FiveThirtyEight uses statistical analysis - hard numbers - to tell compelling stories about elections, politics and American society.

With the 2018 midterm elections approaching, we’ve updated FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings for the first time since the 2016 presidential primaries. Based on how the media portrayed the polls after ...

From that vantage point, the story of how polls did in 2020 is complicated — more complicated in some ways than in 2016, which was also complicated. And since the election was called for Joe Biden on ...

Apportionment, or the process of determining the number of seats each state has in the U.S. House of Representatives, happens like clockwork at this point. Every 10 years, the Census Bureau counts how ...

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was supposed to settle the debate over race, redistricting and representation. Instead, it started new ones. Since the act prohibits states from reducing a minority group ...

Odds may not sum to 100 percent due to rounding and third-party candidates. CORRECTION (Aug. 17, 2018, 5:45 p.m.): The first name of Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin was misspelled in an earlier version ...

The United States is changing rapidly. The oldest baby boomers are into their retirement years, and the median age of the U.S. population is climbing. At the same time, each generation is more ...

Table only includes candidates who have met FiveThirtyEight’s “major” candidate criteria. Polls qualification is based on surveys that appear to meet the Republican National Committee’s requirements ...

There are lots of people who try to predict the Oscars, and no strategy is foolproof — the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is made up of secret voters who aren’t polled and who are ...

Here we are, in the middle of a pandemic, staring out our living room windows like aquarium fish. The question on everybody’s minds: How bad will this really get? Followed quickly by: Seriously, how ...

Editor’s note: The story below contains two slurs that appear in the names of subreddits. Links to Reddit may also contain offensive material. We’ve adapted a technique that’s used in machine learning ...

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of six pieces that show how professional sports owners in America contribute to political campaigns, why they spend millions in the space and what that ...