John Goodman reports for Governing’s 13th Floor blog:

To find out whether [Larry Sabato] was truly Sabiquitous in the past election year, I counted the number of states where reporters quoted the quick-quipping professor, beginning January 1, 2006. That day, the Roanoke Times asked Sabato about home-state presidential hopeful Governor Mark Warner. The next day, he got Florida, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Louisiana out of the way. By the end of the month, his count was up to 21. By the end of the year, Sabato had been quoted in at least 46 states and the District of Columbia. That’s not even counting syndicated columns or wire-service articles, unless it was clear to me that the author was based in the state in question. […] All of this tempts me to say that political reporting is suffering from some of the same problems as local government reporting — that over-stretched journalists tap Sabato as an easy source because they lack the time or wherewithal to cultivate relationships with insiders.

Goodman adds that it doesn’t hurt that Sabato is such a quotable source. A commenter adds this excellent point:

I would argue that the overreliance on academic quotes isn’t mainly due lack of time or reporter laziness — it’s at least as much the newspaper culture that bars reporters from expressing opinion. You call someone like Larry Sabato so you can get in the paper a judgment you could have made yourself if the editors would let you. I did this a lot myself.

The more tendentious approach is to preface a baldly stated opinion with ”critics say” (or even just “some say”). Without bothering with Nexis, I’d bet that ”critics” were quoted even more often than Larry Sabato last year.