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

“The Party Decides,” the 2008 book by the political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel and John Zaller, has probably been both the most-cited and the most-maligned book of this election ...

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 ...

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited. There are other signs, too. For example, the Inflation Reduction Act has spurred investment in manufacturing, ...

Legend has it that after leveling Carthage in the Third Punic War, Roman army generals ordered that the city’s fields be sown with salt so that they’d lie fallow for years, Roman generals not being ...

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 ...

On Friday at noon, a Category 5 political cyclone that few journalists saw coming will deposit Donald Trump atop the Capitol Building, where he’ll be sworn in as the 45th president of the United ...

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 ...

In the last week, Indiana has played an unusually central role in the presidential primary, with Hoosiers watching as Ted Cruz and John Kasich forged a deal while Donald Trump exhumed Bobby Knight.

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, ...

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 ...

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