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 ...

Vote margin calculated based on the two-party vote, which uses just the Democratic and Republican vote totals. Together, the share of the statewide vote and the benchmark margins produce a 50-50 tie, ...

As we watch Michael Jordan vanquish each of his contemporaries in ESPN’s “The Last Dance” — which wraps up with its final two episodes on Sunday — it’s hard not to imagine the best of today’s game ...

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, ...

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 ...

I don’t have a particularly strong take on how the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg will affect either the presidential election or the race for control of the U.S. Senate. And I’d encourage you to avoid ...

The police response to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, in which at least 39 law enforcement officers participated, has renewed conversation about racial bias and links to white supremacist ...

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

From that vantage point, the story of how polls did in 2020 is complicated — more complicated in some ways than in 2016, which was also complicated. And since the election was called for Joe Biden on ...

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 2020 presidential contest is starting to pick up steam, but we’re still a long way from any votes being cast. To see if we can learn anything at this stage of the election cycle, we’ve been ...