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

The NBA playoffs are almost here, with the play-in tournament tipping off later tonight. But while the regular season was careening toward a dramatic finish, we were hard at work creating a live ...

In Kansas City’s Oct. 6 game against Indianapolis, Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes faced a third and 18 from the Colts 27-yard line. Perhaps a bit skittish after an 8-yard sack on the previous play, Mahomes ...

College football does not lend itself to consensus, but if you asked enough fans to name the best defense the sport has seen this century, you’d probably get a clear answer: 2011 Alabama. The ...

The last time the World Chess Championship was held in New York City, titleholder Garry Kasparov met challenger Viswanathan Anand on the 107th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center. They ...

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 ...

It used to be, if you wanted to see a Poweshiek skipperling butterfly, the thing to do was go out on the prairie and stare into the middle distance, like you were trying to see a sailboat buried in a ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

There were a lot of reasons the trees were dying, but it was also partly the commission’s fault. Long ago, the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers and their tributaries would have flooded the bayous ...

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 ...