Ball is a
business owner and a
certified public accountant.
2010 U.S. House campaign In 2010, Ball ran to represent
Virginia's 1st congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives against
Republican incumbent
Rob Wittman. During the campaign, Ball supported education reform, including
charter schools, using technology,
alternative certification of teachers, and paying teachers six-figure salaries. One month before the election, bloggers posted sexually suggestive photos of Ball with her then-husband from a Christmas party in 2004. Her campaign had little national attention before the incident. Ball initially blamed her opponent, Wittman, for the leak as being part of a smear campaign. Wittman released a statement opposing the leak and asked the bloggers to take it down. One of her most discussed monologues on the show was a 2014 critique of
Hillary Clinton which urged her not to run for
President. In 2012, Ball launched a website calling for a boycott of advertisers on
The Rush Limbaugh Show after Limbaugh's comments about
Sandra Fluke. Ball's first book,
Reversing the Apocalypse: Hijacking the Democratic Party to Save the World, was published in 2017, in which she argued that the
Democratic Party needed to return to its
New Deal roots by emulating
Franklin D. Roosevelt and advocating a more
economically interventionist agenda than it has done in recent decades. In May 2018,
McClatchy wrote of her PAC:But thus far, nobody has benefited more financially from the group than Ball herself. Of the $445,000 Ball raised for the group, she paid herself more than a third of that—$174,000—in salary, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission. The majority of her salary—$104,000—came in the first three months of this year alone. That's nearly eight times more than the nearly $22,000 the PHP has used to support its dozen endorsed candidates, some of whom have received just a single $1,000 contribution. Political groups with a glaring discrepancy between personal salaries and candidate contributions are often deemed so-called "Scam PACs," a type of organization that enriches its founders while doing little to assist the cause or candidate they purportedly support. Ball's second book, co-authored with Enjeti, is ''The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left Are Rising'', released on February 8, 2020. Ball supported
Bernie Sanders's 2020 presidential campaign. During the 2020 impeachment inquiry into
Donald Trump, she speculated that Democrats were using the Senate trial to keep Senators
Elizabeth Warren and
Bernie Sanders in Washington, D.C. when they would otherwise be campaigning. In May 2021, Ball announced she was leaving
Rising in order to produce her own independent show with Enjeti titled
Breaking Points.
2021–present: Breaking Points Krystal Ball and
Saagar Enjeti left
The Hill in June 2021 and established an independent program published as both a podcast and a video news show on
YouTube. The show, titled
Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar, achieved around three hundred thousand subscribers the first week. In late June 2023, Breaking Points exceeded 1,000,000 subscribers on YouTube. On January 1, 2021, Krystal Ball and
Kyle Kulinski launched a new podcast called
Krystal Kyle & Friends. ==Personal life==