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

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

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 ...

All of that leaves us with a slightly complicated view of the Final Four field. We’d be lying if we said we saw these matchups coming (our model implied a 1-in-412,740 chance of this particular ...

For the second consecutive men’s college basketball season, just five of the 15 teams in the Atlantic Coast Conference were selected to participate in the NCAA Tournament: Duke earned an automatic bid ...

Thursday afternoon’s tilt between No. 8 Arkansas and No. 9 Illinois promises to be a doozy — if not a rock fight — between two programs looking to vanquish long Final Four droughts. The Razorbacks ...

Longtime readers of FiveThirtyEight are probably familiar with our pollster ratings: letter grades that we assign to pollsters based on their historical accuracy and transparency. Since 2008, we have ...

The NFL has had quite an eventful year. In fact, the 2022 season has been characterized by a series of controversies that, when taken together, seem like a microcosm of the criticisms and existential ...

In the first month of 2023, 25 people lost their lives in four mass shootings in California over just eight days. It’s a grim statistic, made all the more distressing when you consider the fact that ...

Let’s get this out of the way up front: There was a wide gap between the perception of how well polls and data-driven forecasts did in 2022 and the reality of how they did … and the reality is that ...

It used to be, if you wanted to see a Poweshiek skipperling butterfly, the thing to do was go out on the prairie and stare into the middle distance, like you were trying to see a sailboat buried in a ...

I’m not that impressed by long-term projections of Democratic doom in the Senate. Mostly that’s because I’m not that impressed by long-term political projections in general. Political coalitions ...