And most of it’s wasted. It’s really spent to influence the press and a handful of political activists.

There was a piece in The [New York] Sunday Times by Matt Bai — and I assume inflation was factored in — but there was a comparison that in 2000 the bill for television advertising, with a lot of that going to consultants as we know, was about $477 million. And they say that it’s probably going to be about $1.2 billion this time based totally on television advertising. Is that worthwhile or self-defeating?

Well, it’s enriching for the television station owners and the network people. I’ll tell you that much. And they are prime cause in the increase in campaigning. I remember earlier election cycles, figuring out that television times since the ’70s have increased at about four times the consumer price index. And right there it tells you that while it’s a scarce commodity and the law of supply and demand takes over, they are making a killing off of democracy, the station owners and the network owners. That’s a major problem for candidates and for people in politics.

Next February 5, unless we all miss our guess, we will probably know [the candidates]. I love the name super-duper Tuesday, with 20 – 22 states getting in on the action. What do you think? Between February 5 and the conventions, the probable nominees, how are they going to spend their time? Would you guess they are going to spend a lot of money advertising or defining the opponent, as we say, with a lot of negative ads? Because that’s an interim period of quite a time.

Yeah, but it won’t be an interim period at all. We’ll have the longest, most intense general election in American history. Every single day the campaigns will be acting as though it’s the end of October.

Right. Well, we have looked to the past, and sometimes money doesn’t get the job done. Two Texans by the name of John Connally and Phil Gramm can testify to that. But this is the first time, in my memory, that the Democrats are raising more money than Republicans, and defying the old charge that Democrats would usually allege that the Republicans were either buying the election or they had all of the money from business people. I assume that it’s the war in Iraq. But am I wrong there? What do you think accounts for [Hillary] Clinton, [Barack] Obama, [John] Edwards, the so-called top tier, being able to raise more than the top tier of the Republicans?

It is primarily President [George W.] Bush’s unpopularity and the unpopularity of the war in Iraq. And the momentum is with the Democrats. There are some good trends in money-raising. One of them is that the amount of small contributions has been growing by leaps and bounds. The Internet provides an opportunity to raise a lot of small money. And Democrats have been getting a lot of that. But look, Republicans are down. They are depressed. They realize they are likely to lose the 2008 election. And because they are likely to lose it, not too many of them want to give more money than they have to.

Figuring that they were throwing it away, probably, some people anyway.

Yeah, and certainly those who give money in order to become ambassadors have no real incentive to give.

Is it your feeling that we are abandoning public financing altogether? Other than the candidates who — again, I don’t like the term, but we are in that phase of second tier. The top six appear to be, obviously, unwilling during the primaries. If any of them are nominated, I assume that they are going to forgo them in the general.

I don’t think that decision’s been made yet. I think they will wait and see. But look, obviously, public financing does not amount to nearly what it used to. And it’s a small piece of the action. In ’76 it was all of the action, or virtually all of the action. And you can argue in a lot of different ways. I think it’s important to have the public money as a supplement, particularly for the less well-funded candidates. But there is literally no way, under our system, to restrict expenditures to the public money. It just can’t be done. There is always going to be a way around it. And the lawyers, and the candidates, and the parties will always find a way around it.

Are you following the McCain-Feingold [campaign finance-reform law] as far as going back to the Supreme Court?

Yeah.

What’s your feeling about where that’s going to land now that we have two new Bush appointees to the Court since this was looked at last?

My guess is it will end up 5-4 in the other direction. That’s what everybody else guesses, too. The probability is that they are going to find that free speech has been limited under the McCain-Feingold rules, and you can argue it either way. And I tend to be a First Amendment absolutist in the old Hugo Black tradition. To tell you the truth, it does bother me. I don’t like the worry of that McCain-Feingold legislation.

That’s interesting, because there are a lot of people like you that feel that way. Do you think it’s shutting off not just so-called millionaires, but the little guys?

It actually hurts. There is a wonderful piece by Stuart Taylor in this week’s National Journal. And he makes the case that others have made that the McCain-Feingold language actually hurts the smaller, less well-organized groups that can’t afford the tremendous expense of a PAC [political action committee]. It’s expensive to run a PAC and to raise enough money to have a real impact with a PAC. And remember, they can spend all of the hard money they want if they have the wherewithal to run a PAC. But if they don’t, then really McCain-Feingold damages the less well-organized groups. So yeah, I have real problems with it. I always have.

I am old enough, of course, to remember that back in the old days, you remember Richard Viguerie with raising tons of money for conservative causes?

Oh yeah, direct mail.

And I would guess, I don’t know, that just an infinitesimal amount of money is raised now by direct mail because of the cost. And the people are turning more to direct appeals by the candidates and the Internet.

Yeah, and the Internet in particular, which is a wonderful innovation; it’s small money with very low cost to raise it. And if there is any real solution in the long run, it’s probably not going to be through law. It’s going to be through small gifts in the Internet.

Here again, I guess we can credit Joe Trippi and the Dean campaign for really giving this thing a full shove. Of course it didn’t do Howard Dean much good, either, in the long run.

Well, it helped McCain a lot in 2000. It also helped [Jesse] Ventura in 1998 [in the Minnesota gubernatorial campaign]. So there has been a wide variety of candidates that have benefited from it. And now it’s getting to the point where the technology enables you to raise a great deal more through blogs.

I noticed the morning or the day after Edwards and his wife [Elizabeth] were on 60 Minutes talking about her returned cancer, the next day they reported getting $800,000 on the Internet — based, I would guess, almost primarily on people who are very impressed with Elizabeth Edwards.

Yeah, I think that’s absolutely correct. And again, the Internet enables you to give instantaneously. What is that new site they have up? Don’t Almost Give or whatever it is. It really is true. People so often mean to give. And they get excited about it. And they think they will do it. But the moment passes. But with the Internet, it’s a lot more difficult to let the moment pass. You can go and do it instantly.

Yeah. You don’t go to the next day, and get out an envelope, and put a stamp on it. You can just hit the button on the Internet and it’s gone.

It’s gone. And you can do it in two minutes.

This interests me. As we both know, this thing is getting started so early. And I wonder how the candidates are they spending their money. Does it vary in where you stand in the field? I have read that McCain has had to cut back already, because it grew too large. And it seems like Hillary Clinton has a number of consultants and people polling for her. Do you get to a point of no return there? I mean, I haven’t been inside those campaigns much to realize how much money is rolled out for staff, et cetera.

Oh, I think Clinton’s [campaign] is completely top heavy. And they have done the same thing the [Al] Gore campaign did in 2000. They have tried to snap up every major Democratic consultant and pay them top dollar to keep them away from the other candidates. But in the end, it just wastes money.

On negative advertising, you and I have seen this drill going over and over that says the public doesn’t like it. The consultants seem to love it. And the polls show people don’t want to see it. But everybody turns to it. Now, are we apt to, because we already see the negatives dredged up by the current top six candidates? So I assume that we are going to see a plethora of those pretty soon, too.

Yeah, inevitably. I mean, they are going to use every trick in the book and just keep raising money. We have only had the first-quarter figures. So we have three major quarters to go, plus a piece of another quarter before they really have to shut down after February 5 and shift to the general election. So you can just imagine, they are going to try everything.

Is this thing in such a state of flux now that a supposed candidate, like Fred Thompson, could come in late? Because, well, you could make the argument [that] people aren’t conservative enough, that he is Reaganesque and so on. I just wonder if it’s only May 1, is it too late for somebody to get in?

Oh, no. In fact I think Thompson will prove that it isn’t too late. In fact, he hasn’t had to spend a lot of that organizational money that the other candidates have had to do. He hasn’t had to support a big staff. And he benefits from the fact that none of the Republicans have really set the partisans on fire. They are tired of the field already, and they are looking for an alternative.

And he’s getting free advertising on the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, that he might get in. What about on the other side? Do you see any Democrats?

No. Al Gore is not running. He has never been running. This has been a media creation. And I really don’t think there is anybody else. [Mike] Bloomberg can always run as an independent. But he’ll be a spoiler. He’ll end up getting 10 percent of the vote. And I would bet that he would hurt the Democrats disproportionately. He is a Republican, but his positions are Democratic. He’ll end up taking more votes from the Democrats.

You opened the door there to me on the so-called third party or independent [candidate(s)]. And as you know, Gerry Rafshoon and Doug Bailey have started this [Unity08] effort, which really amounts to almost a Bloomberg, although Bloomberg, obviously, hasn’t said he even wants to run. But if you are raising money to be a part of this, it’s rather unique. But I can’t see it getting anywhere. I may be too cynical.

There is always a small chance. Both parties nominate polarizers. Say the Democrats go with Hillary Clinton and the Republicans pick a Newt Gingrich, or a Sam Brownback, or somebody like that. Then a large number of people are going to be desperate for another candidate. But the odds are that at least one party will pick a relative centrist. Maybe both parties will pick a moderate liberal, a moderate conservative. And then there just isn’t any justification for Bloomberg.

Right. And if [Ralph] Nader gets in, I would assume that he would not be a spoiler this time, because his percentages keep dipping.

Yeah. Well, he got 0.37 percent in ’04 after getting nearly 3 percent in 2000. I think he would fall to maybe 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent, something like that.

For [the first time in] a couple of generations now, there is no sitting vice president or one heir apparent to the throne. That’s causing us to think that the fields are so big this time. You have watched a lot of debates. Does it make them more important next year when we get down to the three presidential and one vice presidential, as I assume will probably happen this time?

Well, I would like to think so. I mean, as flawed as they are, they are better opportunities for the candidates to deliver a message that could be useful to voters — certainly better than advertising, assuming good questions are asked. Sometimes the moderators waste the debates as much as the candidates. But let’s hope that’s true. We’ll see. I am skeptical until I see the debates.