With less than a week until the U.S. runs out of cash, economists and policymakers are using words like “cataclysmic event” and “calamity” to describe what will happen if Congress doesn’t raise the ...

Among the teams still alive in the postseason, all but one — the puzzling New York Rangers — were above average in goals per game during the regular season, and the average remaining team was +0.46 ...

But trying to distinguish the effects of only one type of restriction, like voter ID requirements, is challenging because a new election law rarely changes only one voting provision. “The actual ...

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 ...

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 ...

America’s cities are some of its most solidly Democratic areas — but that doesn’t mean they are solidly liberal. Over the past two years, the mayoral elections in our two biggest cities have boiled ...

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 ...

Includes polls of special elections and runoffs. Excludes polls from pollsters that are banned by FiveThirtyEight, New Hampshire primary polls taken before the Iowa caucuses and other states’ primary ...

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 ...

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 ...

Once statistics for an NBA game have been collected, their lifespan of usefulness is only just beginning. Players rely on them to hone skill development; teams leverage them for game-planning and ...

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