Krystal Ball

Ball was born on November 24, 1981 in King George County, Virginia, 60 miles south of Washington, D.C. Her father Edward Ball is a physicist and mother Rose Marie Ball, a teacher. The name Krystal came from her father, a physicist who wrote his dissertation on crystals. She has two older sisters, Holly and Heidi.

In October of that campaign, 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. Ball also complained about the double standard of expectations for male and female candidates given the scant attention Scott Brown had received for previously posing nude in Cosmopolitan. She has used the experience as a warning for future candidates about their youthful indiscretions.

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. She also called for a lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress, banning lobbyist gifts, increasing disclosure, and establishing a new Independent Ethics Commission to investigate and audit influence by special interests. Of Ball's fundraising, 72 percent was from out-of-state donors, and 28 percent in-state. In total, she raised $1.06 million which was 20% less than her opponent.

In 2012, Ball launched a website calling for a boycott of advertisers on The Rush Limbaugh Show after Limbaugh's comments about Sandra Fluke. Thinkprogress reported on March 2, 2012 that over 50 advertisers were confirmed to have dropped the show.

In May 2017, Ball created the People's House Project, a political action committee (PAC) working on behalf of Democratic causes. It was among the largest contributors to Richard Ojeda's campaign for the West Virginia Senate.

Ball responded to McClatchy's claims, stating because the PAC receives money in fits and starts, she paid herself a lump sum in the first months of 2018 as backpay for what she should have earned in 2017, and that her pay "was comparable to what other Pac directors typically make". She also stated that her PAC does not operate in the same way as a typical PAC in that it is not a "direct conduit" of funds, and that she herself is effectively a manager for each of the candidates she works with. McClatchy wrote that candidates and campaign officials that she had assisted had said that Ball "was a go-to adviser for all manner of problems and questions. Her help was especially valuable, they added, because most of them couldn’t afford the kind of high-priced consultants who usually guide campaigns, especially for first-time candidates...There’s no doubt that Ball and Moffett, the group’s executive director, actually help the candidates they endorse. They’ve just backed a very different kind of candidates, and unlike most groups, they’ve prioritized political advice over direct financial assistance."

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 2018, Ball started hosting a webcast called Rising on The Hill. She originally co-hosted the webcast with Buck Sexton, but Sexton was later replaced by Saagar Enjeti. 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.