After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, Morris began working for
The Economist. In February 2020, Morris referred to bad
2016 U.S. presidential election predictions as "lying to people" and "editorial malpractice". He later said that polls in 2016 did not account for education, meaning college educated voters were over-represented, which overstated the lead that
Hillary Clinton actually had over
Donald Trump. In March 2020, Morris and
The Economist published a forecast for the
2020 U.S. presidential election, the first major model predicting the election's outcome. On August 1, 2020, his model gave
Joe Biden an 87 percent chance of winning the election, drawing criticism from
Nate Silver of
FiveThirtyEight who said: "I am not necessarily convinced. It's not just that polls could move. It's a question of, like, how well can pollsters predict turnout when the mechanics of voting have really changed?" Morris has had a public feud with Silver, leading to Silver blocking him on Twitter. In May 2023, ABC News hired Morris to lead
FiveThirtyEight as editorial director of data analytics following Silver's exit from the site. Prior to the
2024 elections,
FiveThirtyEight gave Republicans a 9 in 10 chance to win
control of the
U.S. Senate, while the
presidential and
House elections were effectively tied in their models. The model correctly predicted Republicans winning the Senate, while Donald Trump won the presidential election with 312 electoral votes to Harris's 226, and Republicans retained the House 220–215. Morris and the entire
FiveThirtyEight staff were laid off when the site was shut down in March 2025. Two months later, Morris announced a newsletter,
Strength in Numbers, which he said he intended to gradually expand into a successor to
FiveThirtyEight. ==Bibliography==