Krystal Ball

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 Ball was first married to Aaron Peterson in 2006. In 2008, she married Jonathan Dariyanani, an entrepreneur in educational software. The two were married in May 2023.