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

Kenny Michelena is, by just about any measure, a tough guy. He was born and raised on a ranch in rural northwestern Wyoming and remembers that after class in elementary school, the bus driver would ...

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 ...

Sometimes statistical analysis is tricky, and sometimes a finding just jumps off the page. Here’s one example of the latter.

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 ...

Since Donald Trump effectively wrapped up the Republican nomination this month, I’ve seen a lot of critical self-assessments from empirically minded journalists — FiveThirtyEight included, twice over ...

This story was originally published May 31, 2013. Once again, two U.S. teams, the Chicago Blackhawks and Tampa Bay Lightning, are headed to the Stanley Cup finals. The N.H.L.’s conference finals will ...

If you’re one of the approximately 320 million Americans who don’t live in New York City, it might seem like its Democratic mayoral primary has gotten an outsized amount of media coverage. But even I, ...

There is no shortage of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry. Response rates to political polls are dismal. Even polls that make every effort to contact a representative sample of ...

“Can we trust election polls?” is a question that has reached a fever pitch in political junkie circles dating back to the 2016 election. One popular theory about why election polls missed in 2016 and ...

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 ...