Origins Nate Silver started
FiveThirtyEight in early March 2008, published under the
pseudonym Poblano, the same name that he had used since November 2007 when he began publishing a diary on the
political blog Daily Kos. The name
FiveThirtyEight derives from the 538 electors in the
United States Electoral College. Writing for
Daily Kos, Silver had gained a following, especially for his primary election forecast on
Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008. From that primary election day, which included contests in 24 states plus
American Samoa, Poblano predicted that
Barack Obama would come away with 859 delegates, and
Hillary Clinton 829; in the final contests, Obama won 847 delegates and Clinton 834. Based on this result,
New York Times op-ed columnist
William Kristol wrote: "And an interesting regression analysis at the Daily Kos Web site (poblano.dailykos.com) of the determinants of the Democratic vote so far, applied to the demographics of the Ohio electorate, suggests that Obama has a better chance than is generally realized in Ohio".
FiveThirtyEight gained further national attention for beating out most pollsters' projections in the
North Carolina and
Indiana Democratic party primaries on May 6, 2008. As Mark Blumenthal wrote in
National Journal, "Over the last week, an
anonymous blogger who writes under the pseudonym Poblano did something bold on his blog,
FiveThirtyEight.com. He posted predictions for the upcoming primaries based not on polling data, but on a statistical model driven mostly by demographic and past vote data. ... Critics scoffed. Most of the public polls pointed to a close race in North Carolina. ... But a funny thing happened. The model got it right." Silver relied on demographic data and on the history of voting in
other states during the 2008 Democratic primary elections. On May 30, 2008, Silver revealed his true identity for the first time to his
FiveThirtyEight readers. After that date, he published just four more diaries on
Daily Kos. At the same time,
FiveThirtyEights daily "Today's Polls" column began to be mirrored on "The Plank", a blog published by
The New Republic. In July 2008, the site began to report regular updates of projections of 2008 U.S. Senate races. Special procedures were developed relying on both polls and
demographic analysis. The projections were updated on a weekly basis. By early October 2008,
FiveThirtyEight approached 2.5 million visitors per week, while averaging approximately 400,000 per weekday. During October 2008 the site received 3.63 million unique visitors, 20.57 million site visits, and 32.18 million
page views. On Election Day, November 4, 2008, the site had nearly 5 million page views.
Final projections of 2008 elections In the final update of his presidential forecast model at midday of November 4, 2008, Silver projected a popular vote victory by 6.1 percentage points for
Barack Obama and electoral vote totals of 349 (based on a probabilistic projection) or 353 (based on fixed projections of each state). Obama won with 365 electoral college votes. Silver's predictions matched the actual results everywhere except in
Indiana and the
2nd congressional district of
Nebraska, which awards an electoral vote separately from the rest of the state. His projected
national popular vote differential was below the actual figure of 7.2 points. The forecasts for the
Senate proved to be correct for every race, but the near stalemate in
Minnesota led to a recount that was settled only on June 30, 2009. In
Alaska, after a protracted counting of ballots, on November 19 Republican incumbent
Ted Stevens conceded the seat to Democrat
Mark Begich, an outcome that Silver had forecast on election day. In
Georgia, a run-off election on December 2 led to the re-election of Republican
Saxby Chambliss, a result that was also consistent with Silver's original projection.
The ground game and "On the Road" During the 2008 electoral campaign,
Sean Quinn, a second contributor, drew on his knowledge and experience with campaign organizations to evaluate the
ground game and "
get out the vote" strategies of the McCain and Obama campaign teams. A
poker player, Quinn drew an analogy between Barack Obama's electoral strategy and a poker player having multiple "outs" for winning a hand. In September, Quinn launched a series of essays under the name
On the Road. Quinn traveled from state to state telling the story of the campaign from the electoral battleground, drawing on observations and interviews with
grassroots campaign workers.
After the 2008 U.S. election Focus During the first two months after the election, no major innovations in content were introduced. A substantial percentage of the articles focused on Senatorial races: the runoff in Georgia, won by
Saxby Chambliss; recounts of votes in Alaska (won by
Mark Begich), and Minnesota (
Al Franken vs.
Norm Coleman); and the appointments of Senatorial replacements in Colorado, New York, and Illinois. After
President Obama's inauguration,
Sean Quinn reported that he was moving to Washington, D.C., to continue political writing from that locale. On February 4, 2009, he became the first blogger to join the
White House press corps. After that time, however, he contributed only a handful of articles to
FiveThirtyEight. During the post-2008 election period Silver devoted attention to developing some tools for the analysis of forthcoming
2010 Congressional elections, as well as discussing policy issues and the policy agenda for the Obama administration, especially economic policies. He developed a list of 2010 Senate races in which he made monthly updates of predicted party turnover. Later, Silver adapted his methods to address a variety of issues of the day, including health care reform, climate change, unemployment, and popular support for same-sex marriage. He wrote a series of columns investigating the credibility of polls by Georgia-based firm Strategic Vision, LLC. According to Silver's analysis, Strategic Vision's data displayed statistical anomalies that were inconsistent with random polling. Later, he uncovered indirect evidence that Strategic Vision may have gone as far as to fabricate the results of a citizenship survey taken by
Oklahoma high school students, which led him to denounce Strategic Vision as "disreputable and fraudulent".
FiveThirtyEight devoted more than a dozen articles to the
Iranian presidential election in June 2009, assessing of the quality of the vote counting. International affairs columnist Renard Sexton began the series with an analysis of polling leading up to the election; then posts by Silver,
Andrew Gelman and Sexton analyzed the reported returns and political implications.
FiveThirtyEight covered the November 3, 2009,
elections in the United States in detail.
FiveThirtyEight writers Schaller, Gelman, and Silver also gave extensive coverage to the January 19, 2010
Massachusetts special election to the U.S. Senate. The "
538 model" once again aggregated the disparate polls to correctly predict that the Republican
Scott Brown would win. In spring 2010,
FiveThirtyEight turned a focus on the
United Kingdom general election scheduled for May 6, with a series of more than forty articles on the subject that culminated in projections of the number of seats that the three major parties were expected to win. Following a number of preview posts in January and February, Renard Sexton examined subjects such as the UK polling industry and the 'surge' of the third-party Liberal Democrats, while Silver, Sexton and Dan Berman developed a seat projection model. The UK election was the first time the
FiveThirtyEight team did an election night 'liveblog' of a non-U.S. election. In April 2010,
The Guardian published Silver's predictions for the
2010 United Kingdom General Election. The majority of polling organisations in the UK use the concept of
uniform swing to predict the outcome of elections. However, by applying his own methodology, Silver produced very different results, which suggested that a
Conservative victory might have been the most likely outcome. After a series of articles, including critiques and responses to other electoral analysts, his "final projection" was published on the eve of the election. In the end, Silver's projections were off the mark, particularly compared with those of some other organizations, and Silver wrote a
post mortem on his blog. Silver examined the pitfalls of the forecasting process,
Partnership with The New York Times: 2010–2013 On June 3, 2010, Silver announced that in early August the blog would be "relaunched under a
NYTimes.com domain". The transition took place on August 25, 2010, with the publication of Silver's first
FiveThirtyEight blog article online in
The New York Times. On June 3, 2010,
The New York Times and Silver announced that
FiveThirtyEight had formed a partnership under which the blog would be hosted by the
Times for a period of three years. In legal terms,
FiveThirtyEight granted a "license" to the
Times to publish the blog. The blog would be listed under the "Politics" tab of the News section of the
Times.
FiveThirtyEight would thus be subject to and benefit from editing and technical production by the
Times, while
FiveThirtyEight would be responsible for creating the content. Silver received bids from several major media entities before selecting the
Times. Under terms of the agreement, Silver would also write monthly articles for the print version of both the newspaper and the
Sunday magazine. The first column of the renamed ''FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus
appeared in the Times
on August 25, 2010, with the introduction of U.S. Senate election forecasts. At the same time, Silver published a brief history of the blog. All columns from the original FiveThirtyEight'' were also archived for public access. Shortly after
FiveThirtyEight relocated to
The New York Times, Silver introduced his prediction models for the
2010 elections to the
U.S. Senate, the
U.S. House of Representatives, and state
Governorships. Each of these models relied initially on a combination of electoral history, demographics, and polling. The
538 model had forecast a net pickup of 8 seats by the Republicans in the Senate and 55 seats in the House, close to the actual outcome of a pickup of 6 seats in the Senate and 63 seats in the House.
Writers When the transition to
The New York Times was announced, Silver listed his staff of writers for the first time. Brian McCabe published his first article in January 2011. Beginning in 2011, one writer who emerged as a regular contributor was Micah Cohen. Cohen provided a periodic "Reads and Reactions" column in which he summarized Silver's articles for the previous couple of weeks, as well as reactions to them in the media and other blogs, and suggested some additional readings related to the subject of Silver's columns. Silver identified Cohen as "my news assistant". Cohen also contributed additional columns on occasion. On September 12, 2011, Silver introduced another writer: "FiveThirtyEight extends a hearty welcome to
John Sides, a political scientist at
George Washington University, who will be writing a series of posts for this site over the next month. Mr. Sides is also the founder of the blog
The Monkey Cage, which was named the 2010 Blog of the Year by
The Week magazine".
Beyond electoral politics While politics and elections remained the main focus of
FiveThirtyEight, the blog also sometimes addressed sports, including the
March Madness and the 2012 NCAA Men's Basketball tournament selection process, the
B.C.S. rankings in NCAA college football, the
NBA, and
Major League Baseball matters ranging from the 2011 attendance at the
New York Mets'
Citi Field to the historic 2011 collapse of the
Boston Red Sox. The site has also posted forecasts for the
Academy Awards. In addition,
FiveThirtyEight sometimes turned its attention to other topics, such as the economics of blogging, the financial ratings by
Standard & Poors, economists' tendency to underpredict unemployment levels, and the economic impact and media coverage of
Hurricane Irene (2011). s". In contrast, individual pollsters were less successful. For example, Rasmussen Reports "missed on six of its nine swing-state polls". An independent analysis of Silver's state-by-state projections, assessing whether the percentages of votes that the candidates actually received fell within the "margin of error" of Silver's forecasts, found that "48 out of 50 states actually fell within his margin of error, giving him a success rate of 96%. And assuming that his projected margin of error figures represent 95 percent confidence intervals, which it is likely they did, Silver performed just about exactly as well as he would expect to over 50 trials. Wizard, indeed". Additional tests of the accuracy of the electoral vote predictions were published by other researchers.
ESPN and ABC News affiliation In July 2013, it was revealed that Silver and his
FiveThirtyEight blog would depart
The New York Times and join
ESPN. In its announcement of its acquisition of
FiveThirtyEight, ESPN reported that "Silver will serve as the editor-in-chief of the site and will build a team of journalists, editors, analysts and contributors in the coming months. Much like
Grantland, which ESPN launched in 2011, the site will retain an independent brand sensibility and editorial point-of-view, while interfacing with other websites in the ESPN and Disney families. The site will return to its original URL, www.FiveThirtyEight.com." According to Silver, the focus of
FiveThirtyEight in its ESPN phase would broaden: "People also think it's going to be a sports site with a little politics thrown in, or it's going to be a politics site with sports thrown in. ... But we take our science and economics and lifestyle coverage very seriously. ... It's a data journalism site. Politics is one topic that sometimes data journalism is good at covering. It's certainly good with presidential elections. But we don't really see politics as how the site is going to grow".
FiveThirtyEight launched its ESPN webpage on March 17, 2014. The lead story by Silver explained that "FiveThirtyEight is a data journalism organization. ... We've expanded our staff from two full-time journalists to 20 and counting. Few of them will focus on politics exclusively; instead, our coverage will span five major subject areas – politics, economics, science, life and sports. Our team also has a broad set of skills and experience in methods that fall under the rubric of data journalism. These include statistical analysis, but also data visualization, computer programming and data-literate reporting. So in addition to written stories, we'll have interactive graphics and features".
FiveThirtyEight launched its ESPN-affiliated stage on March 17, 2014. As of July, it had a staff of 20 writers, editors, data visualization specialists, and others. By March 2016, this staff had nearly doubled to 37 listed on the masthead, and 7 listed as contributors. The site produced articles under 5 headings: politics, economics, science and health, (cultural) life, and sports. In addition to feature articles it produced
podcasts on a range of subjects. Monthly traffic to the site grew steadily from about 2.8 million
unique visitors in April 2014 to 10.7 million unique visitors in January 2016.
2014 U.S. elections On September 3, 2014,
FiveThirtyEight introduced its forecasts for each of the 36 U.S. Senate elections being contested that year. At that time, the Republican Party was given a 64 percent chance of holding a majority of the seats in the Senate after the election. However, Silver also remarked, "An equally important theme is the high degree of uncertainty around that outcome. A large number of states remain competitive, and Democrats could easily retain the Senate". About two weeks later, the forecast showed the Republican chances of holding the majority down to 55 percent.
2016 Oscars predictions FiveThirtyEight sought to apply its mathematical models to the Oscars, and produced internal predictions regarding the subject, predicting four out of six categories correctly. The website also compiled a list of other predictions made by other people using different methods.
2016 U.S. elections Presidential primary elections FiveThirtyEight applied two separate models to forecast the 2016 presidential primary elections –
polls-only and
polls-plus models. The
polls-only model relied only on polls from a particular state, while the
polls-plus model was based on state polls, national polls and endorsements. For each contest,
FiveThirtyEight produced probability distributions and average expected vote shares according to both models. As early as June 2015,
FiveThirtyEight argued that
Donald Trump "isn't a real candidate". When Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee in May 2016,
New York Times media columnist
Jim Rutenberg wrote that "predictions can have consequences" and criticized
FiveThirtyEight for underestimating Trump's chances. He argued that by giving "Mr. Trump a 2 percent chance at the nomination despite strong polls in his favor ... they also arguably sapped the journalistic will to scour his record as aggressively as those of his supposedly more serious rivals". In a long retrospective, "How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed up on Donald Trump", published in May 2016 after Trump had become the presumptive nominee, Silver reviewed how he had erred in evaluating Trump's chances early in the primary campaign. Silver wrote, "The big mistake is a curious one for a website that focuses on statistics. Unlike virtually every other forecast we publish at FiveThirtyEight – including the primary and caucus projections I just mentioned – our early estimates of Trump's chances weren't based on a statistical model. Instead, they were what we [call] 'subjective odds' – which is to say, educated guesses. In other words, we were basically acting like pundits, but attaching numbers to our estimates. And we succumbed to some of the same biases that pundits often suffer, such as not changing our minds quickly enough in the face of new evidence. Without a model as a fortification, we found ourselves rambling around the countryside like all the other pundit-barbarians, randomly setting fire to things". On the Democratic side,
FiveThirtyEight argued that Senator
Bernie Sanders could "lose everywhere else after Iowa and New Hampshire" and that the "Democratic establishment would rush in to squash" him if he does not. Sanders went on to win 23 states in
the primaries.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a progressive nonprofit media watch group, wrote in May 2016 that
FiveThirtyEight "sacrificed its integrity to go after Sanders" and that they have "at times gone beyond the realm of punditry into the realm of hackery – that is, not just treating their own opinions as though they were objective data, but spinning the data so that it conforms to their opinions."
FiveThirtyEights predictions for each state primary, both for the Republican and the Democratic party nominations, were based on statistical analysis, not on the analyst's opinions. The core data employed were polls, which
FiveThirtyEight aggregated for each state (while also considering national polls) using essentially the same method it had employed since 2008. In the 2016 primaries, the projections also took into account endorsements. The website also kept track of the accumulation of national party convention delegates. In a comparison of prediction success published by
Bloomberg News after the primary season was completed,
FiveThirtyEight prediction success tied for the highest percentage of correct primary poll winners, at 92%; but it lagged behind PredictWise in predicting a larger set of primaries. Notably, even with
FiveThirtyEight track record of correctly predicting elections that pollsters get wrong, it still missed Bernie Sanders's upset victory in the
Michigan primary, for instance, regarded as "one of the biggest upsets in modern political history". while other major forecasters had predicted Clinton to win with at least an 85% to 99% probability.
FiveThirtyEights model pointed to the possibility of an Electoral College-popular vote split widening in final weeks based on both Clinton's small lead in general polls, but also on Trump's improvement in swing states like Florida or Pennsylvania, mixed with Clinton's poor performance in several of those swing states in comparison with Obama's performance in 2012. In consequence, Clinton's probabilities to win the Electoral College were not improving. Silver also focused on state-by-state numbers in so-called 'must-win' states like Ohio and Florida, plus a consideration of polls' margin of error in advantages of less than three points.
Donald Trump won the election.
FiveThirtyEight projected a much higher probability of Donald Trump winning the presidency than other pollsters, a projection which was criticized by
Ryan Grim of
the Huffington Post as "unskewing" too much in favor of Trump. While
FiveThirtyEight expressed that "nonetheless, Clinton is probably going to win, and she could win by a big margin", the forecaster also made points about the uncertainty of poll trackers in some cases, the considerable number of undecided voters, and the unpredictable outcome in traditional swing states. In April 2018, it was announced that
FiveThirtyEight would be transferred to
ABC News from
ESPN, Inc., majority owned by
The Walt Disney Company. ABC News Live streaming channel was launched on Roku in May 2019. With the reorganization creating the
Walt Disney Direct-to-Consumer and International segment in March 2018, ABC News Digital and Live Streaming (websites, ABC News Live and
FiveThirtyEight) was transferred to the new segment.
2020 U.S. elections Redesign of forecast In early August 2020,
FiveThirtyEight announced that for their
2020 general election forecast they had designed a new graphical structure. This included going with modular structure, a "ball swarm" design for the chart depicting each candidate's chances, and the addition of a "forecast
mascot" named Fivey Fox. An episode of "Chart Chat" discussing the design described the direction saying "FiveThirtyEight has leaned heavily towards a cutesy and engaging approach. The Fivey Fox mascot pops up next to most charts with call-outs to more further information." Fivey Fox would also issue reminders to readers of "the potential for extreme outcomes" according to
Jessica Hullman, in a piece written for
The Hill. Hullman also said of the design that the introduction of the mascot, in conjunction with the new simplified look of the page, was "perhaps the strongest indicator that Silver intends to emphasize uncertainty" in his coverage of the 2020 election. Jasmine Mithani, visual journalist with
FiveThirtyEight, said in an interview when asked about the complaints of new mascot said "I think the biggest complaint about Fivey Fox is that some people find it infantilizing, but that wasn't our intention" and that the motivation for including the character was to help make the forecast more of "a teaching tool". In November 2020,
Rolling Stone reported that Fivey Fox had reached over 7,000 followers on his dedicated
Twitter account. The forecast favored the actual winner of 48 states, the District of Columbia, and four of the five congressional districts awarding electoral votes, only missing
Florida,
North Carolina, and
Maine's 2nd congressional district. In those three contests the forecast had favored Biden, but they were carried by Trump. Despite correctly forecasting Biden to win nationally, they overestimated Biden's margins in some battleground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and underestimated Trump's margins in states such as Ohio, Iowa and Texas. Their forecast showed Democrats winning Senate races in North Carolina and Maine, which Republicans ended up winning. However, their forecast did correctly predict that the Democrats would take control of the Senate. In the House elections, their forecast favored Democrats to gain seats, yet Democrats suffered a net loss of 10 seats. The actual house results fell outside their 80% confidence interval, with Democrats winning 222 seats, lower than the confidence interval's lower bound of 225.
Silver's exit, 2024 U.S. elections and shutdown In January 2023,
The Daily Beast reported that the website was on the "chopping block" amid cost-cutting measures by ABC News, and a sale of the website was being considered. It also noted that several key employees including managing editor Micah Cohen, politics editor Sarah E. Frostenson and sports editor Sara Ziegler had left the website and their positions had not been filled. An ABC spokesperson responded to the report, asserting "no imminent decisions about [its] relationship with
FiveThirtyEight." Nonetheless, in April, Silver announced that he would be leaving the site amid widespread layoffs at ABC News, who said the website would be "streamlined" ahead of the 2024 election cycle; editor Chadwick Matlin was among the many laid off. According to Silver, two thirds of
FiveThirtyEights staff were cut in one day. After the layoffs,
FiveThirtyEights sports and science coverage ground to a halt, with the website mostly returning to its roots of exclusive politics coverage. In May 2023, ABC News hired
G. Elliott Morris, a data journalist for
The Economist who has often been described as a rival of Silver, to head the site as editorial director of data analytics. On September 18, 2023, the original website domain at fivethirtyeight.com was closed, with web traffic becoming redirected to ABC News pages, and its logo was replaced, with the name
538 used instead of
FiveThirtyEight. Silver criticized Morris's model, describing it as at best ignoring the polls and giving Biden positive odds merely due to his
incumbency, and at worst as being "buggy". The election forecast remained suspended for a month after Biden withdrew, before being replaced by a new model for
Kamala Harris versus Trump that put more emphasis on polling. The forecast predicted a very narrow Harris victory with her winning 270 electoral votes to Trump's 268. Trump won the election with 312 electoral votes to Harris's 226. On March 5, 2025,
the Walt Disney Company shut down
538 and laid off about 15 employees. ABC News announced that it would continue to provide polling data and analysis outside of the
538 brand. In May 2025, G. Elliott Morris announced a newsletter,
Strength in Numbers, which he said he intends to expand into a successor to
FiveThirtyEight. ==Recognition and awards==